Medical Ethicists on Fertility Treatment
The other day I mentioned the case of Adriana Iliescu who gave birth to a baby girl at the age of 66. One of my personal pet peeves are medical ethicists who condemn this, and none is worse than medical ethicist megastar Arthur Caplan.
Caplan condemned Iliescu giving birth saying,
“. . . [reproductive decisions] are too driven by the desires of couples and not enough by the interests of children.”
. . .
Caplan called it [Iliescu giving birth] “completely unethical and immoral,” noting that average life expectancy for Romanian women is 73 years. The fact she is single makes it worse because it raises the odds the child would have no one to care for her if the mother dies, he said.
Now the reason I can’t stand ethicists like Caplan is that they apply moral principles in dealing with medical issues that we would never tolerate in other areas.
As I mentioned in my previous post on this issue, the claim that reproductive decisions are driven by selfish interests of parents is silly — almost all children who are intentionally conceived are done for the selfish interests of parents. I doubt there are many women who sit down with counselors and go into detail about all the advantages and disadvantages of having children and decide whether or not it truly makes sense from a purely altruistic point of view. We have children in large measure to fulfill the overwhelming biological drive to do so and the emotional fulfillment that being a parent brings.
So why should we then complain that people seeking fertility treatment are just like the rest of us? Why should they be held to some ridiculous altruistic standard?
The complaint about Iliescu’s age and unmarried status also could broadly apply to large numbers of women who regularly have children (in fact in some countries providing fertility treatment to single women of any age is very controversial and in some areas banned).
There is nothing at all objectionable about Iliescu’s decision to have a child, even at 66. Caplan simply repackages a noxious disrespect for the reproductive rights of individuals and repackages it as “medical ethics.”
Source:
Study finds wide range of ethics at fertility clinics. Marilynn Marchione, Associated Press, January 25, 2005.
The Medical Ethicists on Fertility Treatment by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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