Remember the discussions if there are 15 days on the 'drug baby' ? Well, 15 days is not that long. But I must say that my first reaction (and that of some colleagues who recognize) has been found that the media sometimes have short memories. Because this story of the first 'double hope baby' born in France ought to remind us there is something not so distant. In 2007, the story of Noah and Elodie One was the home. Despite the rather scathing humor that these cases raise , these are serious issues. They involve parents whose child needs a bone marrow transplant, which indications are usually serious diseases. If there is no donor related, and that the chances of getting a gift on international lists is too remote, these parents sometimes resort to ... an increase of relatives. In other words, they have another child. This possibility is open to them with or without assistance, it is after all their rights. But how do you know if this child will be compatible as a donor? Or even if it will also have the disease that strikes its big brother or big sister? Preimplantation genetic diagnosis, genetic testing performed on a cell from an embryo conceived by in vitro fertilization , helps answer the first question, and in some cases the second. It is then technically possible n'implanter an embryo both healthy and compatible.
This small gesture, which still requires a medically assisted procreation, raises a host of controversies . In Switzerland, it is not: parents who want to use it must go abroad. And when the preimplantation diagnosis included the selection of an embryo to allow a donation of cord blood (or sometimes bone marrow) in siblings, we feel the tension rising. The argument is then the opposite is usually that of the instrumentalization : ban the use of a human being only as a means and not as an end in itself ', so as a being with an intrinsic value regardless of its usefulness to others.
The problem is that the problem of exploitation is not the person be useful to others. Is to limit its importance to that. It is therefore critical to acknowledge those families unable to consider this child as a kind of reservoir tissues, being unable to love as they would a child conceived otherwise. Seriously as charge it. And not very realistic. When the question is explicitly placed on the table, there is also interesting to contortions to avoid this conclusion. The National Committee of Ethics, which published two position papers on pre-implantation diagnosis, which was divided during the second , which has carefully avoided making that charge, provides an example of the contortions in this passage:
"The committee members who oppose the legalization of PGD for tissue typing in Switzerland based themselves on purely ethical-social and do not call them either into question the decision of individual parents. "
Strange ethics review, which considers ethically objectionable practice which actors are also considered perfectly honorable ... Alex Mauron commented on some time ago during a debate on the radio that you find here . This is probably a reflection of our discomfort. Because everything around us, in situations that medical technology does not, the examples are legion: we have a second child to complete the family, to give a companion to the first, to comply with a social ideal for not later regret not having been, for ... for ... for ... a whole series of things. And it is estimated that all these choices are ... perfectly honorable. Required a bit, sometimes, even. A friend told me there are some time she 'did not know that having a first child she signed a contract with the company to have a second'.
What technology is changing that? A number of things, no doubt. But not the question of instrumentalization. And is it really, at base, more problematic for a second child to save the life of the first? Until the problem is attached to this , we must admit that the argument is rather weak ...
0 comments:
Post a Comment