Reproductive technologies

The 'Google baby', Oliver O'Donovan, 14-day-old embryos, and techno-optimism

This week we resumed our conversation about infertility which begun in our previous episode. If you haven’t yet listened to that discussion, which focused on IVF, we’d recommend pausing this and going back to it as we will build on some of the ideas we explored last time. Today, we moved on to consider new ethical issues among other reproductive technologies. This is an area of medicine and science which is developing fast, sometimes faster than ethicists and regulators can keep up. What would it mean if we were able to genetically screen embryos to choose the most desirable traits before pregnancy? Is surrogacy, a growing alternative to IVF, a good option for couples or could it unintentionally become exploitative? And more broadly, should we as Christians be concerned by this rush to find technological solutions to our human frailties?

Listen to other episodes of Matters of Life and Death or find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Podcast Addict, Castbox or whatever app you use to subscribe and receive new episodes sent straight to your device.

Leave a Reply

Tags
Most read posts
What can we learn from how the early church lived out their faith during their own pandemics?
Navigating the transitions of later life
How are young people different to those who came before, and what can we learn from them?
Living faithfully as we approach retirement, dependence, dementia and death
Investing in the next generation - Lessons from John Stott and others
Recent posts
Unpicking why almost everyone has been happy to turn the page on the pandemic
There may be no straightforward way to turn around a struggling health service
Euthanasia tourism takes off in the US amid fresh push to change law in Britain
Innocence and guilt, partial evidence, and living with unknowns
Capacities, calling, relationships - disentangling this foundational theological tenet