Bottle babies. (Society).(ethical questions concerning artificial human reproduction)

Honour your father and mother That your life may be long in the land.

IF A MARRIED COUPLE adopt an orphan baby and rear it with care and kindness do they deserve to be honoured? Yes indeed--usually. But not always. For suppose the natural parents were political dissidents living in a dictatorship and suppose those parents were tortured to death by a henchman of the dictator and suppose the torturer and his wife adopted the dead dissidents' child. What will, what should, that child feel when it discovers the truth? Surely not gratitude, surely not respect.

Suppose someone has been created either as the result of artificial insemination by donor (AID) or from the in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) of eggs taken from a woman other than the one into whose womb the eggs are inserted. (Let's call people created in those ways "bottle babies" for short.) What will a grown-up bottle baby feel, what should it feel, when it discovers the truth? Are respect and gratitude in order or not?

Grown-up bottle babies might feel upset to discover that their lives began with bodily matter taken from strangers. People like to know about their ancestry, they like to know who they belong to. Bottle babies cannot know their origins because the identities of donors are kept secret; hence such babies find it hard to discover whether or not they have any inherited tendencies to mental or physical disease.

But perhaps it would be unreasonable for them to feel upset. After all, most of us are glad to be alive. We might think of life as a gift and it's good to feel grateful to those who give gifts. Against that it can be argued that the sentence "life is a gift" is a metaphor. You can't literally give a gift to someone who doesn't exist.

It makes sense to be grateful to your natural parents if they cared for you when you were small and helpless. The same goes for adoptive parents unless, for example, they harmed the real ones.

If you are truly grateful you will care for your parents as they grow old and helpless. In doing that you will incidentally provide a role model for your own children--which could mean that "your life will be long in the land".