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Sep. 23, 2011
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Jewish Law Supports Reproductive Technologies, Says Emory Professor
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Jewish law supports current and emerging forms of biotechnology used in assisted reproduction—including artificial insemination, surrogacy, embryo screening and even more debatable techniques—as long as the overriding intent is to “produce a healthy or healthier child,” says Rabbi Michael J. Broyde, professor of law at Emory University. “We ought to not be afraid of new technologies,” says Broyde, who delivered the remarks at the recent Decalogue Lecture hosted by Emory’s C enter for the Study of Law and Religion (C SLR). “It’s too easy to imagine worst-case scenarios and craft theoretical opposition. But processes that allow people to have children who can’t are processes we should support.”
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Michael Broyde
Broyde classified artificial insemination (AI) as a fairly low-tech activity that is even discussed in the Talmud. “No adultery is associated with AI. The dominant Jewish law view doesn’t look at misplaced paternity, absent sexual conduct, as a moral or religious wrong,” he says. “If there’s no fun, there’s no sin. I often try to convey that to my law students.”
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While surrogate motherhood can raise questions of maternity, Broyde favors the view that the mother is the one who carries and gives birth to the child. “Maternity is established in Jewish tradition through birth, not merely genetics. In competition between the egg donor and the birth mother, the dominant Jewish law view labels the birth mother as the mother,” he says. C loning should be considered a potential reproductive technology since scientists have successfully cloned horses, cats, mice and almost every other mammal, Broyde says. He notes that human cloning has not yet occurred because “governments have taken steps to restrict this, it violates our sense of ethics.” He favors allowing cloning for “profoundly infertile people,” such as men who no longer produce sperm due to a military or industrial accident. The man’s genetic material would be inserted into his wife’s egg and she would give birth to a child who looks “astonishingly like him,” Broyde says. Have we produced another healthy or healthier child? Broyde lists a half-dozen emerging reproductive technologies that “at first glance might appear scary” but that are likely to become commonplace within the next 25 years. In each case, he maintains that Jewish law would use the “best interest of the child” standard when evaluating each process and above all ask this essential question: Have we produced another healthy or healthier child? • Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD,) commonly known as embryo screening, allows doctors to implant embryos that test negative for a specific, disease-causing genetic trait, or conversely to implant embryos that possesses a particular preferred genetic trait. The benefits could extend beyond the child to the family: for instance, parents whose older child has leukemia could implant an embryo that is, with certainty, a bone-marrow match —previously a one-in-16 chance. “Some people say, ‘How sad a child will be born to be used.’ But when you’re finished with this activity, you know what you’ll have? Two healthy children,” says Broyde. “Implanting embryos that are healthy, that’s a wonderful thing although not natural.” • The use of a human artificial chromosome (HAC ) might one day be possible in reproduction. “This would make maternity or paternity difficult to determine,” says Broyde. Still, he sees a place for HAC when an individual’s “genetic material is so corrupted it needs to be significantly corrected to produce healthy children.” • Genetic engineering (GE), in which the traits of different individuals, or animals, are combined, already has resulted in amazing combinations, such as the Mayo C linic’s recent development: bioluminescent cats marked with glowing jellyfish genes (who are also resistant to feline AIDS thanks to virus-resilient DNA from a monkey).