{"id":239,"date":"2010-01-27T10:29:41","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T09:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=239"},"modified":"2010-01-27T10:29:41","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T09:29:41","slug":"the-ethics-of-elderly-mums-in-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2010\/01\/27\/the-ethics-of-elderly-mums-in-the-news\/","title":{"rendered":"The ethics of Elderly Mums in the News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Daniel Sokol has written <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/magazine\/8480641.stm\">this thoughtful piece<\/a> about the yuck factor and Elderly Mums conceiving children late in life via IVF.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I generally agree with Daniel, it seems difficult to justify criticism of elderly mums on grounds other than potential harm to the child &#8211; and as Daniel notes these grounds are problematic due to the non-identity problem. (And well done to Daniel for managing to make Parfit understandable to the general public in his piece)<\/p>\n<p>Daniel references other potential arguments and it is one of these I want to discuss &#8211; resource allocation. If (and it is a big if) the IVF was being provided via public funding then it might be considered more objectionable &#8211; since other things could be done with that money than give someone a baby, such as save lives and so on. However even this argument doesn&#8217;t clearly cut against Elderly Mothers, since arguably it would apply to all cases of publicly funded assisted reproduction rather than just those cases.<!--TrendMD v2.4.8--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Daniel Sokol has written this thoughtful piece about the yuck factor and Elderly Mums conceiving children late in life via IVF. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2010\/01\/27\/the-ethics-of-elderly-mums-in-the-news\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[511],"tags":[1550,1551],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news","tag-ivf","tag-resource-allocation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}