What the heck? What if any technology X causes misery? It was argued that in vitro fertilization would cause soulless humans to be born (seriously) with all sorts of ramifications (from them destroying society, to their existence being constant agony). This claim has been made repeatedly about all sorts of medical interventions, from organ transplants to cloning. Right now there are people who claim aspartame is turning us into zombie-like horrors.
There is always a risk from any medical intervention. A bad anesthesiologist can give you brain damage and turn you into a zombie when all you wanted to was have a wisdom tooth pulled. This objection is so generalized that I’m not sure it’s a true objection at all. I think you may be searching for other objections rather than stating a true objection.
It was argued that in vitro fertilization would cause soulless humans to be born (seriously) with all sorts of ramifications (from them destroying society, to their existence being constant agony).
Did someone actually suggest that? A cursory glance through some articles shows, for instance, the Pope expressing worry that women would be used as ‘baby factories’, but questions about IVF seem to have, historically, been tied up with worries about custom-designed people.
Yes. I suppose it depends a bit on how official you require the suggester to be before you’re willing to grant that it was a legitimate social discourse. A few examples:
Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today’s “Faith & Reason” column asked her readers “Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes of God?” in 2010.
People have reported asking priests for advice and being told ” He told them that if they were to go ahead with it, they would be doing something worse than abortion, their child would be born without a soul as he or she would be manmade and not Godmade.”
There’s various crazy ministries on the internet that make/made the soulless claims as well.
So yes, someone did actually suggest that. Multiple someones. How much they count is debatable.
Yeah, I don’t mean the crazy-ministry people, I mean people connected enough to reality that they wouldn’t say that sort of thing now, but who did right up to the point where normal human babies showed up and the position became unsupportable.
Maybe I’m looking too far into this, but I’m trying to understand how you could look at a person pretty much indistinguishable from other people and claim that they have all of these hilariously weird properties. I can see if happening if people conceived via IVF all had red hair or something, but people did know these would be, y’know, people conceived in-vitro, right?
/shrug. The concept of souls is unsupportable right now but it doesn’t stop anyone from claiming all sorts of hilariously weird properties for them. I don’t know how hard it would be to say that one person has an unsupportable property X and another person doesn’t, since they’re both just naked assertion anyway. When your references are that detached from reality you can start saying all sorts of nonsensical crap.
What the heck? What if any technology X causes misery? It was argued that in vitro fertilization would cause soulless humans to be born (seriously) with all sorts of ramifications (from them destroying society, to their existence being constant agony). This claim has been made repeatedly about all sorts of medical interventions, from organ transplants to cloning. Right now there are people who claim aspartame is turning us into zombie-like horrors.
There is always a risk from any medical intervention. A bad anesthesiologist can give you brain damage and turn you into a zombie when all you wanted to was have a wisdom tooth pulled. This objection is so generalized that I’m not sure it’s a true objection at all. I think you may be searching for other objections rather than stating a true objection.
Did someone actually suggest that? A cursory glance through some articles shows, for instance, the Pope expressing worry that women would be used as ‘baby factories’, but questions about IVF seem to have, historically, been tied up with worries about custom-designed people.
Yes. I suppose it depends a bit on how official you require the suggester to be before you’re willing to grant that it was a legitimate social discourse. A few examples:
Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today’s “Faith & Reason” column asked her readers “Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes of God?” in 2010.
People have reported asking priests for advice and being told ” He told them that if they were to go ahead with it, they would be doing something worse than abortion, their child would be born without a soul as he or she would be manmade and not Godmade.”
There’s various crazy ministries on the internet that make/made the soulless claims as well.
So yes, someone did actually suggest that. Multiple someones. How much they count is debatable.
Yeah, I don’t mean the crazy-ministry people, I mean people connected enough to reality that they wouldn’t say that sort of thing now, but who did right up to the point where normal human babies showed up and the position became unsupportable.
Maybe I’m looking too far into this, but I’m trying to understand how you could look at a person pretty much indistinguishable from other people and claim that they have all of these hilariously weird properties. I can see if happening if people conceived via IVF all had red hair or something, but people did know these would be, y’know, people conceived in-vitro, right?
/shrug. The concept of souls is unsupportable right now but it doesn’t stop anyone from claiming all sorts of hilariously weird properties for them. I don’t know how hard it would be to say that one person has an unsupportable property X and another person doesn’t, since they’re both just naked assertion anyway. When your references are that detached from reality you can start saying all sorts of nonsensical crap.