The Ethics of Cryonics
Page 18
Another recurring issue seemed to be that of responsibility. Some women thought that, if a pregnant woman cannot take care of her future child, she should make a decision that proves that she is anyway taking responsibility for this foetus, instead of abandoning it to an uncertain future. Pro-choice women thought that instead of relinquishing it to another person, or even worse, to an artificial womb (or a cryonics facility, in our case), she should make sure the foetus does not develop into an actual baby and does not come into existence. So to pro-choice women, responsibility towards an unwanted foetus is best expressed through the choice of having an abortion , since the alternative would be an uncertain future.
Some women who opposed abortion , instead, thought that ectogenesis was not a good option because it would have given women the wrong belief that, by not killing the foetus and by transferring it to an artificial womb, they were not harming it. However, refusing to take on the responsibility of raising the prospective child would be wrong, just like, they said, it would be wrong to have an abortion . To some women, the wrongness of abortion is not explained exclusively by the harm one (supposedly) inflicts on the foetus by killing it, but also by the fact that a woman refuses to take on herself the responsibility of raising her own child. So, to pro-life women, responsibility towards an unwanted foetus is best expressed through the choice of having that child anyway.
Thus, it would seem that the assessment of the morality of abortion (and of alternatives such as ectogenesis and cryonics) does not rely exclusively on the moral permissibility of killing a foetus , but also on disagreements about how women should express their responsibility towards a foetus that, regardless of their intentions and desires, is growing in their womb. To some people, being responsible for the foetus implies interrupting its development through an abortion rather than bringing them into a world under suboptimal circumstances, including by relinquishing them to a machine or to an adoptive family. To some other people, instead, responsibility towards an unwanted foetus is shown through accepting the pregnancy and raising the child without shifting the responsibility towards someone else.
Also in light of this disagreement about the meaning and the implications of responsibility towards the foetus , it seems that cryosuspension of pregnancy would be preferable to both abortion and ectogenesis. The foetus would not be killed, as in the case of abortion , but would not be relinquished to some machine and then to strangers (unless the foetus were reimplanted in the uterus of the adoptive mother), as in the case of ectogenesis. Thus, the pregnant woman would not refuse to take the responsibility of raising the prospective child—she would only postpone this moment. So irrespective of disagreements about what taking responsibility towards a foetus entails, it seems that cryosuspending the foetus would not imply refusing to take such responsibility on.
Limits
I have considered the cases of women choosing to have an abortion because they get pregnant at a time when they are not able to take care of their prospective child, either because they have projects that are not compatible with parenthood or because they are in a suboptimal psychological or economical state. I have argued that, if given the option to pause the pregnancy for months or years, these people would perhaps choose this option. Hence, they would benefit from having the option of postponing the moment when they become parents without having to kill the foetus they are pregnant with. Similarly, women pregnant with foetuses with disabilities could find cryosuspension of pregnancy advantageous because this pause would give science the time to find a therapy or, at least, it would give prospective parents more time to prepare for welcoming a child with special needs.
However, bad timing and disabilities are not the only reasons why people choose to have an abortion . Some people choose to have abortions because they have no desire to become parents at any time during their life. Some people have abortions because they share David Benatar’s view that it is morally impermissible to bring someone into existence (see Chap. 3). Some other people seek an abortion because they do not want to become the parents of that specific child that was conceived with a specific person (e.g. the person who raped them).
In some of these cases, it seems that cryopreservation of the embryos /foetuses could be a good option. Foetuses growing in the womb of women who do not want to have children could be cryopreserved and adopted by people with infertility issues. Couples having problems to conceive could implant these embryos or foetuses (or find a surrogate mother), and fulfil the desire to have a child and to experience a pregnancy. The embryo /foetus would not be destroyed or kept cryopreserved indefinitely, so it would not be deprived of a future life and of the chance of being born in a family that actually wants a child.
However, cryosuspension of pregnancy might not be a good option in some other cases. For instance, if the pregnancy is the result of an abuse, then it is possible that a woman would want to have an abortion in order to eliminate all traces and memories of the violence she was subject to. Even if the woman were reassured that the foetus would not be reimplanted before a very long time, say a century, to make sure that she would be dead by the time the foetus is brought into existence, there is a possibility that the mere existence of such foetus , even though in a cryosuspended state, would make her uncomfortable.
In other cases, a woman could desire to have her embryo /foetus eliminated and not cryopreserved not because the pregnancy is the outcome of an abuse, but because she thinks that bringing someone into existence always equates harming them. In these cases, elimination of the embryo /foetus would be the best option, even better than cryosuspension, other things being equal.
Some people might argue that the interest of some women in having a cryopreserved embryo /foetus donated to them trumps the interest of another woman in not having her embryo /foetus implanted in someone else’s womb against her preference. Therefore, in this view, the availability of cryosuspension would always make abortion impermissible, at least as long as there are women who want to have embryos and foetuses of other women reimplanted into their own womb. This would be similar to arguing that, insofar as there are people wanting to adopt a child, abortion is impermissible. However, this view would be quite difficult to defend, as it would be based on an obligation to give something (be it a kidney, a foetus , or money) or to do something to benefit someone (the adoptive family, or the prospective child) even if it goes against one’s preferences. We might say that it is morally praiseworthy to donate blood, kidneys, bone marrow, money, and unwanted embryos to people who need them, but respect for autonomy requires allowing people to refuse to do something that to them is extremely burdensome or simply wrong. There are people who do not feel distressed about donating their sperm, eggs, or giving up for adoption a child after they have given birth to them, and these people should certainly be encouraged and praised for their generosity. But it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to have identical emotional responses when giving up their own foetus . So even if cryosuspension of pregnancy became an option, just like donation of kidney is an option, nobody should be forced to donate their embryo or foetus to another person if they feel that such a choice would be detrimental, and therefore no one should be prevented from having an abortion if abortion is what they want.
Cases like the ones just discussed show that cryosuspension of pregnancy would not solve the moral disagreements about abortion , but would only be a practical tool to circumvent some conflicts caused by such disagreements. Even if cryosuspension of pregnancy became a real possibility, there would still be disagreements about what right should prevail: the right to decide on whether or not to have a biological child or the right to life of an enbryo/foetus . But to say that ethical disagreements would not be solved does not mean that cryosuspension would not be a very useful tool for both empowering women and avoiding certain moral conflicts.
It seems therefore that, given the alternatives, there are very good reasons for conducting research on the feasibility of such hypothetical technology.
After all, cryonics and indefinite life extension are not available yet, but at some point someone started to think about them before anyone else, and then research started to make cryonics and life extension a real option. Time will tell if cryonics, indefinite life extension, and cryosuspension of pregnancy will ever become available, or if they were just good ideas bound to remain ideas. All the great inventions that make our life much more comfortable than the lives of our ancestors did not appear out of thin air, but are the result of trial and error. We should be grateful to all the people who tried to make the future a more comfortable place, for it is thanks to their successes and failures that progress is achieved.
We cannot predict the outcome of cryonics-related projects, but at least we have reasons to think, or at least I hope I have provided sufficient reasons to think, that they are worth a shot.
References
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Condon, J. T. (1986). Psychological disability in women who relinquish a baby for adoption. The Medical Journal of Australia, 144(3), 117–119. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3945198
Finer, L. B., Frohwirth, L. F., & Dauphinee, L. A. (2005). Reasons US women have abortions: Quantitative and qualitative perspectives. On Sexual and … Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1931-2393.2005.tb00045.x/full
Ford, N. M. (1991). When did I begin?: Conception of the human individual in history, philosophy and science. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from https://market.android.com/details?id=book-VKq7xWqr8g0C
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Marquis, D. (1989). Why abortion is immoral. The Journal of Philosophy, 86(4), 183–202. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11782094
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Partridge, E. A., Davey, M. G., Hornick, M. A., McGovern, P. E., Mejaddam, A. Y., Vrecenak, J. D., … Flake, A. W. (2017). An extra-uterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb. Nature Communications, 8, 15112. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15112
Pavone, M. E., Innes, J., Hirshfeld-Cytron, J., Kazer, R., & Zhang, J. (2011). Comparing thaw survival, implantation and live birth rates from cryopreserved zygotes, embryos and blastocysts. Journal of Human Reproductive Sciences, 4(1), 23–28. https://doi.org/10.4103/0974-1208.82356
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Footnotes
1Some women do not have a womb and would thus not benefit from this; however, many people struggling with infertility would actually be able to carry a pregnancy once they had a healthy embryo/foetus implanted in their uterus. Some people are infertile because of the lack of fertile eggs (usually due to ageing), or poor quality of the sperm. Miscarriages are often explained by congenital defects of the embryo/foetus that is then expelled by the body.
Index 1
A
Abortion
embryo
foetus
voluntary cryosuspension of pregnancy
Amortality, see Immortality
B
Benatar, David
Better never to have been
Brain
neural substrate
neuropreservation
uploading
tumour
C
Consciousness
loss of
mind
neural information
Cryonics providers
Alcor
Cryonics Institute
Kriorus
Cryopreservation
of adults
of brains
of embryos
of euthanized patients
of foetuses
Cryothanasia, see Euthanasia
D
Death
cardiopulmonary standard
information-theoretic criterion
whole-brain standard
Doctrine of double effect (DDE)
E
Embryo cryopreservation (EC)
Ettinger, Robert
The prospect of immortality
Euthanasia
assisted suicide
cryothanasia
F
Fallacy
naturalistic
status quo bias
sunk cost
Fischer, John Martin
Immortality
Immortality and boredom
G
Gard, Charlie
Genetically modified organism (GMO)
Giubilini, Alberto
Abortion and the argument from potential
Euthanasia: what is the genuine problem?
H
Heidegger, Martin
Being and time
I
Immortality
chosen
coerced
indefinite life extension
Intensive care unit (ICU)
In-vitro fertilization (IVF)
K
Kagan, Shelly
Death
Kass, Leon
Why we should ban human cloning now
L
Liquid nitrogen
cryopreservation
M
McMahan, Jeff
Death and the value of life
Metaphysics of brain death , The
May, Todd
Death
Mill, John Stuart
nature
Mitchell-Yellin, Benjamin, see Fischer, John Martin
Moen, Ole Martin
The case for cryonics
N
Nagel, Thomas
Death
O
Organ donation
P
Paralysis
locked-in syndrome
Parfit, Derek
Reasons and persons
R
Rejuvenation
Religion
Catholic Church
God
Heaven
Hell
Playing God
Soul
S
Sandberg, Anders
Cryopreservation of embryos and fetuses as a future option for family planning purposes
Euthanasia and cryothanasia
Scheffler, Samuel
Death and the afterlife
Singer, Peter
In vitro fertilisa
tion : the major issues
Life’s uncertain voyage
V
Virtual reality
W
Williams, Bernard
Makropulos case , The
Problems of the self
Footnotes
1Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.