IVF, embryos and abortion - Page 3

I do see a difference between keeping someone alive (heart surgery, caesarean section) and "creating new life" (point of discussion, I know) to maybe go down the drain (surplus eggs).

Maybe I'm just too young and fertile (although I never tried or tested the quality of my sperm) to know how painful it can be not being able to get pregnant "the natural way" and maybe thinking "they should adopt or cope with it" is as bad as denying someone his or her heart surgery.

However, we live in a "what can be done, will be done"-world, so it is me who has to cope with how things are and honestly I'm not directly affected in my every day life by IVF. Things like this are personal decisions, and today I say: "I won't have IVF, I'd try to cope or adopt." Maybe this opinion will change. When a couple and a doctor and whoever else is need is agreeing to do it, who am I to say its bad?

Another big part of the discussion concerning IVF is gestational surrogacy, maybe kwark wants to start another thread with an outstandingly good OP.

I was musing on this today and I thought it provided a very different and interesting source of hypotheticals for looking at embryos, when life starts, the obligation to carry an embryo to term and so forth.

So, first, some background.
IVF stands for in vitro fertilisation, basically fertilisation of an egg outside the body. It's used with couples who are struggling to conceive naturally to help them have children. Basically you get eggs from the woman using science, you get sperm from the man using his hand, you mix them up, you wait for two or three cell divisions and then you put the mix back into the woman using science and hopefully a baby happens.

Why it's interesting

1. The conception happens outside of the body.
- This means that there is no default mother to place responsibility for carrying it to term upon. Unlike normal conception where the default is that the egg is attached to some woman's womb in IVF it's in a test tube. The default position of the egg is not on it's way to becoming a person if not interfered with but rather completely fucked unless interfered with. Does this different default position change the value of the fertilised egg?

- In the hypothetical case that the mother changes her mind before the egg is implanted we get a bunch of great moral problems to think on. We now have a pre-emptive abortion where a woman chooses to not get pregnant with a baby she already chose to conceive. For the anti-abortionists among you, should she be forcibly implanted with the fertilised egg? If not, what happens to it? Does it still come under "my body, my right" if it's not in her body?

- Oddly enough there was a case in the UK when a couple broke up after a successful course of IVF resulted in the fertilisation of eggs. The man wanted the eggs destroyed whereas the woman, who had subsequently had her ovaries removed due to cancer, wanted to keep them because they were her only chance of ever having a natural child. The genetic material that made up the fertilised eggs had come from both of them while the eggs weren't in the body of either of them. Should the man be allowed to abort their eggs in this case or should the woman be allowed to carry them against his will?

- In the case of unwanted fertilised eggs should effort be made to find a potential surrogate to give birth to them? Perhaps hiring unemployed teenage mothers to squeeze them out (rather than more of their own, amirite?) and give them a chance at life. If you're not going to give these eggs a womb to live in is it justifiable to destroy them? In my opinion this is where the hypothetical gets really cool. The core argument for abortion is not that the mother has the right to kill her unborn children but rather than the mother has the right to control her own body which includes ending a pregnancy, the death of the unborn child is an unfortunate side effect. With a fertilised egg on ice nobody is having their right to their own body in any way violated by it, it's just sitting on ice, so killing it becomes a deliberate act rather than an unfortunate side effect. Does this mean it is worse to destroy a fertilised test tube egg than a normal abortion? Is it justifiable to destroy it if nobody wants to carry it to birth in their womb? Is there an obligation to carry it upon the creation of it and if so who has this obligation? If, for example, the mother dies before implantation should the father then hire a surrogate mother because he has an obligation to ensure his unborn child is born if he can?

- If you're not going to force anyone to make sure the fertilised eggs get carried to term and nobody wants them but you don't want to destroy them because they're fertilised eggs which are still completely viable and could become people if they only got a womb to bake in for 9 months then what do you do with them? Store them indefinitely even though you're getting lots of eggs and no women who randomly want to be implanted with eggs? Is there a moral difference between indefinitely storing the eggs and destroying them? If yes, would that mean that if a pregnant woman decided to pause her pregnancy indefinitely and never resume it (and tell you she planned to never resume it) that'd be morally different to aborting the child? It wouldn't get born either way but in one it'd technically retain potential life. Should the state pay for the protection of these unborn potential citizens, they may only be 8 cells but they're still completely viable and could become people if only given a chance.

2. Surplus eggs
When an egg is implanted the magic doesn't always happen, sometimes it doesn't work just like a lot of naturally conceived eggs which the body will discard for whatever reasons. To save time and money IVF is usually done in bulk, the woman will get fertility treatments and will have a dozen or so eggs harvested at the same time. Then all the eggs are fertilised, even though she only wants one baby. The others will generally get destroyed which is great for us in hypothetical ethics land.

- Is it justifiable to fertilise more eggs than you plan to carry to term? This is literally abortion of convenience, deliberately creating fertilised human embryos (they've split to 8 cells or so) with the intent to destroy most of them in order to save time and money. Should it be allowed?

- IVF is expensive and time consuming and an individual egg has a fairly low success rate. If a woman is forced to go one egg at a time then she may run out of money or fertile years and not be able to have a child at all. Consider this hypothetical. She has ten unfertilised eggs sitting in test tubes with a load of sperm in a test tube next to them. She is told that the chance of success for an egg is roughly 10% and she can afford three attempts. If she tries to avoid discarding embryos then there is a 73% (0.9^3) chance that she simply won't have a child, that there would be a potential human who would have lived had she fertilised all of them, that did not get to live. Does that potential human have no value because it is theoretical because the egg and sperm that would make it have glass between them? If she has all ten fertilised there is a 65% (1-0.9^10) chance she'll end up having an actual child, by choosing to fertilise all the eggs she's doubled the chance of one of them actually becoming a person but also guaranteed the death of fertilised eggs whereas previously they'd have died unfertilised. Is this worth it? Are the embryos at 8 cells so much more valuable than the unfertilised eggs at 1 cell that they should be protected even at the cost of lowering the chance that an actual child is born of one of them? Also, in this case, the embryos are being protected by making sure that if you do discard the egg you discard it before it is fertilised, the embryos aren't being kept safe by going one round of IVF at a time, they're just never existing.

- Is it better to discard an unfertilised egg and some sperm than an 8 cell embryo or is it essentially the same? If an embryo is given value and protection because of that and it results in people simply discarding unfertilised eggs and sperm such that the embryo you're trying to protect never actually exists have you actually protected it? In the above example placing a different value of the embryo to the egg actually lowers the odds of any egg becoming a child, is an embryo still morally equivalent to a child despite this?

- The decision of which embryos to implant and which to destroy essentially amounts to selective abortion. Say a woman starts with ten eggs, six become viable embryos and the doctors wish to implant three to give her decent odds of having a single child. Three of the embryos are boys, three are girls. She wants a girl, should she choose those three and have the three boy embryos destroyed? Is this morally any different from her getting pregnant naturally, finding out the sex and aborting it if it's a boy? Statistically is it better to get an actual gender based abortion to get a girl (if she got pregnant and aborted boys until she got a girl there would be a 50% chance of her having no abortions, a 75% chance of having one or less, 87.5% chance of her having two or less, 93.75% chance of her having three or less)? By those numbers discarding the three male embryos just because she wants a girl is statistically way worse than just aborting boys after a natural pregnancy. Or is it better because three had to get aborted anyway so you might as well choose? Should she randomise it and just pick three of the six or does it make sense to choose?

3. Life begins at implantation
- The argument that an embryo has value is based on the assumption that at the moment of conception it is a potential human life which, lacking outside interference, will possibly become a human. This isn't true of an IVF embryo until implantation which happens after conception or possibly not at all. If it still needs outside interference to possibly become a human then how is an embryo in a test tube any different from an egg in a test tube with some sperm available? Both can potentially become humans, one needs to be implanted, the other needs to be mixed then implanted but neither will ever become anything more than the cells they already are without outside interference. In terms of their odds of becoming a human they're about the same. Does this mean they're both potential humans or does the fertilised embryo get to be a potential human while the egg and sperm don't? Given the act of fertilising the embryo was a deliberate human intervention does that mean an embryo in a needle ready to be implanted is more of a potential human than one in a test tube (it is after all closer to being born) or are they both potential humans with the same value? If there are both potential humans with the same value, albeit one closer to birth than the other due to human intervention, then how can we consider the unfertilised egg and sperm cells as not potential human even though the same human intervention separates them from the embryo?