The Ethics Of Playing Stork

As scientists come up with new techniques to overcome infertility, they have stumbled into a thicket of complex legal and moral dillemmas. In 1999, CBSNews.com talked to bioethicist David Magnus, a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. An expert on fertility issues, Magnus had some unexpected ideas.

Inherent Contradictions

"We spend billions of dollars trying to develop industries to prevent pregnancy, at the same time we spend billions of dollars developing industries which make it possible to have children essentially on demand, at time when they were previously not able to."

Is Infertility A Disease?

"One of the things that gives rise to all of this technology, which is creating a lot of these problems dealing with infertility, is the way we think of infertility as a disease. There are a lot of problems with thinking of infertility as a disease - I'm not saying that it's not a disease, but I'm saying that there are some issues and there are values that play a role, and that need to be addressed."

Expanding Definition

"Who counts as infertile now is very very fluid, and the concept [of infertility] has expanded now to include virtually everybody who is past menopause."

Examining Assumptions

"One of the messages that our culture gives to women, and to couples generally, is that you're not a full person if you don't have children. That's a very dangerous message. Rather than questioning that assumption, we've instead just looked for a fix. One of the reasons behind the drive for these high-tech solutions is the tremendous pain and anguish that women and couples go through when they're unable to conceive. Instead of asking 'why do you feel this pain?', we look for high-tech solutions, which often don't succeed, and have all kinds of unintended consequences. Over the past 25 years, the rate of multiple births has quadrupled. And multiple births are very dangerous."

A Circus

"[Fertility medicine] is running unchecked, for a lot of reasons. There's very little regulation. One of my colleagues has pointed out that there is more regulation of the training of circus animals, than there is of reproduction technology. It's incredibly underregulated ... it's just a circus out there, with people trying all kinds of different things."

The Human Family

"There's all kinds of assumptions that people have about genes. They have this notion that they want to pass on their genes, which, in a lot of ways, is very silly. It's not how genetics really works. When you have a child, 50 percent of the genes that you have will be passed on to that child. But we share a huge amount of genes in common across the population, so in terms of your genes being passed along to the net generation, that's going to happen anyway. It's not very hard to adopt a child who basically shares a huge number of genes in common with you. The real character traits people are usually interested in are actually superficial morphological characteristics like hair color, eye color, certain kinds of facial features. And all those traits are shared widely throughout the population. I'm blond and blue-eyed, my wife has dark hair. If we have a child, that child is not going to superficially resemble me physically nearly as much as the children of friends of mine who both happen to be blond and blue-eyed and have certain other features."

Some Solutions

"I'd like to see more counseling for people who want to have kids and can't. I'd like to see a discussion of these values rather than just having them be assumed. This assumption that we've created in our society - that people have a right to have children at any time in their lives, whether they're in they're 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, even 60s -- is very problematic. We have not asked the question: do people really have that right? These social problems are being dealt with medically."

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