A CASE AGAINST ASSISTED REPRODUCTION

The two largest growth areas in American medicine are assisted reproduction and cosmetic medicine (it's not just surgery any more.) Why? Mainly because, unlike most other areas of medicine, these are things that people want, rather than things they need. Purveying goods and services that people need is not good business, because many of the people who need them can't afford to pay and will nonetheless purchase them and then default on the payments. But dealing in things people want is usually very good business, because only the people who can afford the things they want will buy them. (Which is why advertisers are cutting their own throat by trying to convince consumers that they need the things their parents merely wanted. But I digress.)

I'm not going to talk about cosmetic medicine here. But I do want to talk about assisted reproduction. And it's a difficult thing to talk about, because many really nice people I know personally have used it to produce some really great kids. Nonetheless, I think it is essentially a bad idea. Not for the reasons most right-to-lifers oppose it--that the process creates and discards more fetuses than it allows to develop into babies--because my religious tradition teaches that a fetus isn't a person until it's born.

But, in the first place, the human race is doing a perfectly fine job of reproducing itself the old-fashioned way. We not only have enough people, we have too many people, in terms of environmental impact. And the people who are using assisted reproduction, generally speaking, are those with the most serious impact on the environment--affluent people from industrial countries.

In the second place, many of the people already crowding this world are children in need of parents. If the people best able to help care for these children are forming their families from petri dishes instead of orphanages, isn't that an injustice to the orphans?

And in the third place, I believe the impetus behind the popularity of assisted reproduction is a distorted idea of family, a kind of idolatry of one's own DNA. Sure, my genes are probably pretty interesting, and my ancestors were cool people, mostly. But are my genes me? Are they the substance of my humanity, the most important thing I can pass on to the next generation? Not hardly. What I can pass on to the next generation is my deepest beliefs and my most decent impulses. None of that came with my DNA. It came from the way my parents raised me, the examples they set for me, and the innumerable other good people whose paths have crossed mine during my lifetime. The people I know whose families have been formed by assisted reproduction are raising some pretty neat kids. So are the people I know who have adopted children. That's because, in both instances, they are pretty neat parents.

The process of adoption is probably more difficult than it needs to be, and not always very well thought out. That is not an argument for avoiding it. It is an argument for cleaning it up, and making it accessible to people who couldn't possibly afford assisted reproduction and who can't afford adoption either at its current price. What makes us smug First-Worlders think our DNA is better than the DNA of the world's orphans, here and elsewhere? Matching up parents in search of children and children in need of parents is a holy task. What makes us think we are superior to it?

WESTERN CIVILIZATION STILL SAFE

Forget what I said in previous post. We are once again getting one or two credit applications (mostly "pre-approved") every postal business day. Think about that--roughly 450 of these things a year. No doubt there are people out there getting lots more. What would happen, I wonder, if everybody stamped them "Refused--return to sender" and sent them back? Could we bankrupt anybody that way?

Other personal musings--my new Palm Pilot is finally up and running with most of the stuff I need on it. I would have kept the old one, but its software wouldn't run on our new computer, so I had no choice but to get rid of it. Controlled obsolescence strikes again. Also we are throwing out huge quantities of VHS tapes to make room for our DVDs. All of this is part of a grand project to get the house cleaned up before Passover. Wish me luck.

LATEST UPDATES

Yesterday was a momentous occasion. It was the first business day in roughly six months when our daily mail did not include at least one invitation to apply for a credit card (usually two, sometimes three, most of them "pre-approved.") Getting all those applications gave me the creeps, but suddenly not getting them makes me a little nervous too. Does it mean the business mavens are finally catching on that even serious debt addicts are about to go cold turkey? Does it mean the corporate bigwigs are finally noticing that they are the only people whose income isn't going down?

I mean, our local Sunday paper has, for at least the last couple of years, included a real estate section the size of the city phone book, and a jobs section the approximate thickness of a wedding invitation. Am I the only one wondering who buys all that real estate?

Is The Almighty Economy, like Wile E. Coyote, finally looking down to notice that it has run off the edge of the cliff and is poised above empty air?