Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 3, 1991 TAG: 9103030157
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES HITE MEDICAL WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"We all have to be leery of control over these decisions being taken away from the people immediately involved," Janet Gallagher, a New York lawyer specializing in reproductive rights, told a conference at Hollins College.
Too much attention has been focused on the rights of embryos, while women have been viewed as objects, Gallagher said. "Women in many ways are talked about simply as uterine environments," she told a symposium on reproductive technology and ethics.
A "media fixation" with problems encountered in disputes about the fate of embryos has led to a lack of focus on the problems of the adults who are involved in the creation of the embryo, Gallagher added.
Some legislatures, for instance, "have taken it upon themselves to determine fitness for parenthood" by adopting guidelines for couples that can have a child through a surrogate mother, she said. "Yet we let 11-year-olds go out and get pregnant," she said. "What do we think we are doing?"
The surrogate mother needs to be protected from regulations that would erode her rights to make final decisions about her pregnancy, including decisions to have a Caesarean section or an abortion, Gallagher said.
Another troublesome tendency at overregulation, Gallagher added, was an attempt in the past session of the Virginia legislature to exempt religious organizations from a bill requiring health insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization, the process of creating an embryo in the test tube and then implanting it in the mother's womb.
Such a restriction would have eroded the reproductive choices for the employees of religious organizations, Gallagher said. The bill died in committee.
Society must have the courage to recognize that traditional roles in families are changing, Gallagher said. New reproductive technologies are disturbing to many because they challenge traditional notions of what families are, she added.
Terms like "genetic parents," "surrogate mother" and "donor father and mother" are inadequate to describe how family relationships have evolved, Gallagher suggested.
A recent New York case involving a lesbian couple that had a child through artificial insemination is an example, she said. Several years after the child was born, the couple separated. The judge denied visitation rights to the woman who was not the mother, calling her a "genetic stranger."
"That seems out of sync with our contemporary view of family," Gallagher said. "This is an era in which children are being raised in many sorts of families."
Before society adds more rules and regulations governing parenthood, she said, it should learn to live with the "ambiguity" of current relationships until ethical and moral conflicts can be sorted out.
by CNB