MercatorNet: Are babies prizes or gifts?.
Margaret Somerville commented on a contest at an Ottawa, Canada radio station, HOT 89.9. They offered as a prize, up to three fertility treatments. Numerous couples submitted short statements explaining why they should be most eligible for such assistance. In the end, the field was narrowed to five contestants, and all of them “won” the treatments.
People of various views on the life issues are troubled by the contest.
Pharmer, as usual, gets down to the nitty gritty:
The main problem is not the contest itself, but the fertility treatments, which (depending on the type) frequently have in their design the idea that babies are objects. You see…… there is selective reduction. The parents are convinced (by the docs) to knock off some of the babies if there are multiples, to increase the survivability of the remaining one or two.
The type of fertility treatments is not specified, so it could include some procedures which inherently involve killing human embryos.
What most people are saying “yuck” to is not the killing that so often accompanies the fertility treatments, but the exhibitionism. These five couples may be putting that killing on display, since they agreed to shed the privacy which usually surrounds the treatments.
Note that the socialized medicine system of Ottawa is apparently not covering the treatment of the disease of infertility. That apparently has to be won in a contest.
