Jackalope

If we were to hold absolutely to this standard, in vitro fertilization would never have been developed. We now know that "test tube babies" grow up to be perfectly normal children, but I remember a certain amount of quacking about that back when it was first tried. For that matter, there are a number of in utero procedures that are fairly common now that would have never been developed. Nor amniocentesis nor chorionic villi sampling.

Now, I'm the result of one of the notorious failures in pre-natal care. I'm a DES baby. I have the ankle deformities and some other problems that we now know are the result of exposure to DES in the womb. The sad part, is that the effects were already known when I was exposed. My mother just had incompetent doctors. One can argue in this particular case, that using DES to prevent miscarriages was done with almost no experimental evidence or testing. However, there are also things like thalidomide that were tested...we just didn't know at the time that there was a particular window in fetal development that the drug totally bolluxes (it's a rather small window too, by the way, which is why it didn't show up in the animal or clinical tests).

Pregnant women end up making decisions about these types of issues all the time. Their fetuses certainly can't consent to any of the new and/or experimental procedures performed. This appears to me to be a non-argument. No child asks to be born. The real question is "Have we tested this procedure well enough to even think about using it on humans yet?"

--Lee