Will someone please explain to me how it is that the federal government can elect not to fund certain types of stem-cell research, while at the same time there appears to be no legal proscription against parents deliberately choosing the sex of their child or even choosing to have disabled children via IFV?
In other words, it's somehow wrong to use embryos that will otherwise be destroyed to carry out vital medical research, but it's completely okay to decide that your kid should be born deaf, or mute, or blind or not at all if it's the wrong sex.
So here's the big picture: when it comes to not having kids, it's everybody's business how you go about it (including how you get an abortion, the morning-after pill, or condoms, or even decent sex education) but when it comes to having kids, it's anything goes.
What explains this utter failure of imagination and moral consistency?
Thursday, September 21, 2006
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The whole IVF culture is completely sick -- but America is so wrapped up these days in reproduction-worship that any anti-IVF platform is utterly untenable.
Kudos go to the Catholics for being utterly consistent on this issue.
To be clear, I'm not saying we need to go in the direction of imposing draconian controls on how people go about having children, either naturally or through the IFV process. What I'm trying to point out is the disparity in moral reasoning that says that abortion and sex must be heavily regulated, but that it's okay to deliberately choose to give birth to a disabled child. In truth I think abortion should not be de facto illegal by virtue of being harder to get, nor do I agree that sex education should be abstinence only. But if we're going to regulate that behavior based on some moral sensibilities, in that people should not have unfettered freedom to have sex and abort babies, then we ought to be willing to put some limitations on how people can go about having children based on similar moral sensibilities.
Perhaps it's an issue of being merely uninformed, but I suspect that many of the people who'd ban abortion tomorrow are not as concerned about the issue I blog about here.
Yeah, I don't know if it's ignorance or diffidence that keeps there from being a similar outcry on issues like these. I'd like to think that the right-to-lifers would be just as concerned about the living children as they are about the aborted, but then again it doesn't seem that they're pushing for greater reforms on child abuse, neglect, and welfare laws.
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