Pandora's Baby
Henig, Robin Marantz & Callahan, Daniel
BOOKS Where the slippery slope began Pandora's Baby How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution Robin Marantz Henig Houghton Mifflin, $25, 256 pp. Daniel Callahan 0 f...
...Vande Wiele caught wind of that effort, got the test tube, and poured the mix out...
...The techniques of IVF opened the way technologically for human cloning, embryo and stem-cell research...
...We all want them and when, now and then, someone does not, that is taken as prima facie evidence of derangement...
...Ramsey was probably right, but it is not known just how many bad results, with what damage to fetuses, came about as the result of Edwards and Step-toe's efforts to bring forth Louise Brown...
...What was, through most of the 1970s, a highly controversial line of research, condemned by the pope and many moralists and theolo-gians, and treated with suspicion by physicians and research scientists, now elicits little ethical or scientific interest...
...Even if Kass was right that it was a holy war against nature, it turned out that infertility was treated as an evil that called forth a more important war in the eyes of the public and those thousands of couples unable to have a child other-wise...
...Instead, as too often hap-pens, it was turned into a medical problem and, with IVF, treated as an issue ripe for a high-technology solution...
...Theoretical or empirical research that advances the discourse of Catholic Social Thought...
...Much infertility in recent years can be traced to late procreation, women who bear children in their thirties and for-ties, and to sexually transmitted disease...
...About 56 per-cent of IVF babies are twins or triplets or more because of the American practice of implanting three or more embryos, not typically done in Europe...
...and the number of such couples grows all the time...
...As a historical footnote I would add that, thereafter, a generation of ethicists in the 1960s and 1970s who were ready to be skeptical of new medical technologies gave way to a younger generation, far more prepared to bless rather than condemn radical medical research...
...Robin Marantz Henig tells the story of the emergence and growth of IVF in an interesting and nuanced way, and it is a story well worth telling...
...No such diversity exists with our capacity to see, taste, smell, think, walk, or hear...
...Recommendations on how future documents might advance our understanding of the selected topic...
...Two prominent ethicists, Paul Ramsey and Leon R. Kass (now the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics), harsh critics of the research as it was progressing, lost as well...
...Daniel Callahan 0 f all the human biological capacities, procreation is one of the strangest...
...Analysis of existing documents in Catholic Social Thought that is particularly relevant to the issue...
...The childless will often go to endless trouble and great expense, and put up with a regimen of medicine and self-discipline that can make military boot camp look easy...
...One other point...
...As she accurately puts it, the American IVF effort "reveals what can happen when society faces a new and frightening technology: how it is first greeted with resistance and expectation of the worst, then with grudging permission, then with acceptance, and finally with incorporation so seamlessly into the culture that no one even notices it any more...
...Commonweal 2 3 January 30, 2004...
...Hazards of the Research Imperative (University of California Press...
...Unlike any of the others, some people desperately want to use that capacity to have children and some people no less desperately want to avoid having children...
...Yet some qualifications are in order...
...It worked...
...Ramsey argued that the research was wrong because of the potential medical risk to the fetus and then to the eventual child, while Kass held that the very effort was part of a "new holy war against human nature...
...At most there are now some calls for a reform of fertility clinics, for the most part unregulated, but the fact that it has taken so many years for those calls to arise is it-self testimony to the high place infertility treatment has achieved in modern medicine...
...Infertility, I believe, is best understood as a public-health issue, which would be greatly relieved by dealing with its social causes...
...Yet if couples of that kind can display a striking singlemindedness, it is as nothing compared with the infertile couple desperate to have a child...
...The event was celebrated with a media blitz and considerable public excitement, but the timing was terrible for Vande Wiele, who shortly thereafter lost the case...
...CONFERENCE THEMES: Catholic Social Thought and Racism November 18-19, 2004 Papers must be submitted by August 2, 2004 for consideration...
...Commonweal 2 2 January 30, 2004 CONFERENCES ON CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT Call for Papers Office for Mission Effectiveness Villanova University As part of its commitment to exploring the contemporary relevance of Catholic Social Teaching, the Office for Mission Effectiveness will sponsor a series of conferences and invites interested parties to explore the contribution of Catholic Social Thought on a variety of issues...
...His next skirmish with Shettles was far more dramatic...
...If it could be said that Ramsey and Kass were, in their own way, prophets of a valuable and necessary kind, it is not helpful to those who would later address different issues that they were on the losing side—particularly when the winning side consists of thousands of happy parents and their healthy children who would not otherwise exist...
...Mixing an egg from Doris Del Ziowith the sperm of her husband John in a test tube with some other ingredients, he hoped to create a fertilized egg...
...Papers may be selected for presentation at these conferences and/or be included in a future issue of the Journal of Catholic Social Thought, published by Villanova University...
...In the midst of the trial, word came from England in July 1968 that, as a result of the research of Edwards and Step-toe, Baby Louise Brown had been born...
...A desire not to have children is now common among many married couples and no less so among many cohabiting couples...
...Henig inter-weaves a number of threads in the story she tells, one of them the work of Dr...
...The dean of his department, Dr...
...And a solution it was, but not without some medical costs...
...End of story...
...Daniel Callahan is director of the international program at The Hastings Center, and author of the recently published What Price Better Health...
...Catholic Social Thought and Ecology November 10-11, 2005 Papers must be submitted by June 1, 2005 for consideration...
...Shettles was considered by most of his colleagues at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York an odd duck, given to strange working hours, a taste for publicity, and an in-difference to the niceties of academic medical research...
...While surely not the only means of relieving infertility, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is now probably the most widely, and routinely, used...
...Contributors are encouraged to explore: Themes in Catholic Social Thought which illuminate and inform the causes and consequences of each issue...
...There is indeed a slippery slope, but it is not reassuring to realize that the slope can begin with something that is such a source of joy, a baby of one's own...
...For more information concerning preferred topics and submitting a paper, visit our web site at: www3.villanova.edu/mission/journal/calls/2004.htm As Henig notes, after the 1970s one bioethical commission after another approved embryo research and it was not hard to find ethicists who, after the birth of the cloned sheep Dolly, saw no real harm in the possibility of human cloning...
...Read this book...
...Raymond Vande Wiele, a Catholic, sought first to rein him in be-cause of some books and articles on how to pick the sex of a child-to-be, which he felt displayed poor science...
...The Del Zios then sued him and, in a trial much covered by the press, Doris accused him of pouring their "baby" down the drain...
...Landrum B. Shettles in making the first American attempt at IVF with Doris and John Del Zio, another that of the research efforts of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe in England, and the third the various ethical and regulatory battles that broke out along the way...
...Yet those who want children badly are a dedicated group, ready to do what it takes to succeed and to run the varied medical risks IVF entails...
...Hardly anyone worried about that worry once they had succeeded...
...That is a story we need to think about, and Robin Marantz Henig has told it beautifully...
...Many children born of IVF are of low birth weight and are more likely than other newborns to suffer from a variety of birth defects...
Vol. 131 • January 2004 • No. 2
