{"id":2796,"date":"2014-07-25T09:23:44","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T08:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=2796"},"modified":"2014-07-25T09:23:44","modified_gmt":"2014-07-25T08:23:44","slug":"arts-in-a-warming-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2014\/07\/25\/arts-in-a-warming-world\/","title":{"rendered":"ARTs in a Warming World"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are some people who disagree, but we can take some things as read: there is such a thing as global climate change, it is at least substantially anthropogenic, and there are moral reasons to try to minimise it.<\/p>\n

With that in mind, how should we think about reproductive technologies?\u00a0 These are techniques whose intent is to create humans, and \u2013 presumably \u2013 those humans will have an environmental impact.\u00a0 This is a question that Christina Richie confronts in her paper in the JME<\/em><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span>:<\/p>\n

The use of ART to produce more human-consumers in a time of climate change needs to be addressed.\u00a0 Policymakers should ask carbon-emitting countries to change their habits to align with conservation.\u00a0 And though all areas of life \u2013 from transportation, to food, to planned technological obsolescence \u2013 must be analysed for ecological impact, the offerings of the medical industry, especially reproductive technologies, must be considered as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of her suggestions is of carbon-capping for the fertility industry; she\u2019s more reluctant to suggest a moratorium on the use of ARTs.\u00a0 But she does suggest thinking quite seriously about who should get access to fertility treatment.\u00a0 After all, she points out, fertility treatment is unlike other medical treatments in a number of ways.\u00a0 Not the least of these is that someone whose life is saved by medicine will go on to have a carbon footprint bigger than it might have been \u2013 but that\u2019s not the intention.\u00a0 The whole point of fertility treatment is to create new humans, though \u2013 and therefore the treatment has not just a footprint, but a long-lasting carbon legacy.<\/p>\n

I wonder, actually, whether the argument could be radicalised.\u00a0 Tacit in a lot of it is that there is a right to reproduce \u2013 that the starting point is that at least some ARTs ought to be available and provided.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure whether that\u2019s a given \u2013 it might be that there\u2019s a duty to adopt<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span>, for example, that means that even those who want kids ought to look at other ways of having them.\u00a0 (Adopted children would be almost as closely related genetically as non-adopted ones, so \u2013 as I\u2019ve argued here before<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span> \u2013 I don\u2019t think that the genetic relatedness argument carries much weight.)<\/p>\n

Doubtless, there\u2019ll be some who accuse this kind of argument of Malthusianism (although whenever I\u2019ve seen that argument bandied about, an explanation of why that is a bad thing in principle is less forthcoming).\u00a0 I don\u2019t have any particular objection to that label, though neither do I think it has to be seen in those terms.\u00a0 After all, as Richie points out, most ARTs are used in countries with low birthrates \u2013 so the overall impact on population is likely to be low.<\/p>\n

That, in a way, is beside the point.\u00a0 If an action can be shown to be morally problematic, the fact that the consequences will not be widespread may be a mitigation on certain accounts.\u00a0 But even a little of a bad thing is still a bad thing.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the crunch, it seems to me that while reproduction may be a good, it is not the only good at which persons or policies may or should aim; and there are times when two goods conflict.\u00a0 Neither is it too strange to suggest that there are times when a person should abandon one good because of the greater moral gravity of some other, greater, good.\u00a0 It\u2019s possible that reproduction is one of those goods.<\/p>\n

What goes for artificial reproductive technologies would go, in principle, to natural ones, too.\u00a0 But they\u2019re much harder to regulate.\u00a0 In that sense, the argument is analogous to that surrounding procreative beneficence: even if you think that there\u2019s a duty to have the best possible child where making a choice is feasible, that won\u2019t tell us much about real life reproduction, which is going to be almost irreducibly haphazard \u2013 at least, it won\u2019t without a lot more philosophical heavy lifting.<\/p>\n

But, really, this kind of question can be put to one side, because I think that there are some important things that Richie touches simply in having written the paper.\u00a0 One of these is her use of the term \u201cindustry\u201d in relation to ART providers.\u00a0 I guess that, in Europe, we\u2019re not used to thinking of ARTs in those terms \u2013 we treat them as social goods.\u00a0 But thinking about them as an industry \u2013 something that has certain inputs, and certain outputs \u2013 does seem like a reasonable move.\u00a0 And, following from that, there\u2019s a general point about the kind of moral question to which ARTs are amenable.\u00a0 There\u2019s lots of ink spilled over who should have access to infertility treatment, for sure \u2013 but there is a good deal less time devoted to the question of whether facilitating reproduction is always a good thing to begin with.\u00a0 It might turn out that it is \u2013 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 But the fact that there isn\u2019t all that much attention given to the question of where ARTs fit in a more holistic account of what policy should be does seem important.\u00a0 We\u2019d ask it in relation to other industries \u2013 if I wanted to frack for shale gas under Manchester, there\u2019d be questions about sustainability, and about whether we should be looking for more and cheaper hydrocarbons given what we know about the environment.\u00a0 So why not ask analogous questions about reproduction, its environmental impact, and its legacy to the future?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are some people who disagree, but we can take some things as read: there is such a thing as global climate change, it is at least substantially anthropogenic, and there are moral reasons to try to minimise it. With that in mind, how should we think about reproductive technologies?\u00a0 These are techniques whose intent […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443,475,2022,472],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jme","category-politics","category-reproduction","category-thinking-aloud"],"yoast_head":"\nARTs in a Warming World - 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\/2014\/07\/25\/arts-in-a-warming-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"ARTs in a Warming World - Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There are some people who disagree, but we can take some things as read: there is such a thing as global climate change, it is at least substantially anthropogenic, and there are moral reasons to try to minimise it. 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