Well, I did find the uterine replicator idea poking into my brain while writing some of this...
I think uterine replicators require us to do some bioethics catchup. I'm not really entirely when life and individual personhood should be considered to begin, in that case. I feel like being physically outside of another person's body, and being sustained by something other than a direct biological hookup from another person, gives you considerable points towards being considered an individual human being. On the other hand, just because we may get the ability to grow a fetus all the way from conception outside a human being doesn't mean the blastocyst is a person.
I think it is important, though, that in case 1) an injury to the fetus must be made directly to the fetus, not directly to the mother and incidentally to the fetus. I.e., to shoot a fetus in a uterine replicator in the head you have to walk into the lab where the replicators are kept, rather than shoot the mother in the abdomen, quite possibly without even knowing she's pregnant.
If someone burns down the lab and kills all the fetuses without directly intending to do so, what then? It's not the same as burning a bunch of pregnant women, since in that case you've got the obvious deaths of post-birth people. I'm not sure destroying a bunch of fetuses in replicators ought to be considered equivalent to destroying a bunch of people. I guess I like the laws which define causing the death of a fetus as a separate crime from causing the death of a person, but may treat it as as severe a crime. But you wouldn't necessarily want to treat the death of a blastocyst the same as a death of a fetus that was going to be born from the replicator tomorrow.
Then again, we don't have exact sentences for all situations of killing people either, so maybe this is another case where who and how you killed, and why and what else you were doing, just has to be taken into consideration.
2) -- well, I don't think someone is necessarily responsible for giving something to a mother to injest that they have no idea will harm her particular child. You can make a case that someone is responsible for giving things to a mother that they don't make her aware can or will harm any fetus she has. I wouldn't say that's murder, though. I think again that falls into injury to the mother, and conceivably injury to an unborn child if such laws exist, not injury to the individual person that is her fetus.
This kind of gets into the 'treat all women as pre-pregnant' business. I don't think it's necessarily anyone's job to be required to treat a woman as if she is pregnant all the time, or for her to act as if she is. I think a pregnant woman has a significant chunk of responsibility for not doing things to her body or allowing other people to that will harm her fetus. I think other people who are doing things that could have an impact on her fetus have a responsibility to allow her informed consent -- drug manufacturers, doctors, etc. I feel like there is some degree of difference here between a woman's fetus and her child; if a woman allows or enables harmful things to be given to her child, her child can be taken away from her 'for its own good', but you can't take out someone's fetus even if she is harming it. Can uterine replicators change this? Can you force someone who wants to body-birth to take their child out of their body and use a replicator because her drug addiction or whatever is harming the fetus? Seems to me that's a reproductive choice issue.
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Re: Precedents
Date: 2007-03-27 06:33 pm (UTC)I think uterine replicators require us to do some bioethics catchup. I'm not really entirely when life and individual personhood should be considered to begin, in that case. I feel like being physically outside of another person's body, and being sustained by something other than a direct biological hookup from another person, gives you considerable points towards being considered an individual human being. On the other hand, just because we may get the ability to grow a fetus all the way from conception outside a human being doesn't mean the blastocyst is a person.
I think it is important, though, that in case 1) an injury to the fetus must be made directly to the fetus, not directly to the mother and incidentally to the fetus. I.e., to shoot a fetus in a uterine replicator in the head you have to walk into the lab where the replicators are kept, rather than shoot the mother in the abdomen, quite possibly without even knowing she's pregnant.
If someone burns down the lab and kills all the fetuses without directly intending to do so, what then? It's not the same as burning a bunch of pregnant women, since in that case you've got the obvious deaths of post-birth people. I'm not sure destroying a bunch of fetuses in replicators ought to be considered equivalent to destroying a bunch of people. I guess I like the laws which define causing the death of a fetus as a separate crime from causing the death of a person, but may treat it as as severe a crime. But you wouldn't necessarily want to treat the death of a blastocyst the same as a death of a fetus that was going to be born from the replicator tomorrow.
Then again, we don't have exact sentences for all situations of killing people either, so maybe this is another case where who and how you killed, and why and what else you were doing, just has to be taken into consideration.
2) -- well, I don't think someone is necessarily responsible for giving something to a mother to injest that they have no idea will harm her particular child. You can make a case that someone is responsible for giving things to a mother that they don't make her aware can or will harm any fetus she has. I wouldn't say that's murder, though. I think again that falls into injury to the mother, and conceivably injury to an unborn child if such laws exist, not injury to the individual person that is her fetus.
This kind of gets into the 'treat all women as pre-pregnant' business. I don't think it's necessarily anyone's job to be required to treat a woman as if she is pregnant all the time, or for her to act as if she is. I think a pregnant woman has a significant chunk of responsibility for not doing things to her body or allowing other people to that will harm her fetus. I think other people who are doing things that could have an impact on her fetus have a responsibility to allow her informed consent -- drug manufacturers, doctors, etc. I feel like there is some degree of difference here between a woman's fetus and her child; if a woman allows or enables harmful things to be given to her child, her child can be taken away from her 'for its own good', but you can't take out someone's fetus even if she is harming it. Can uterine replicators change this? Can you force someone who wants to body-birth to take their child out of their body and use a replicator because her drug addiction or whatever is harming the fetus? Seems to me that's a reproductive choice issue.