“IVF does not heal”
December 15, 2010
“. . . nor does it serve the greater good of children and families around the world.”
Catholic theologian and adoptive father Tim Muldoon explains why the Nobel Prize awarded to the developer of IVF technology represents a turning away from the plight of the world’s abandoned children.
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I am very ambivalent about IVF and could be easily persuaded to oppose it altogether (I think). However, I disagree with this line of reasoning:
Most therapy does not deal with pathologies at the root of a medical problem. And the exact causes of many medical conditions are unknown, nor frequently is it known exactly how and why drugs to treat these conditions work.
I think I would be hard hearted enough to say that insurance should not pay for IVF, but not because I don’t think infertility is a medical condition. Pregnancy is not a medical condition, and I would hope all insurance would pay for prenatal care, delivery, and so on. IVF (aside from any ethical problems it may involve) is expensive, not particularly successful, and unnecessary. I am sympathetic to people who want to have their own children, but I would rather have the limited resources available through insurance pay for something else.
Personal ethics aside, though, Muldoon presents — convincingly for my money — the idea that IVF is also unethical from a communitarian standpoint. My family is in the process of an adoption right now, and while, as faithful Catholics, we would never have considered IVF, we also believe that through our adoption we are striving to fulfill one of the works of mercy, that of welcoming the stranger.
There was a discussion of the Muldoon piece over on First Things (The Anchoress) and I liked this comment from “Adoptive Dad”:
Have you stumbled upon Vox Nova by accident? Do they know you are presenting such orthodox ideas here, free of nuance or that highly prized “Cathy Kaveny type heterodox thoughtfulness”?
I haven’t been censored yet. :)
Hah!
It’s why there are so few comments. ;)
I’m quite boring, actually.
Believe it or not, Austin, we sought her out. All your favorite VN contributors thought she was just what we needed here. ;)
I’m following some of the Muldoon links. Seems like an interesting guy. I liked this piece on the condom fiasco:
http://experts.patheos.com/expert/timmuldoon/2010/11/24/conservative-catholic-condoms/
Hard to believe he gets no comments for a piece like this.
Wow!
“Who, in their right mind, enters into an arrangement with a car dealer who promises that, ‘if you plunk down $20K, there is a 20% chance you’ll drive off the lot with the car of your dreams’?”
So we opted to to adopt.”
What a great job of assigning a $ value to children.
Regarding, “I would rather have the limited resources available through insurance pay for something else.”
There are many folks in the world who feel this way toward providing care to people with what most would consider serious disabilities: CP, alzheimers, dimentia, etc.
Why expend resources on people who cannot contribute to society?
This can be expanded to other sets of money as well– money for education, social services, etc.
It is a slippery slope.
From an adoptive mom who is also an Economist.
There are many folks in the world who feel this way toward providing care to people with what most would consider serious disabilities: CP, alzheimers, dimentia, etc.
Calamity4e,
I see your point about assigning monetary value to children, but I also see no way of escaping hard decisions about what insurance should and should not pay for. Are you saying insurance should pay for IVF?
Should insurance pay for everything possible that can be tried to extend by a week or two weeks the life of a terminally ill patient? (It is my understanding that a great deal of end-of-life care is not merely expensive, but futile.)
I strongly disagree that making difficult choices about what insurance should and should not pay for is a “slippery slope” if by that you mean insurance should just pay for every medical expense. Surely, as an economist, you cannot mean that.
What a great job of assigning a $ value to children.
Calamity4e,
After thinking further on what you said here, I find that it doesn’t really make sense to me. Of course, I agree that you can’t put a dollar value on children, but you certainly can (if you have no moral objections to IVF) still say that $20,000 treatments that have only a 20% chance of success are too expensive. It seems to me if that is illegitimately putting a dollar value on children, then you also couldn’t say that $1 million treatments that had only a %1 percent chance of succeeding were too expensive. If insurance were expected to pay extravagant sums so that infertile couples could have a finite but small chance to conceive, insurance companies would all go out of business.
The comment implies you can either pay $20K for IVF treatments or you can pay the same amount to adopt– many people – maybe not you, certainly not me– do interpret this as buying a child. Really bad wording and people who choose to parent through adoption, IMO, really need to be more carefule about their word choice when having these types of discussions.
Regarding how insurance is spent on health care, there are many states where it is illegal to remove a person from life support even if that is what is keeping them alive.
I am not Roman Catholic, so maybe I am confused on this issue, but it had been my understanding that the Roman Catholic church was against removing people from life support systems– regardless of the cost– regardless of quality of life, etc.
Also, all the insurance companies that I know of will only cover 5 IVF treatments– it is limited.
Actually, IVF is partly immoral because it assigns a scientific control to human reproduction *at all.* So the money part is just inevitable. The intrinsic processes of the moral way of conceiving children are free, given to us by God (free gifts! God is awesome!).
IVF makes children a material commodity that men (seemingly) provide. Sick.