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Technology and Pregnancy Enhancement
81
children? Already single women and lesbian partners have sought children
by AID. If such practices increase dramatically, they will call into question
widely held, traditional understandings of the basis of parenthood and the
nature of the marital union. Is our society prepared to deal with such
changes?
Other changes are also on the horizon. Practices such as IVF and
embryo transfer that provide “waste products” open the door to experi
mentation with embryos on the basis that they will be discarded anyway.
Experimentation has already indicated the potential of fetal parts in the
fight against certain diseases. Will we eventually create a society in which
embryos are produced for the purpose of providing for the medical well
being of the living?20
Technology also holds the possibility of increased interest in eugenics.
Current procedures already enable some degree of gene selection. One
sperm bank was established specifically for the purpose of collecting sperm
from persons of high intelligence. Future possibilities are mind boggling. For
example, by combining IVF and gene-splicing procedures, technicians
could attempt to eliminate genes that are undesirable.21
Some scientists are beginning to advise caution concerning the possibili-
ties that loom in the not-too-distant future. Oxford University zoologist Wil
liam D. Hamilton for example, after contemplating the current trend of
"unnatural human reproduction,” concluded at the 1987 Nobel Conference
at Gustavus Adolphus College, “I would like to see sex kept not only for our
recreation but also, for a long while, let it retain its old freedom and danger,
still used for its old purposes.”22
Conclusion
The consideration of these various matters leads to two conclusions.
First, procedures that technologically introduce a third party into the pro-
creative process may not constitute a violation of the marriage covenant.
Therefore, they are not for that reason ethically suspect. At the same time,
however, the variety of problems that potentially arise from such procedures
indicates that the good they might bring simply does not outweigh the risks
ihey involve. Janet Dickey McDowell aptly summarized the matter in terms
of the genetic confusion that arises: “Such deliberate scrambling of lineage
seems to serve only the purpose of allowing a couple to experience preg
20.
For a discussion of the question of fetal tissue transplants from a philosophical point
view, see Barbara Miller, “Baby Harvest: Year Two-thousand Twenty,”
Contemporary Philoso
phy
12, 7 (January 1<)«<)): 2()
M).
2 1. I*or a discussion of this possibility, see Neaves and Neaves, “Moral Dimensions,” 17 19.
22.
William 1). I lamillon, “Sex and Disease,” in
The Evolution of Sex,
ed. George Steven
iiid Robert Bellig (San l ;rancisco: HarpciiV Row, I
(>K<S), ( )().