As long as 2.5 billion non judeo christians are on this planet human reproductive cloning is going to happen. When? is the question .
Let us take Heart transplantation.
human reproductive cloning
Adequate preparation in the basic and clinical sciences and training in surgical techniques must have been accomplished before any new surgical procedure is introduced into clinical medicine. An illustrative example of an over enthusiastic rush into a procedure was the sudden popularity of cardiac transplantation in the 1960s. The preparatory laboratory work in cardiac transplantation started in 1905, but the first successful replacement of the heart in a dog took place in 1960. Immunosuppression, which is crucial to the procedure, was introduced in 1958, and longtime survival of grafts occurred by 1965. Christian Barnard reported the first successful human heart transplantation in December 1967 in South Africa. By the end of 1968, 101 human heart transplantations had been performed by 64 surgical groups in 22 countries. Most patients improved briefly and then died of rejection of the transplant or infections. In 2 years, the procedure was largely discredited, and it took more than 10 additional years to reestablish wide acceptance of the operation. This experience illustrates the need to limit difficult and complex procedures to specialized centers that have the resources and adequately trained surgeons to perform them. This is equally true for complex pelvic surgery. or Human reproductive cloning.
"In the first pages of Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley's famous portrayal of a future dystopia, the author plunges us into a world where the state controls every aspect of human reproduction. In minute detail, he describes the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, with its Fertilizing Room, Bottling Room, Social Predestination Room, and Decanting Room. Most women in his envisaged society are induced to have their ovaries removed. Their eggs are harvested, inspected for abnormalities, and mixed with spermatozoa. Once conception occurs, the fertilized egg is incubated, fed, bathed in hormones, its sex determined, and the crucial decisions made—will it be twinned? Will it have its development arrested? And, if female, will it be made into a freemartin? Finally, instead of being born, babies are “decanted.” In this society, carrying a child to term is taboo, its citizens conditioned to be disgusted by the idea that reproduction was once “viviparous.” Now, Huxley has the director of the hatchery hailing ectogenesis—that is the conception and gestation of babies outside the womb—as “The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.”1"
From the 1920S onward, a number of writers had defended artificial insemination as a form of positive eugenics.174 In 1935, Herbert Brewer, socialist and postal clerk, argued that race improvement could be achieved by controlled breeding, all couples selecting sperm that had been determined to have the best possible hereditary endowment. Although men would no doubt initially oppose being displaced by sperm banks, Brewer believed they would eventually be won over.175 The biologist Cyril Bibby agreed that it made eugenic sense for more than one woman to avail herself of superior sperm but warned that there were dangers. “The prospect of thousands of little Adolphs is appalling.”176 Though the geneticist Herman Muller did not believe that Brewer's notion would work under capitalism, under socialism he envisaged donor insemination being practiced. “Only social inertia and popular ignorance now hold us back from putting into effect (at least in a limited experimental way) such a severance of the function of reproduction from the personal love-life of the individual.”177 He assumed that an enlightened woman would be proud to bear the child of a Darwin or Lenin. Julian Huxley agreed that with the availability of birth control and artificial insemination it was now possible to separate the sexual and reproductive functions. “The (p.132) perfection of birth-control technique has made the separation more effective; and the still more recent technique of artificial insemination has opened up new horizons by making it possible to provide different objects for the two functions. It is now open to man and woman to consummate the sexual function with those they love, but to fulfill the reproductive function with those whom on perhaps quite other grounds they admire.”178 In each scenario, the talk was of passing on the traits of the “superior” male; women's endowment was judged to be not that significant.
Medical defenders claimed that AID could be used not just when the husband was sterile but when his genetic disposition raised the risk of such complaints as deafness or nervous disease.179 Barton made a point of stressing that she sought superior donors. They should be mature and already fathers, but the doctor would consider as well the “eugenic quality of the donor's stock.”180 Dr. Margaret Jackson, of the Exeter Family Planning Clinic and Infertility Clinic, was both a gynecologist and member of the Eugenics Society. She argued that AID offered a better selection of genes than a fling with a “fancy man.” Fertility panels were choosy about donors, and in the future she predicted the Medical Research Council and the Eugenics Society could give advice on their selection.181
Some supporters of Barton employed the crudest eugenic rhetoric. One doctor asserted that artificial insemination was preferable to adoption because of “the frequently poor genetic quality of the material presented for adoption.” Another protested that it was necessary to counter the current threat of “racial degeneration” in which the country tolerated the breeding of “any and every sort of rubbish” by turning to means of race improvement.182 Recalling the eugenic language in which artificial insemination was described and rationalized does not diminish the courage that pioneering doctors like Mary Barton and Margaret Jackson needed to help women desperate to become mothers and advance an initially unpopular cause. What it does do is remind us of how difficult it was in the first half the twentieth century to speak of the importance of reproduction without falling back on old platitudes about the need to “improve the race.”
In the 1940s, nothing could rival artificial insemination in better representing reproduction by design. In so doing, it dramatically demonstrated the splitting of sex and reproduction. For this reason, the reassurances offered by its defenders are all the more interesting. Downplaying as much as possible its potential impact on attitudes toward gender and paternity, they insisted that the procedure only assisted men and women become what nature intended them to be—mothers and fathers. Far from overturning traditional gender roles, a simple service would allow women to become maternal, men to be manlier, and families (p.133) to be fruitful and fulfilled. Drawing on eugenic notions, the argument was made that British couples, the British nation, and the British race would all benefit. Of course, in the long term artificial insemination would also be employed by single women and lesbians to radically redraft our notions of the family.183 In the short term, that is to say in the first half of the twentieth century when the procedure was only emerging, it was predictable that that its defenders would seek to portray it in the most conservative of hues. (p.134
No comments:
Post a Comment