HINT: You might want to print this page out and think about these questions for a while.
1. If you were over 40 and became pregnant, would you
want to have an amniocentesis? Why or why not?
2. In some countries, where male children are more highly valued than females, amniocentesis is used to determine sex, and if the fetus is a female it is aborted. While almost all U.S. college students think this practice is unacceptable, they are much more likely to find abortion in the case of birth defects to be acceptable. What do you think? Before just stating "abortion is wrong and they will all go to hell", remember the article on "Genes of Life and Death" and the parents' comments that their child "lived a miserable, painful existence for six months" - and then she died. Really think about watching your baby suffer in pain for six months and then die - would you really be willing to go through that again?
What about aborting a baby because it is the 'wrong' sex?
People from those cultures sometimes argue that we have no right to try
to force them to fit our values, and we do not understand their situation,
e.g., a boy may help support them in their old age while a girl will be
with her husband's parents. If they don't have a male child, they may be
on the street begging or starve in their old age. It's easy for us to criticize
when we have Social Security, Medicaid, etc. to fall back on. What do you
think?
3. In the article "Genes of Life and Death", one
couple decides to try in vitro fertilization to have a healthy baby. Do
you think this was a good decision on their part? Would you have done the
same in their position? Why or why not?
4. What do you think of surrogate mothers? Is it just
selling your body? Should it be made legal? What rights (if any) should
the surrogate mother have?
5. Cloning has made the news recently, and congress seems to be rushing to make it illegal to clone humans. While many people seem to be afraid that dictators like Hussein will clone whole armies of soldiers, or replicas of themselves, many scientists believe that cloning might have much more benign uses. For example, a couple who could not have children could have a clone of one of them, thus avoiding the whole problem of artificial insemination, egg donors, etc. A family with a child who develops some condition requiring a transplant could have a clone of that child, guaranteeing that there would be a match. To give you an idea how this might work, a few years ago, there was a family with a 15-year-old daughter who developed leukemia. Her only hope was bone marrow transplant and no compatible donors had been found. The parents decided to have another child in the hopes that the baby could be a donor and save their daughter's life. They conceived a baby (the old-fashioned way), and nine months later had a little girl who did turn out to be a suitable donor. As soon as the surgery could be safely performed, the older child received a transplant, and the family now has two healthy daughters, one who is three and one who is eighteen. Many people expressed disapproval that a couple would have a baby just to have the possibility of a transplant. What do you think? How does this differ from using cloning for this purpose?
click here to email
your answers
click here to go on to more information on pregnancy and birth