Kinship ties: a new world

With the new age of technology comes a new world of reproductive issues.  It is now common practice to use artificialm insemination, intro vitro fertilization, embryo adoption, and surrogate mothers.  Infertile families now have the options of many different ways to have children, depending on who is infertile, and how much money they have in the bank.  If the husband is sterile but the woman fully capable of conceiving, then fine!  We have sperm for you.  If the woman is sterile but capable of bearing a child, and the husband is fine, then great!  We have an egg for you.  If both parties are sterile and the woman able to carry, then fine!  We have a petri dish, egg, and sperm.  Woman unable to carry? It's all right!  Here's your surrogate mother.

 However, with these new means of reproduction come very troublesome issues as far as kinship is concerned.  Who is considered the mother in the situation of surrogacy?  The surrogate mother, or the woman who donated the egg?  Who is the father?  The man married to the woman bearing the child, or the man who donated the sperm? 

 These questions are particularly sticky when Judaism is involved, as Jewishness is passed on via the mother.  If a non-Jewish woman were to donate an egg to a Jewish woman, would the child be Jewish?  If a Jewish woman receives donor sperm while married, has she committed adultery?  If a married man donates his sperm, is he considered adulterous?  These questions are still actively and heatedly argued amongst the Jewish faction, and there has yet to be even ground.  The closest they've come to answers is to ask your own personal Rabbi.

 Ironically, Israel offers free fertility consultation and practices to all women.  This is mostly because it is more frowned upon to be a child-less mother than a single parent.  For this particular reason, Israel runs farther ahead than most countries as far as fertility research is concerned.

 Furthermore, there is a dawn of cloning.  With cloning there comes even more ethical debates, especially where humans are concerned.  In 2003, South Korea officially announced the cloning of humans for medical purposes.  Once the embryos were created, they were reportedly detroyed.  Whether or not they would have been carried to term is widely speculated, and it is unclear if other countries have unofficially followed suit.  While America prohibited the use of government funds to condone human cloning in 2004, it is not obligatory for other countries across the world to follow the USA's lead.  Also, there is a loophole where America is concerned: most fertility clinics are privatized, making it perfectly fine for them to pursue the idea of human cloning, so long as no government funds are involved.

 Have humans been cloned?  Technically, yes.  Have cloned humans been carried to full term and birthed?  If they have, it has been a hush-hush occurance.

 Finally, it is becoming practice to actively select certain genes in one's child.  A recent case involves a chlid that has been carefully selected so as to meet bone marrow requirements necessary for his older sister to survive--she suffers from a rare and dillapitating bone disease.  This brings up even more ethical questions: is it moral to choose children for the sole use of harvesting useful cells once they are old enough?  In this case, the cells will be harvested from the umbilical cord.  To uncomplicate things in the future, there is  loose rule of thumb: people cannot choose a child's genes solely to serve an older sibling.  However, as with human cloning, there are ways to get around such an obstacle.

 Technology has hit an awkward stage as far as reproductivity goes.  With the dawn of artificial insemination comes a series of difficult questions.  Only time will tell as to how society will collectively answer them.

 Many instances of reproductive technology have been left out in order to shorten the essay; there are also cases where children do not actually have a mother or father, as the genes are solely of one or the other (in instances of lesbian couples: harvesting an embtyo fertilized by a man, then removing the nucleus and inserting the nucleus of the other woman's).  Kinship ties are being undone and are now flapping in the wind.  It's a truly strange point in history.