Another Side of Choice.

As you may recall from this previous post, I have an ambivalent view of headlines. So when this one caught my attention, I heard the siren's song. Or the muse's muttering.

A US woman who was implanted with the wrong embryo in a fertility treatment mix-up has given birth to a boy.

Carolyn Savage and her husband Sean said in a statement that the baby was delivered at St Vincent Mercy Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio. Mrs Savage, who had been told about the mix-up in February, said the family was "going through a very difficult time".

The Savages have decided to give the baby to his biological parents, Shannon and Paul Morell from Michigan. The Savages, who have three children, offered their "heartfelt congratulations" to the Morells.

Carolyn Savage chose to carry to term an embryo that had no genetic connection to her. She did it for her own personal reasons, it was difficult but nobody forced her to do it. Does anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together out there believe that Blob Blogging Wingnut understands the difference between Carolyn Savage's choice and punishing rape victims by obliging them to carry a pregnancy to term? No, I don't think SHE would get it either.

As for Carolyn Savage, she appears to have more real compassion than BBW will ever understand.

Wake up Maggie

... I think I got something to say to you
It's late September and I really should be back at school.
I know I keep you amused
but I feel I'm being used ...

Margaret Somerville - a cougar? Unlikely, though stranger things have happened. No, I suspect Maggie is a latex - errr, latent and likely self-suppressed dominatrix though that orientation breaks out when she launches in one of her predictable and tedious public floggings of public morality.

Dr Dawg, who can run epistemological circles around Somerville, nails her sanctimonious hide to the wall. Metaphorically, of course.

...while on the subject of public intellectuals, the Citizen graces us today with another incompetent column by Margaret Somerville, the popular self-anointed authority on bioethics from McGill who is fond of telling us how to live and what to think under the guise of ethical discussion. There is, in fact little real discussion in Somerville's writings: it's all moral claims and assertions.

This time she's on about stem cell research and the sacredness of the embryo. ... "We are all ex-embryos," she says, in her sloppy way. We are, of course, all pre-corpses, too. ... Somerville makes much of the potential of an embryo, its "becoming," and summons up that phantasm, "moral intuition," which she has referred to, in other columns, as the "yuck factor." But the same abstract argument of potential could be used about contraception, since sperm and ova are, at least potentially, joined. In fact one could trace a chain of potential back to the origins of life. A protozoan has the potential of evolving into a human being. Morally speaking, must the chain never be broken? How can it be avoided?

Frances Kissling has a much better understanding of these issues, in addition to being more rigorous and honest in her intellectual analysis.

Surely I'm not the only one scratching my head at Somerville's never-ending perorations and wondering what deep, dark private secrets she knows about selected gros fromages. It's certainly not her MASSIVE moral authority or intellect that keeps McGill officials in her thrall.