Читать книгу Bioethics - Группа авторов - Страница 49

Timothy F. Murphy

Researchers have had success in using synthetic gametes – sperm derived from female stem cells and ova derived from male stem cells – to produce live offspring in laboratory animals.¹ The prospects for same‐sex couples to have children using only their gametes has been predicted in some of the earliest reports of success in the development of synthetic gametes, and some researchers have mapped this outcome as meaningfully within the range of possibility.² Even so, considerable work remains to be done before human beings conceived with synthetic gametes could materialise this way,

Gay and lesbian people do already have children, of course, from opposite‐sex relationships, by adoption, through surrogacy arrangements, and – more recently – through various assisted reproductive treatments (ART). As many as six million people in the USA have a gay or lesbian parent.³ Because of shifting social views, it is likely that many more children of gay and lesbian parents are on the way. For example, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine now counsels its members to offer their services without regard to sexual orientation or marital status.⁴ Even so, two men or two women hoping to have children together cannot expect to share genetic parenthood, although certain symbolic gestures toward shared parenthood are available. For example, one woman might offer ova for fertilisation while her partner gestates the children.⁵ Two gay men may blend their sperm prior to insemination when relying on surrogate gestation for a child so that the child’s genetics are a matter of chance rather than choice. By contrast with these practices, the use of synthetic gametes – ova derived from males and sperm derived from females – stands poised to offer same‐sex couples ways to share full genetic parenthood of their children.

Despite the increasing social acceptance of gay men and lesbians around the world, the prospect of parenthood by homosexual men and women raises suspicion and even outright rejection in some quarters, and these objections carry over to bioethics as well. I want to show examples of these objections in a range of bioethics analysis, and show how synthetic gametes would – paradoxically – disarm key elements of these objections. In doing so, I hope to make the case that it is past time to move past the burdens of proof that are reflexively invoked in regard to parenthood by gay men and lesbians whenever a novel method of assisted conception surfaces.