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Access to IVF

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Should all health-care services, including IVF, be equally available to all?
   
2. Do parents act immorally by creating a child at high risk of major disability or suffering?
   

Introduction

I am in substantial agreement with most of the central points made in "The Ethics of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)." Therefore, I will address two issues that were not addressed: who should have access to IVF and what policies would follow if those who disagreed were correct. Before getting to those points, however, I would like to buttress one key point on which I think Goldworth yielded ground unnecessarily; that is, the implications of considering the embryo as a person in the full sense of the word.

What If an Embryo Were a Person?

As Goldworth points out, the definition of personhood is unavoidably a social construct. Reasonable people, religious and secular, always will disagree on the various available definitions. It is most certainly not a scientific question that can be resolved by experiment.

When a definition is constructed for a social purpose, it is helpful to determine the purpose. In this case, "personhood" is shorthand for the position that an embryo should be entitled to the same privileges and protections as all other entities who generally are included in that category. At one level, such a proposal seems silly. Even the most ardent proponent of the embryo-as-person view would not suggest that an embryo is entitled to the same level of health care as other persons. Although the United States lags behind most countries in positing a right to health care, there are advocates who argue that every person should be entitled to some decent minimum of health care. Someone who makes that claim presumably would not assert that a sick or dying embryo was entitled, for example, to emergency services, including ambulance or helicopter transport, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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