Eight Lives + Six More

[AiA in Atlanta]

During the PA abortion narration I wondered how Octomom fit into our discussion. Certainly you have heard of the crazy woman whose life with 8 newborn infants plus the 6 back home in a house under foreclosure and no income is unfolding on Oprah and Dr.Phil and various other tabloid outlets. We now know this woman did it for the money and attention (a porn studio has just offered her $1,000,000 to star in a movie.).

Those babies should not have been born. The California Medical Board is investigating a violation by her physician. Lets suppose that just after the embryos had been transferred this shady physician's actions had come to light. Should there have been an abortion of at least some of the embryos?

[Rainbow Moonlight]

Absolutely not.

[mantra.]

Those babies should not have been born. The California Medical Board is investigating a violation by her physician. Lets suppose that just after the embryos had been transferred this shady physician's actions had come to light. Should there have been an abortion of at least some of the embryos?

It couldn't have been done safely without losing the lot of them and morally no - because she chose the pregnancy.

She's using the old pro-life argument justifying the number of eggs implanted claiming the frozen embryos were life and would have been discarded if they hadn't been used. Is a frozen embryo considered life?

This woman is an idiot though. She's on her own and tricked the alleged father into donating sperm. The physician definitely should be investigated. She had proved her fertility earlier and it would have been unnecessary to implant 8 embryos instead of the usual 2 or 3. With IVF you often hear of multiple births as usually 2 or 3 are used to ensure at least one survives - but rarely, if ever, do you hear of 8 being used and all of them surviving. There is an ethical code I believe where only several embryos are the maximum ever used at one time.

From what I gather she has no income and regardless of this, how could a single person manage physically and emotionally to raise 8 babies, not counting the other 6, and give them some quality of life?

Maybe it is a stunt to make money - although she's full of ultruistic reasons as to why she needs a large family, but she's definitely going to need the extra income. Now the father has come forward full of indignation it will be interesting to see if he will be forced to pay child support for 14 children.

[JW Frogen]

. Is a frozen embryo considered life?

Yup.

The question is morally right to kill it for the perceived greater good?

The need to define it away from life reveals a lack of conviction in the act of killing.

[mantra.]

How is a frozen embryo life if it's frozen? If you were locked in a freezer for a few days, months, years - would you be considered alive?

[JW Frogen]

How is a frozen embryo life if it's frozen? If you were locked in a freezer for a few days, months, years - would you be considered alive?

It is a conceived life, if humans ever have suspended life for say space travel and ran into problems on the journey killing those lives would still be killing.

The life exists, the need to argue that basic biological premise away reveals a lack of courage and conviction for the decision to kill.

[mantra.]

It is a conceived life, if humans ever have suspended life for say space travel and ran into problems on the journey killing those lives would still be killing.

That's hypothetical Frogen. What you are talking about is a perceived life - so it is not a life until that embryo is implanted in a womb and is accepted.

[JW Frogen]

It is a conceived life, there is simply no way around that.

To say that it is not a life until it has been accepted by a womb could be used in reverse for perverse reasons, one could then say premi babies are not really lives because they have been rejected by a womb.

Once one starts making arbitrary and political decisions about when life begins rather than the only biological time it does begin, conception, they open a pandoras box.

Now I have little problem killing such life before it goes to the womb, but I am not prepared to argue away the definition and dignity of life simply to make killing easy.

Killing should not be too easy.

[boxy]

It doesn't make it a life that holds the sanctity that we endow "human life" with though. Just as killing an human (child or adult) is a "bigger deal" than stepping on an ant, so it is with a few cells in an icebox... hell, even more so.

[JW Frogen]

That is your personal, political and cultural desicion not to hold such in any regard.

Many other religions and cultures would disagree revealing the danger of defining it away as a life altogether. For instance Christianity, Judaism and Islam all hold human life even at the early stages in higher regard than ants or other forms of life.

Buddists would disagree.

If there is going to be a meaningful debate about when to kill life the principal it is a life must be upheld.