Beware: Killing for Organs, Taking Organs From Living People
I have been warning for several years that many in bioethics and the organ transplant community hope to legalize killing for organs, that is, taking organs from the living. The latest example comes in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics by Canadian philosophy professor (of course!) Walter Glannon.
It’s a long article and I don’t have space here to deal with every aspect. But a few points: First, he claims that all decisions about organ donation and the treatment of patients are kept strictly segregated. From, “The Moral Insignificance of Death in Organ Donation:”
All transplant policies and protocols require that decisions about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment be separated from decisions about organ donation,procurement, and transplantation. This prevents a conflict of duty for critical care teams, whose primary duty is to provide appropriate care to critically ill patients,as well as for transplant teams, whose primary duty is to patients with organ failure who need a transplant. Separating these decisions and duties minimizes the risk of compromising the care of critically ill patients and prevents treating them instrumentally as nothing more than a source of transplantable organs.
I thought that was true, too. But as I posted about yesterday, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network permits discussion of organ donation to occur before the decision to withdraw life support.
Glannon claims that death is morally insignificant in procuring organs.
All transplant policies and protocols require that decisions about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment be separated from decisions about organ donation,procurement, and transplantation. This prevents a conflict of duty for critical care teams, whose primary duty is to provide appropriate care to critically ill patients,as well as for transplant teams, whose primary duty is to patients with organ failure who need a transplant. Separating these decisions and duties minimizes the risk of compromising the care of critically ill patients and prevents treating them instrumentally as nothing more than a source of transplantable organs.
I thought that was true, too. But as I posted about yesterday, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network permits discussion of organ donation to occur before the decision to withdraw life support.
Glannon claims that death is morally insignificant in procuring organs.
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Scientists Want to Scavenge Aborted Fetal Eggs for IVF Treatment
Scientists are keeping aborted fetal ovaries alive in order to scavenge their eggs.
From the Daily News story:
Scientists are ready to plunder the ovaries of aborted babies for eggs to use in IVF treatment. Experiments have taken the process almost to completion, it emerged yesterday. They raise the nightmare prospect of a child whose biological mother has never been born. The news, from a scientific conference in Madrid, was greeted with widespread revulsion at how far science is testing ethical frontiers. Experts warned of appalling emotional and biological problems.
But fertility doctors say the development could ease a worldwide shortage of donated eggs for women who cannot produce their own…Scientists have known for some time that female foetuses develop ovaries after as little as 16 weeks in the womb. Now researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have kept ovarian tissue from aborted foetuses alive in the laboratory for several weeks. They stopped the experiment at the point where they believed eggs were about to be produced. Chief researcher Dr Tal Biron-Shental said it was ‘theoretically possible’ that with extra hormone treatment they could have produced mature eggs suitable for IVF use.
But fertility doctors say the development could ease a worldwide shortage of donated eggs for women who cannot produce their own…Scientists have known for some time that female foetuses develop ovaries after as little as 16 weeks in the womb. Now researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have kept ovarian tissue from aborted foetuses alive in the laboratory for several weeks. They stopped the experiment at the point where they believed eggs were about to be produced. Chief researcher Dr Tal Biron-Shental said it was ‘theoretically possible’ that with extra hormone treatment they could have produced mature eggs suitable for IVF use.
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Making Orphans: Harvesting Eggs From Abortion
Scientists often believe that if something can be done it should be done. But that's not always true.
The subtitle of Mary Shelley's famous novel "Frankenstein," was "The Modern Prometheus." The reference is to the Greek legend about the tragic consequences of endowing humanity with god-like power. Shelley's Frankenstein is about a scientist operating without regard for moral and ethical constraints.
All of this comes to mind after reading about a proposal coming out of a scientific conference in Madrid. There, researchers from Israel and the Netherlands announced a potential new source for human eggs to be used in in-vitro-fertilization treatments: aborted female fetuses.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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