Like mother, like daughter, like daughter-sister?
by Jared Bridges
April 20, 2007
A story from Canada could give new meaning to sibling rivalry:
MONTREAL – In what is considered a world first, Melanie Boivin has donated her eggs to her daughter who is sterile because of a genetic condition called Turner’s syndrome.
The Montreal lawyer’s eggs are to be frozen until her seven-year-old daughter, Flavie, becomes of age to bear a child through in-vitro fertilization.
If she chooses to become pregnant, Flavie will be giving birth to her genetic sister and Boivin will simultaneously become mother and grandmother.
The possible outcomes from this scenario boggle the mind. Would this make Flavie’s spouse (assuming he consented to fathering a child with his mother-in-law’s eggs) a stepfather-husband to Flavie? Would he be progenitor to his own sister-in-law? Would the child have a brother-in-law-father, a sister-mother, and a mother-grandma? My head hurts just from thinking about all the possible permutations.
What’s equally bizarre is the apathy some ethicists have toward the matter. University of Toronto philosophy professor and “moral scholar” Wayne Sumner argues:
When it comes to donor gametes, it is “irrelevant” who donates the eggs, Sumner said.
“I don’t see it as all that significant – the scrambling of generations .I don’t have concerns about whether it’s natural or normal.
“It’s a little odd for (Boivin), who will have both a child and a grandchild simultaneously, but people wrap their heads around these things.”
Just a little odd? Consider my head unwrapped.
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Comments
I dont see any problem either. Genetically, the daught is uninvolved, so there is no inbreeding problem. Legally, the paperwork is exactly the same as for any other egg donation – a frequent enough occurance that all the procedures are in place – and makes the offspring the legal child of Flavie’s spouse.
The family tree might look a little twisted if you try to look in both genetic and legal terms at once, as they dont match up any more – but if you only consider one or the other, its perfectly clear.
That this bizarre, Aeschylean tangle of a scenario raises so little general concern rather boggles me. People are understandably reticent, I think, to impose standards that would force someone to have to “apologize” for their existence and so are reluctant to cast a prospective stone at the potential human being that might arise from this scenario. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t contemplate the rather tormented, claustrophobic confusion of relations this situation would impose upon such a child. Are we really so absentmindedly blase about the state of reproductive technology that we’re ready to dismiss any stable, unitary conception of “parenthood” as an arbitrary, outmoded social construct? If a prosperous couple wishes to hire a woman to perform the service of carrying their fertilized egg (obtained, mind you, by who knows what additional complications!) to term, then they should be unambiguously accepted as the “parents” and the childbearer should hussle away. On the other hand, in this potential situation, we are assured, the childbearing woman should feel confident that she is the “real” mother, with all assurances that her own mother (the genetic mother!) and the child will merrily comply! It seems to me that, amidst all this arbitrary redefining, we forget that this potential child (as well as the actual girl today, who certainly has to live with the reality of her mother’s “donation”– oh, can we hear the “when are you gonna make me a grandmother?” conversations of 20-years to come?!) may find our conceptions utterly alien and unnatural. And let’s be unsentimentally honest– we’d be horrified to find ourselves in Flavie’s, or her potential sister-child’s, place too.
By: John | April 20, 2007 at 7:00 pm
I can’t see any ethical dilemma here at all. If a child is born to Flavie, Flavie is the mother, her spouse is the father and Melanie is the grandmother.
Where her eggs came from is irrelevant.