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Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

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Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#81

Post by XorNot »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #79
XorNot wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is confusing the practical realities of today with ideal law. The burden of carrying or terminating a pregnancy, bodily and fiscally rests solely on the woman in any scenario. The law can't meaningfully distinguish, or even collect solid evidence, of "consent for reproduction" nor can it handle third party equipment failure (or reasonably prove it was not due to misuse either way). If a man has sex with a woman…

Are we pretending things like vasectomies aren’t a thing? The success rate is generally in the upper-90% so sure it could fail but for the vast majority of people, that is equivalent to “disabling sperm production entirely” The laws also, as have been mentioned already elsewhere in this post, do include such a consent clause. So it’s not really theory either.

Are you ignoring my distinction between hypothetically perfect laws and the laws as written?

And also being just downright stupid about what a vasectomy is and it's reversibility (hint: no medical professional will perform a vasectomy if you are getting one under the impression that it is reliably reversible, particularly after decades).

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#82

Post by mynameisvlad »

XorNot wrote: post #81
mynameisvlad wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we pretending things like vasectomies aren’t a thing? The success rate is generally in the upper-90% so sure it could fail but for the vast majority of people, that is equivalent to “disabling sperm production entirely” The laws also, as have been mentioned already elsewhere in this post, do include such a consent clause. So it’s not really theory either.

Are you ignoring my distinction between hypothetically perfect laws and the laws as written? And also being just downright stupid about what a vasectomy is and it's reversibility (hint: no medical professional will perform a vasectomy if you are getting one under the impression that it is reliably reversible, particularly after decades).

You never said it had to be reversible, so maybe next time outline your goal posts a bit better if you don’t want people to blow right through them.

It’s almost as if all you said was:

> Invent a world where men can disable sperm production entirely, and you'd be able to write very different laws.

And you clearly can’t bother looking at the existing comments when you have so much snark to share so let me help you out with real, actual laws that exist. There is no difference between an ideal world and real laws when the laws actually exist.

https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90c12#BK9

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#83

Post by russdill »

lelanthran wrote: post #64
sjducb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sex is not separate from reproduction. If you are a man and have sex with a woman then you're consenting to be a father. Most western countries recognize verbal and other non-written contracts. The clearest example I can see here is the UK's law about weather the genetic father is the legal father. If the child was conceived through sexual intercourse then the genetic father is always the legal father.

> If you are a man and have sex with a woman then you're consenting to be a father. That sounds primitive and regressive. "If you're a women who has sex, you're consenting to be a mother".

If you're a woman, you're consenting to the possibility of becoming pregnant. If you're a man, you're consenting to the possibility that the woman man become pregnant and may choose to keep the baby.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#84

Post by jlawson »

russdill wrote: post #83
lelanthran wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are a man and have sex with a woman then you're consenting to be a father. That sounds primitive and regressive. "If you're a women who has sex, you're consenting to be a mother".

If you're a woman, you're consenting to the possibility of becoming pregnant. If you're a man, you're consenting to the possibility that the woman man become pregnant and may choose to keep the baby.

That's the legal standard, yes. I think the stark inconsistency between how the sexes are treated here, with one being given far more power to decide outcomes for everyone, strikes many people as wrong. In a world where 'equality' is one of the highest values, it's hard to square that.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#85

Post by mynameisvlad »

jlawson wrote: post #84
russdill wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a woman, you're consenting to the possibility of becoming pregnant. If you're a man, you're consenting to the possibility that the woman man become pregnant and may choose to keep the baby.

That's the legal standard, yes. I think the stark inconsistency between how the sexes are treated here, with one being given far more power to decide outcomes for everyone, strikes many people as wrong. In a world where 'equality' is one of the highest values, it's hard to square that.

Equity is the real thing we should be striving for, not equality. There is a massive difference between the two, and it's very telling that even then, you chose to put quotes around equality.

Maybe when you're asking yourself why the woman has the ultimate choice, you remember that you're not the one carrying the baby to term.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#86

Post by Turing_Machine »

chr1 wrote: post #29
russnes wrote: post #15

This will be great until we select away our natural ability to reproduce, and then the power goes out and nobody can reproduce anymore and humanity goes extinct in one generation

Well if power goes out 99% will already be dead because of current dependence on technology. And for the remaining 1% the religious conservative groups like Amish or Hashidis will be the ones who survive.

> And for the remaining 1% the religious conservative groups like Amish or Hashidis will be the ones who survive.

Not unless the Amish stopped being pacifists, they wouldn't.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#87

Post by Turing_Machine »

gnicholas wrote: post #4

> People could even potentially steal the DNA of celebrities from, for example, a clipping of their hair to make babies, he says. "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely. A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person, (2) use it to create a baby, and (3) threaten to harm that baby if the rich person does not…

> A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person,

I can imagine a future where this is prosecuted as a copyright violation. I'm not saying I'd be in favor of such a law, just saying I can imagine it.

Something would definitely have to be done, or celebrities would be in big trouble every time they ate in a restaurant (or took a cab or limo, or whatever). I think the odds are pretty high that there are bus boys who would happily hand off Taylor Swift's used drinking glass for a thousand bucks in cash.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#88

Post by whythre »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #85
jlawson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the legal standard, yes. I think the stark inconsistency between how the sexes are treated here, with one being given far more power to decide outcomes for everyone, strikes many people as wrong. In a world where 'equality' is one of the highest values, it's hard to square that.

Equity is the real thing we should be striving for, not equality. There is a massive difference between the two, and it's very telling that even then, you chose to put quotes around equality. Maybe when you're asking yourself why the woman has the ultimate choice, you remember that you're not the one carrying the baby to term.

I disagree. I think equity is impossible and more of a political device than an actual thought out goal. Equality is actually legally enforceable and achievable.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#89

Post by Vecr »

XorNot wrote: post #25
Vecr wrote: post #12

One of the main problems preventing human cloning is the trouble getting enough eggs. Even if you don't care about the ethical issues (females only have a quite low finite number of eggs), it's still really expensive. If a small team can get their hands on a whole lot of viable human eggs, they may be less limited by what funders of big research grants want.

The number of eggs women have is far from "quite low". How many do you think they need? A woman menstruates once a month until menopause, from say age 14 till 55. So you would estimate a need for 492 total eggs. A woman is born with 1 million eggs, and has about 300,000 left by puberty. Which is to say: developing the eggs is not a limiting factor in getting them from women.

Actually, I'm not sure about the real situation. The organizations who fund large grants apparently claim that's a reason why they don't like human cloning, but it could be a cover for other reasons they don't want to talk about.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#90

Post by samtho »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #71
gnicholas wrote: post #4

> People could even potentially steal the DNA of celebrities from, for example, a clipping of their hair to make babies, he says. "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely. A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person, (2) use it to create a baby, and (3) threaten to harm that baby if the rich person does not…

Nobody is going to care. The larger problem is what happens if someone gets a significant piece of DNA from a celebrity and then decides to mass market this to many different people. There's currently a huge scandal such as this one: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/du... . going on with the sperm donor industry because some individuals have donated under various aliases. The people who were…

These ”mega donor” scandals happen near monthly as they are revealed via DTC autosomal DNA tests. It’s a combination of the unchecked power banks have to recruit and collect ad-nauseam sperm that sells very well. Donors may also go to other clinics where they are likely to be approved as well, but are not required to disclose their prior donor status. This results in an unmanageable number of sibling in these group.

Also, ever since the industrial process of sperm and egg freezing, the accidental incest argument isn’t statistically significant anymore. It used to be that donors donated to clinics who then stored and did rounds of AI, IUI, or IVF depending on the needs of the client. Because these clinics were hyper local, donors were often in the same city or at least metro area as the DC offspring. Nowadays, gametes are shipped all over the US and the world so the likelihood of encountering a half sibling goes down significantly even for very large cohorts.

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