Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The Right to Discriminate

In no insdustry in the United Kingdom are you allowed to say, "Find me a boss with a penis, i refuse to be supervised by a woman," except one: the Church of England.

The C of E began ordaining women as priests in 1994. Now the debate is women bishops. If a male priest excels at his job and serves the church well, he is made a bishop. Now that there are women priests, surely there will be women bishops, too. Right? Not so much.

You see, if a woman is a priest, she is only in a position of authority over parishners, and they don't count. But if she is a bishop, she has authority over other clergy. Male clergy. Ooooh, scary.

The church is already operating under an exception to national anti-discrimination laws, otherwise they wouldn't have a choice in the matter of whether to make women bishops or not. This situation brings to light 2 compelling questions on discrimination:

1. Should any organization, even a church, be exempt from national anti-discrimination laws?
2. Should individuals within that organization be allowed to refuse to work for someone on the basis of that person's gender?


Also, the debate on reproduction still rages below. Feel free to continue to comment on older posts.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Responsibilty

So far it seems that we all agree that Guppy-Woman is behaving incredibly irresponsibly. That's no surprise. Let me re-phrase my original question:

Do people have a personal right to behave irresponsibly when it comes to reproduction?
If not, what kind of system do we implement to enforce responsible reproduction?

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Questions of Reproductive Rights

You may have read lately about the woman in Las Angeles who just gave birth to octuplets. This raises some interesting ethical questions about reproductive rights. A few facts:

1. The woman, aged 33, already had 6 children
2. Yet she sought invitro fertilization in order to conceive again
3. She is unmarried and does not live with the father of any of her children
4. She and her (now 14 in total) children live in a 3 bedroom house, along with her parents. (Yes, that's 17 people in a 3 bedroom house.)
5. Her father is employed as a contractor in Iraq (and as such is not around much to lend a hand with child-rearing)
6. Despite her father's income, the family filed for bankruptcy last year
7. When told she was carrying 7 children (they didn't find the 8th until the cesarian) and informed of the extreme risks, she was encouraged to reduce the number the foetuses to give the remainder the best possible chance of survival. She refused.

A lot of people are discussing the ethics of implanting multiple embryos in a woman trying to conceive because of the high risk of multiple births, which exponentially increases the risk of various medical complications to both the foetuses and the mother. These are legitemate questions and well worth exploring, but I'm more interested at this point in the financial ethics involved.

Here is a woman who is already unable to afford the 6 children she's got, as evidenced by the bankruptcy report and the fact that she's still living with her parents in a 3-bedroom home. And yet she has fertility treatment to have more kids. (I'd LOVE to know who paid for that. Herself? Insurance? Medicaid?)

Then there's the hundreds of thousands of dollars of hospital expenses for the delivery (7 surgeons and 7 nurses in the delivery room) and all the neonatal treatment. The babies were delivered 9 weeks early, all with extremely low birthweights. All are still too small to be handled, 7 are at least breathing on their own now. Each baby has 2 nurses assigned to it night and day. They will all remain in the hospital for several more weeks. Did I say hundreds of thousands of dollars? Make that millions.

This woman is not paying the hospital expenses on her own, clearly. Either she's on medicaid (goverment-provided medical care for extremely low-income people), in which case the taxpayers are paying for all this, or she's got insurance, in which case all the other people who also happen to have their insurance with the same company are picking up the tab in the form of their monthly premiums. Regardless, none of them got a say in how many kids this woman has.

Then there's the food stamps she'll almost certainly need to feed them all. Then there's the cost of education, which is likely to be much higher than the national per-student average. Why? Because babies born with such low birthweight have a very high likliehood of having physical and learning developmental difficulties, possibly severe ones.

Ultimately, it comes to this:

Is reproduction an absolute right, to be undertaken by any individual regardless to the cost of society, or if society must help bear the cost of raising the children, does society therefore get some say into how many children are created, and by whom?

If so, who decides these questions, and with what criteria?

On you marks...

get set...

...comment!