There is an interesting article in the Boston Globe this morning about a young woman who was on life support after a heart attack. The family made the decision to remove the breathing tube, however a few hours later, before she passed away, they asked the doctors to hook it back up.
- Image via Wikipedia
Here’s where it gets interesting…they wanted to keep the woman alive so they could harvest her eggs.
Where it get’s even more interesting is the woman had never shown any inclination to have children.
What should the doctors do? In this case, the doctors were able to talk the family out of it. The doctors felt that the procedure would hasten her imminent death and since she never expressed any desire for children, they felt it was not what she wanted.
What if the opposite were true? What if this woman planned on having kids in a couple of years? Should we be harvesting eggs of an about to be deceased person if they expressed desire to have children before their life was cut short?
Natural selection talks about the environment not being able to support unlimited reproduction therefore not all individuals get to reproduce to their full potential. Are we messing with natural selection here?
This is a very slippery slope that we are on right now. Technology is able to do things that we couldn’t have dreamed of even 10 years ago.
What do you think? Me, I am for the laws of nature. I think we need to be real careful about how far we want to take technology when it comes to mother nature.
If you would like to read the Globe article you can get it here.
