I have always had enormous sympathies for the anti-abortion sentiments, even though I am firmly settled on the side of the mother having that choice. I understand how deep down that opposition is not merely to the horrors of abortion itself, but is about a philosophical understanding of what life is. This struggle, to quite some extent, politically manifested itself with the introduction of the pill. (Even now we continue to duke it out over the pill in Obamacare, about which
I had blogged way back in September 2009!)
Centuries before the biology of making babies was scientifically understood, it would have been clear, perhaps even to the caveman and cavewoman, that a couple of minutes of frolicking around could result in a baby ten months later. Since that rudimentary understanding, we have come a long way, but our inability to create life artificially and to prevent deaths mean that life itself remains a mystery. When life is a mystery, it then provides enormous scope for interpretations, via religions and otherwise.
Science and technology have managed to remove most of the mystery out of it by continuously breaking down the process of baby-creation into mechanistic processes. The understanding of the mechanisms meant that we could also develop products that prevented pregnancy. Modern man and woman were now increasingly looking at a real possibility of frolicking around without worrying about creating a life. Thus, began our big political divide, which is a philosophical issue; whether contraceptives are acceptable, after all, they clearly challenged that notion of life as a mystery.
Of course, science has further broken down the mechanistic process of babymaking, which has made millions of otherwise "infertile" men and women happy parents. I am always surprised that the opposition to abortion far outnumbers any opposition to the "unnatural" ways in which medical technologists now routinely create babies without the natural frolicking. But, I digress.
These artificial ways of creating children makes becoming a biological parent a real possibility
for gays and lesbians too, and not merely for the heteros who can frolic and create kids:
Lesbian
couples use medically assisted insemination. The sperm donor is usually
anonymous and picked from a sperm bank. Some turn to a friend; others
to a brother or a male cousin to have a baby genetically related to both
women. Some use in vitro fertilisation: one woman may contribute the
egg while the other carries the pregnancy. Gay men use surrogacy, which
comes in two forms. In traditional surrogacy the woman who carries the
baby to term is also the genetic mother. Gestational surrogacy uses an
egg from a donor, rather than the surrogate. Most couples prefer this as
the surrogate is less likely to want or indeed be able to keep a
newborn not genetically related to her. Gay couples often leave the
baby’s genetic fatherhood up to chance by mixing their sperm, though
some combine an egg from one man’s sister and the other man’s sperm for a
baby genetically related to both men.
We have come a long way since those cave-dwelling days. Life continues to be a mystery, but is far less mysterious than ever before. But, these mechanistic and material approach to life can easily get complicated, as two examples illustrate.
While the "natural" frolicking involves only two people, and one man and one woman in that, medical advances could make possible
a life with three biological parents:
The
treatment relies on the fact that mitochondria are not just another
part of a living cell. They are the distant descendants of bacteria
that, a billion years ago, gave up their free-living lifestyle to form
symbiotic partnerships with other cells. As a result, mitochondria
possess their own tiny genomes, entirely separate from the much bigger
hunk of DNA that sits inside the cell nucleus. A baby inherits its
"nuclear DNA" almost equally from its mother and father. But it inherits
its mitochondria only from its mother: every single one is a descendant
of the original set that lived inside the egg. Although the British and
American researchers are using different techniques, the basic idea is
the same: to give the baby a working set of mitochondria donated by
another woman. The scientists take an egg with damaged mitochondria,
remove the nucleus (and the DNA it contains) and transplant it into a
second, donor egg, whose nucleus has been removed but whose mitochondria
are working normally. The result is a baby that will have nuclear DNA
inherited from its mother and father in the usual way, but mitochondria
inherited from the egg donor.
For some people the idea of a
baby that is genetically related to three different people is
viscerally unsettling (something that ethicists refer to as the "yuck
factor").
"Life" seems more and more like a factory, right?
My sympathies are with those who find that science and technology are hellbent on slowly erasing away the mystery of life, and making it to be an assembly of materials. Life becomes prosaic and less charming even to this atheist.
What if in this factory we put together these materials but the product comes out "defective"? If it were a widget, then the defective ones will be tossed aside. But,
this is no widget but life.
An Australian couple's apparent decision to
leave a baby with Down syndrome with his Thai surrogate mother has
raised questions about a trade that is banned in many developed
countries but can be lucrative for women with little income elsewhere.
Australian
officials said they were looking into issues relating to surrogacy in
Thailand after expressing concern at the plight of Pattharamon Janbua, a
21-year-old Thai street food vendor. Ms. Pattharamon said the unnamed
Australian couple left her to raise the baby boy she carried on their
behalf after she refused to abort it, taking only the infant's healthy
twin sister.
A couple placed an order for a child. Turned out that they were getting a "buy one, get one free" offer. However, the freebie was a "defective" child with Down's Syndrome. So, they dumped the defective one with the vendor and took only the quality product.
An atheist I have been for years, and an agnostic for even longer, but I have always worried about such human behavior. As individuals and as societies, we rarely treat human lives as equals. Sometimes even before they are born. Which is also where the abortion issue also comes in:
It wasn't long into the second trimester
that Ms. Pattharamon said she started to worry that something might be
wrong. Tests by her doctor showed abnormalities in one of the fetuses,
but the information was initially withheld from her and relayed to the
Australian couple instead, she said. "The parents of the baby knew, but
didn't tell me until I was seven months pregnant," Ms. Pattharamon said.
She
said that, at that point, the agent told her the couple wanted her to
have an abortion and that there was a way to achieve it, but Ms.
Pattharamon refused. Instead, she said she would raise Gammy, who also
has a heart condition, herself, and asked the agent for 40% more money.
I worry that we do not spend enough time trying to understand what life is about. If we did, we would be a lot careful about our actions and their consequences. Instead, we seem to be rushing with scientific and technological advancements like how a two-year old is tempted to put into its mouth anything that it finds. One doesn't need to be a religious person at all in order to be troubled by such casual attitudes--this atheist worrying about these
when he should be working on the syllabi is an example all by himself.
If only more humans spent at least a little bit of time everyday in order to fine-tune their own understanding of what life is all about!
