News analysis: The other 'moral issues'
While national leaders are occupied etching out a legal definition of torture, fighting and funding a war of dubious inception and enacting policies many perceive as socially unjust, somehow, the sphere of “moral issues” in American public discourse has come to consist essentially of abortion, homosexuality and religion.
Other serious ethical problems lurk behind the more traditional, routinely addressed “moral issues.” These are often overlooked by the simple “culture war” script of the socially conservative right versus the liberal left according to which national debates on ethics tend to be directed.
Take stem cell research, which is abhorred by many because the embryos containing the versatile cells must be destroyed in order to extract them. Politicians and pundits argue long and loud on moral grounds over what becomes of excess embryos, but the procedures that create them not only go unchallenged in contemporary culture, but are generally encouraged in the name of helping the infertile generate genetically genuine families.
More than 9 million American women of childbearing age have undergone infertility treatment. To date, 15 states have requirements that health insurance providers must cover infertility treatments for women, making it a pertinent financial issue for the entire health care system. As reported by ABC News, a single round of in vitro fertilization treatment can cost more than $10,000, with many women making multiple attempts to successfully conceive a child.
According to Centers for Disease Control data, fewer than one third of all “assisted reproductive technology” procedures are successful, in that they result in at least one live birth.
With infertility treatments, particularly in vitro fertilization, more embryos are created than will be implanted, much less gestated into children. The unused embryos are generally frozen and stored, for the time being indefinitely. Estimates vary, but according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an organization of fertility doctors, there are upwards of 400,000 embryos currently frozen in storage in fertility clinics across the country.
In May, to protest a proposed bill broadening federal support for embryonic stem cell research, President Bush held a news conference posing with parents and their “Snowflake children,” conceived using embryos donated from other couples through the Christian-based Snowflakes program. The children represented a solution, which the program and the president termed “embryo adoption,” to the question of what to do with leftover embryos from infertility treatments. It works by allowing couples who have undergone infertility treatment to donate the embryos they did not use to another couple, who “adopts” them and uses them in their own attempts to conceive.
However, as reported by The New York Times, “embryo adoption” is not something most people undergoing infertility treatment are comfortable with, on either the giving or receiving end. The vast majority of infertility patients choose to freeze and store their excess embryos, with a mere 2 percent donating them to other patients and a mere 3 percent donating them to research in 2003.
Even then, only about half of donated embryos are viable after being thawed, and even fewer of those result in actual births.
To increase the odds for success, a newly offered procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis promises to screen embryos so that the healthiest can be implanted. It is performed when the embryo is only composed of six to eight cells, any one of which is still capable of developing into an organism. (When an embryo reaches 16 cells, it begins to differentiate and gives rise to stem cells. But by that point, removing any one cell destroys the entire embryo, creating the main ethical snag for stem cells.)
However, such a screening procedure carries its own ethical gray areas. With this technology, parents can unnaturally select the fittest embryos and discard the genetically “inferior,” to a greater and more precise degree than with previous techniques. Ethicists warn this could be a significant step toward selecting children for traits like sex, eye color or even intelligence.
It also allows parents to more easily have custom-tailored, tissue-matched children to provide spare biological parts to treat an existing child’s ailments. Recently termed “save-your-siblings” in The New York Times, surely the mere existence of such a category has to strike many as at least ethically questionable, if not plainly immoral.
Especially if any notion of “playing God” or overstepping one’s human boundaries–criticisms commonly leveled against abortion, stem cell research and even birth control–enters the discussion, the entire enterprise of assisted reproductive technology starts to look equally suspect.
While questions over when life begins have long floated about the “moral issues” discussion, another key issue centers on what rights individuals and their families have to control how life ends. Euthanasia and end-of-life care issues raised by increasing lifespans and improving medical expertise have been around for some time, but have not yet commanded the attention or spurred the serious national discussion they arguably deserve.
The “right to die” issue flared most noticeably with the Terri Schiavo case earlier this year. Public opinion polls revealed government intervention in Shiavo’s death by Republican leaders including President Bush, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to be a substantial public relations misfire, with a strong majority of Americans viewing it not as a noble attempt to save a life, but as an insulting, meddling and moralizing political stunt. Following a reported rush among Americans to draft living wills, the issue soon left the spotlight.
In October, with little publicity, the Supreme Court took up the Bush administration’s challenge to the state of Oregon’s “Death With Dignity Act,” which allowed doctors to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to competent, terminally ill patients who wished to end their lives. The act was approved twice by state voters, and more than 200 residents ended their lives under the act before it was challenged in 2001 by then-Attorney General John Aschcroft.
The case is John Roberts’ first as the Supreme Court’s new chief justice, but during his confirmation process, attention remained focused largely on how he might steer the Court regarding abortion rights. This other life-and-death issue, with the potential for wider reach into the lives of ordinary people planning for their own deaths or dealing with the deaths of loved ones did not enter the audible discourse.
Yet as reported by The Boston Globe, Roberts appears to be leaning toward the Bush administration’s position on denying states the right to decide on such issues and deferring to federal authority, which would outlaw Oregon’s act and set national precedent–a position plainly discordant with popular opinion, but unassailed in the media or in legislative debate with pre-emptive cries of judicial activism.
The Court’s ruling, expected sometime before June 2006, will have serious implications for how all Americans are allowed to live and die–yet the case barely made news.
Though to some abortion and gay marriage are the most pressing “moral issues” facing the country today, they are far from the only ones. Other ethical issues are waiting in the wings while the “culture war” drama plays out among politicians, the press and the public, and though they are rarely called out and seriously entertained, they are no less important.
Other serious ethical problems lurk behind the more traditional, routinely addressed “moral issues.” These are often overlooked by the simple “culture war” script of the socially conservative right versus the liberal left according to which national debates on ethics tend to be directed.
Take stem cell research, which is abhorred by many because the embryos containing the versatile cells must be destroyed in order to extract them. Politicians and pundits argue long and loud on moral grounds over what becomes of excess embryos, but the procedures that create them not only go unchallenged in contemporary culture, but are generally encouraged in the name of helping the infertile generate genetically genuine families.
More than 9 million American women of childbearing age have undergone infertility treatment. To date, 15 states have requirements that health insurance providers must cover infertility treatments for women, making it a pertinent financial issue for the entire health care system. As reported by ABC News, a single round of in vitro fertilization treatment can cost more than $10,000, with many women making multiple attempts to successfully conceive a child.
According to Centers for Disease Control data, fewer than one third of all “assisted reproductive technology” procedures are successful, in that they result in at least one live birth.
With infertility treatments, particularly in vitro fertilization, more embryos are created than will be implanted, much less gestated into children. The unused embryos are generally frozen and stored, for the time being indefinitely. Estimates vary, but according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an organization of fertility doctors, there are upwards of 400,000 embryos currently frozen in storage in fertility clinics across the country.
In May, to protest a proposed bill broadening federal support for embryonic stem cell research, President Bush held a news conference posing with parents and their “Snowflake children,” conceived using embryos donated from other couples through the Christian-based Snowflakes program. The children represented a solution, which the program and the president termed “embryo adoption,” to the question of what to do with leftover embryos from infertility treatments. It works by allowing couples who have undergone infertility treatment to donate the embryos they did not use to another couple, who “adopts” them and uses them in their own attempts to conceive.
However, as reported by The New York Times, “embryo adoption” is not something most people undergoing infertility treatment are comfortable with, on either the giving or receiving end. The vast majority of infertility patients choose to freeze and store their excess embryos, with a mere 2 percent donating them to other patients and a mere 3 percent donating them to research in 2003.
Even then, only about half of donated embryos are viable after being thawed, and even fewer of those result in actual births.
To increase the odds for success, a newly offered procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis promises to screen embryos so that the healthiest can be implanted. It is performed when the embryo is only composed of six to eight cells, any one of which is still capable of developing into an organism. (When an embryo reaches 16 cells, it begins to differentiate and gives rise to stem cells. But by that point, removing any one cell destroys the entire embryo, creating the main ethical snag for stem cells.)
However, such a screening procedure carries its own ethical gray areas. With this technology, parents can unnaturally select the fittest embryos and discard the genetically “inferior,” to a greater and more precise degree than with previous techniques. Ethicists warn this could be a significant step toward selecting children for traits like sex, eye color or even intelligence.
It also allows parents to more easily have custom-tailored, tissue-matched children to provide spare biological parts to treat an existing child’s ailments. Recently termed “save-your-siblings” in The New York Times, surely the mere existence of such a category has to strike many as at least ethically questionable, if not plainly immoral.
Especially if any notion of “playing God” or overstepping one’s human boundaries–criticisms commonly leveled against abortion, stem cell research and even birth control–enters the discussion, the entire enterprise of assisted reproductive technology starts to look equally suspect.
While questions over when life begins have long floated about the “moral issues” discussion, another key issue centers on what rights individuals and their families have to control how life ends. Euthanasia and end-of-life care issues raised by increasing lifespans and improving medical expertise have been around for some time, but have not yet commanded the attention or spurred the serious national discussion they arguably deserve.
The “right to die” issue flared most noticeably with the Terri Schiavo case earlier this year. Public opinion polls revealed government intervention in Shiavo’s death by Republican leaders including President Bush, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to be a substantial public relations misfire, with a strong majority of Americans viewing it not as a noble attempt to save a life, but as an insulting, meddling and moralizing political stunt. Following a reported rush among Americans to draft living wills, the issue soon left the spotlight.
In October, with little publicity, the Supreme Court took up the Bush administration’s challenge to the state of Oregon’s “Death With Dignity Act,” which allowed doctors to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to competent, terminally ill patients who wished to end their lives. The act was approved twice by state voters, and more than 200 residents ended their lives under the act before it was challenged in 2001 by then-Attorney General John Aschcroft.
The case is John Roberts’ first as the Supreme Court’s new chief justice, but during his confirmation process, attention remained focused largely on how he might steer the Court regarding abortion rights. This other life-and-death issue, with the potential for wider reach into the lives of ordinary people planning for their own deaths or dealing with the deaths of loved ones did not enter the audible discourse.
Yet as reported by The Boston Globe, Roberts appears to be leaning toward the Bush administration’s position on denying states the right to decide on such issues and deferring to federal authority, which would outlaw Oregon’s act and set national precedent–a position plainly discordant with popular opinion, but unassailed in the media or in legislative debate with pre-emptive cries of judicial activism.
The Court’s ruling, expected sometime before June 2006, will have serious implications for how all Americans are allowed to live and die–yet the case barely made news.
Though to some abortion and gay marriage are the most pressing “moral issues” facing the country today, they are far from the only ones. Other ethical issues are waiting in the wings while the “culture war” drama plays out among politicians, the press and the public, and though they are rarely called out and seriously entertained, they are no less important.
posted by Holly at 10:27 AM
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