Last night I went out to dinner with the LTR and her best friend. Best friend is a nice gal though I can’t say I’m impressed with her thought processes or the choices she’s made in her life. We obviously don’t see the world in the same way. She’s approaching mid-30’s and hit the wall long before I knew her. Several topics of conversation came up and ranged over a lot of territory. It was a ‘choose your battles wisely’ kind of night where I mostly sat back and marveled at the tapestry of her moral and ethical framework. Like many things, consistency is not necessarily a requirement.
On the way to dinner, the LTR asked about one of best friend’s family members. This relation had found a nice guy and married him around the age of 30. A month after her wedding she found out she had breast cancer of the fast growing kind. One double mastectomy and massive amounts of kemo later and she appears to be out of the woods. The kemo, of course, has left her barren. Prior to all that the relation had harvested eggs, had them inseminated in a petri dish, and then frozen after several cell divisions. Life in stasis waiting to be implanted at some future date…or sent to some lab to be harvested for stem cells.
Later in the evening the topic of the Duggars came up. LTR’s Best Friend tells me that having that many children is immoral and bad for the environment. She tells me that following the bible and having a quiverful of children just doesn’t make sense. Mind you best friend is very religious when it suits her, goes to church every week, and belongs to a mainline protestant faith. I pointed out that the Duggars and people like them are out reproducing everyone else and their values and communities may well end up taking over. She told me that people like them just need to be educated about sustainability (Whatever the fuck that means. Ever try asking people for a definition of sustainability? Try it, it’s enlightening).
So. I was left contemplating the following. It’s moral and ethical to create a couple dozen embryos with the intention of only giving birth to one or two of them and destroying the rest, but it’s not moral and ethical to naturally give birth to a dozen and a half plus children. What’s more it’s also moral and ethical to reeducate people who have too many children.
