How to Ethically Analyze Reproductive Technologies | Glenn Cohen

source: Big Think    2016年12月15日
Harvard bioethicist Glenn Cohen knows in his gut that sex and sexual reproduction are areas of human life that involve moral dilemmas. But when it comes to resolving those dilemmas and taking action, he recognizes the need to "go beyond the gut."
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/glenn-cohe...

Transcript - So, reproductive technology is sort of a family of technologies. We have in vitro fertilization where essentially an egg is being fertilized outside of the body. So that involves harvesting eggs from women and then implanting sperm into that and putting it in. There are some variations on that. Another very common form of productive technology is surrogacy. In surrogacy an embryo is being carried by a woman who is not the genetic mother of the child, so another woman is caring the egg and sperm combined into a fetus. And then we have a series of other brand new technologies like mitochondrial replacement therapy where you're taking the egg from one woman, you're removing the mitochondria from that egg and putting in the mitochondria from another egg to deal with mitochondrial disease and here there's an idea that there's actually three genetic parents: the genetic father who provides the sperm, there's the mitochondrial donor and there's the woman who donates the rest of the egg. So in reality there's three genetic parents, even though the mitochondrial donor is only giving a very small part of genetic material in the DNA. So those are three reproductive technologies. Two are very common. One is brand-new.
And, of course, the oldest one that we have is artificial insemination. And in fact this goes back to the 1800s I believe in the United States at least. And this is essentially when a man ejaculates his sperm and it's used to inseminate a woman typically through an injection, although the old things they say about turkey basters are actually true. You can do at home insemination with a turkey baster. So those are four technologies: artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy and mitochondrial replacement therapy. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/711tDf.