by CKR
A couple of op-eds in today's Boston Globe reminded me of a recurrent irritation relating to the subject of when life begins, stem cell research, and all that.
There are genuine ethical issues relating to the use of human germ cells. That includes sperm as well as eggs, but because sperm are so plentiful and so easily obtained, the ethical issues tend to be smaller. In addition, they seem to have little or no possibility of being used by themselves to generate human beings or simulacra thereof.
It seems to me, though, that the reason that far too many people focus on ethical problems involving women is that women's sexuality is to be carefully circumscribed for all the reasons that have been there for centuries.
So the same people who are up in arms about "destroying life" have no qualms about the death penalty or civilian deaths in Iraq but are extremely vocal about frozen embryos. There are some real ethical issues here, and people who have contributed to generating those embryos have been dealing with them.
There's a historical precedent that hasn't much been cited. After some intensive googling, I am beginning to see why it hasn't. It's very hard to find on the internet. Once these battles are won, it's easy to take them for granted.
The precedent I'm thinking of is the use of anaesthesia in childbirth. Anaesthesia was a scientific innovation in the 19th century. Some of its early uses were getting high with nitrous oxide, which young people did at parties after Humphrey Davies discovered it. Doctors had used alcoholic intoxication to mitigate the pain of surgery, but this had its dangers and limitations. Davies' and others research into the nature of gases made nitrous oxide and ether available to control pain during operations. A logical extension was to childbirth, but there the religious objections arose. (One reasonable reference I found, but very minimal.)
The Bible says that women are to bear children in pain, and anaesthesia removed that pain. The base objection was, as it is now, that women must bear the consequences of sex, and if those consequences are painful, so much the better to keep women under control. Additional "scientific" and "ethical" objections were adduced, as they are now, to bolster the Biblical injunction: women would not develop a proper motherly love for their children if they were deprived of that opportunity for pain. This was eventually seen for the nonsense that it is, and Queen Victoria chose to give birth under anaesthesia.
We can hope that today's extraneous arguments will soon be seen for the nonsense they are. Recently scientists have contorted themselves to produce stem cells that can't be seen as coming from viable embryos, introducing complications that may undercut the positive values of stem cells and still rejected by the objectors.
This is giving far too much power to those who will do anything to maintain their very limited view of the universe and people's ethical capabilities. Additional power to remove the pain inflicted by nature is to be welcomed.