Pregnancy by brain dead women: where is the limit?

Ana Smajdor, a researcher and associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, has published an article in a prestigious journal in which she defends the relevance of brain-dead women being used to gestate.

He maintains that this option is comparable to the decision that some people express in their living wills or in their medical documents when they express that they wish to be an organ donor. And that, consequently, there are no reasons why this capacity should not be used in these patients, as long as they have consented before being in that circumstance.

This possibility, he says, would help heterosexual couples in which the woman has problems carrying a pregnancy; homosexual people and single men or, simply, any woman or couple who wants their own genetic offspring, but without assuming the experiences and risks involved in pregnancy and childbirth.

Is it the same as an organ donation?

However, the position maintained by the author requires a deeper reflection. First of all, comparing organ donation to the use of a brain-dead woman to fulfill the reproductive whims of others seems impertinent. While organs are donated to save lives, here a person would be used and objectified to fulfill a wish, in no way decisive for the well-being of third parties, much less to safeguard their lives.

Secondly, it seems daring that the author proposes the use of brain-dead men to gestate, proposing their livers as the organ intended for said function. It has not been possible to successfully replicate an artificial uterus, no matter how many attempts have been made in recent decades, its ethical legitimacy being somewhat questionable.

For all these reasons, beyond pointing out the eccentric and bizarre nature of the proposal, it is appropriate to carry out an ethical analysis that, certainly, can continue to be supported by some of the counter-arguments that the author anticipated as long as it does not resolve them at all.

Thus, it should be noted that, even if this practice were successful in the womb of women in terms of gestation and maturation of a new creature, it is effectively instrumentalizing a clinically dead person. How is it possible to assume that women are used as reproductive objects even after they are brain dead? It seems that we are facing the fact of extending the “useful life” of women as subjects to be oppressed and objects to be exploited, through the reification and exploitation of their bodies, even after their death.

not everything is acceptable

How to admit that an individual uses another in such circumstances to satisfy a desire? Patriarchy, in that metastability described by Amorós, is capable of taking advantage of any situation that women suffer in all its extremes: in its harsh versions, it attacks their sexual repression and in its postmodern versions it takes advantage of female hypersexualization.

In the reproductive issue, it no longer only takes poor women to gestate or expropriate their eggs, choosing among them the youngest, healthiest, most fertile and capable reproductives; He also obtains benefits from illness and death: that of using women as inert matter to be used without the limits required by the minimum autonomy that living women preserve who are also reproductively exploited.

Shouldn’t the temerity of “playing gods” on the border between life and death alert us? The Frankfurt School, after the horror of the Holocaust, already reflected that not everything that is technically possible is humanly and ethically desirable. It is natural that science investigates how to improve our quality and time of life, curing diseases and increasing our health thanks to its advances. However, neither gestating nor having children improves the health or vital conditions of anyone and, consequently, using brain-dead people to satisfy the wishes of third parties is morally execrable.

Should the use of science be all-powerful? In our opinion, the potential of science is commendable as long as it improves the quality of human life, of our health, within the natural limits of our species. However, it is not good, nor necessary, nor progressive for a woman to be used to gestate after her death, since she does not benefit her at all and, on the contrary, she receives objectifying, instrumental and, consequently, unworthy treatment.

Andrea Gutiérrez García, Assistant Professor Doctor. Psychologist specialized in multidisciplinary intervention in gender violence, University of La Rioja and Ana Cuervo Pollán, PhD student in the UNED Philosophy program, UNED – National University of Distance Education

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.