Editor's Note: This podcast originally appeared as a Parallel Paper Presentation from CBHD's 2007 Annual Conference, Bioethics Nexus: The Future of Healthcare, Science and Humanity.
Our technological society, ruled as it is by the technological imperative, is actively engaged in the pursuit of progress regardless of the cost. This progress is often ill-defined; we are “committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly unexamined ends.” While cost-benefit analyses are frequently performed to ascertain the efficiency of progressive techniques in terms of monetary value, seldom do we truly count the immaterial costs of progress. One area of medicine where these changes are vividly portrayed is the arena of women’s reproductive health where to the goals of life, health, and happiness, “a perfect child of our own” is added. Here, too, we have failed to count the immaterial costs of such a project. We’ve failed to see how our blind pursuit of elusive but noble goals is threatening not only the profession of medicine, but the very nature of our humanity as well. This paper will explore some of the costs of technology in women’s reproductive health—costs to the art of medicine as well as the nature of marriage, reproduction, and children.
