{"id":239,"date":"2010-01-27T10:29:41","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T09:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=239"},"modified":"2018-08-19T13:54:57","modified_gmt":"2018-08-19T12:54:57","slug":"the-ethics-of-elderly-mums-in-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2010\/01\/27\/the-ethics-of-elderly-mums-in-the-news\/","title":{"rendered":"The ethics of Elderly Mums in the News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By David Hunter<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Daniel Sokol has written <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/magazine\/8480641.stm\">this thoughtful piece<\/a> about the yuck factor and Elderly Mums conceiving children late in life via IVF.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I generally agree with Daniel, it seems difficult to justify criticism of elderly mums on grounds other than potential harm to the child &#8211; and as Daniel notes these grounds are problematic due to the non-identity problem. (And well done to Daniel for managing to make Parfit understandable to the general public in his piece)<\/p>\n<p>Daniel references other potential arguments and it is one of these I want to discuss &#8211; resource allocation. If (and it is a big if) the IVF was being provided via public funding then it might be considered more objectionable &#8211; since other things could be done with that money than give someone a baby, such as save lives and so on. However even this argument doesn&#8217;t clearly cut against Elderly Mothers, since arguably it would apply to all cases of publicly funded assisted reproduction rather than just those cases.<!--TrendMD v2.4.8--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By David Hunter Daniel Sokol has written this thoughtful piece about the yuck factor and Elderly Mums conceiving children late in life via IVF. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2010\/01\/27\/the-ethics-of-elderly-mums-in-the-news\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[511],"tags":[1550,1551],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news","tag-ivf","tag-resource-allocation"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The ethics of Elderly Mums in the News - Journal of Medical Ethics blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2010\/01\/27\/the-ethics-of-elderly-mums-in-the-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The ethics of Elderly Mums in the News - Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By David Hunter Daniel Sokol has written this thoughtful piece about the yuck factor and Elderly Mums conceiving children late in life via IVF. 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