Orphans By DesignOrphan" is one of those words that seems old-fashioned to modern ears -- a word that evokes abject poverty in a Dickens novel. But in the years ahead, our reproductive technologies may lead us down a new, terrible path of creating orphans by design. In this case, the problem is not the tragic death of parents but the deliberate creation of children without living biological mothers or fathers -- as if such bodily origins do not much matter, as if nurturing were the only dimension of parenthood that still has any meaning.
Over the past few years, a cadre of leading scientists has been working on "gamete harvesting" and "gamete engineering," techniques that may be moving soon from the laboratory to the clinic. The first technique involves harvesting eggs from aborted fetuses and fertilizing them with sperm in the laboratory. The dead fetus, in other words, is the child's biological mother. The second technique involves destroying human embryos, deriving embryonic stem cells, and turning those stem cells into sperm or eggs. The dead embryo, in other words, is the child's biological mother or father. By these methods, we would produce children sprung from the dead, or children whose genetic parents were never allowed to be born, or children who resemble those who never had human faces.FULL STORY at