5.20.2005

Salon: don't worry your pretty little heads

Salon has a lame article entitled the future of reproductive sex. The author takes the usual inexplicable "head in the sand" position that successfully using these techniques will be very difficult if not impossible, few people would use it if it ever was possible, it will probably not replace regular sex if people did want to use it, so therefore, there is no need to worry about it. Go back to drinking your beer, everyone. Huh? That would mean that the only case the author feels we should have reason to worry is if it were so safe and successful that everyone used it and it replaced sex!! He doesn't say where the downside is in banning it right now, he just says we are so far away that all we should do today is have fun getting drunk and laughing about it. What overseer arrogance! How much more ostrich-head-in-the-sand can you get?

Meanwhile, the research goes on, and, more tragically, people are allowed to believe that they might be able to have a child someday with a person of their same sex. That is a very cruel and anti-social thing to allow anyone to believe, given the liklihood that it will never happen. People should know with absolute certainty that the only way they will ever reproduce is with the cooperation and equal participation of a person of the other sex, so they had better learn how to get along with people of that sex now, since they'll be their child's other parent.

The discussion of artificial eggs and sperm illustrates that the PCBE's proposed language needs to be changed to "a man's sperm and a woman's egg". A child created with an "egg" artificially created from a man's DNA might have the same imprinting problems that plagued Kaguya's siblings, and so that would have to be ruled out completely. Creating children needs to be limited to couples that could naturally do so. This is the Enough point, and we are there already.