How much do you want to bet that the end result of this is going to be very bad?
Scientists have created mice with two biological fathers by generating eggs from male cells, a development that opens up radical new possibilities for reproduction. ...
"This is the first case of making robust mammal oocytes from male cells," said Katsuhiko Hayashi, who led the work at Kyushu University in Japan and is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of lab-grown eggs and sperm.
Now there are implications here for what the Guardian calls "treatments for severe forms of infertility." But the paper also notes the more obvious conclusion as well: that the advent of same-sex parentage presents what the Guardian calls "the tantalising prospect" of "same-sex couples being able to have a biological child together in the future."
Let's just pause for a moment here.
I am, of course, not a scientist. But you don't need to be a scientist to recognize a pretty basic, inarguable fact: That mammals were designed to reproduce heterogametically — in laymen's terms, we are meant to reproduce by using both a male and a female.
You can believe in whatever origin of that dichotomy that you wish: Creation, intelligent design, evolution. The good news is that even if we disagree on how we got here, we can pretty readily agree on what's here before us today: Male and female. The two sexes are the foundation of mammalian species, including the human species.
That doesn't mean you can't alter nature in certain ways, including, as we see now, in extremely fundamental ways. It would appear that you can even use two members of the same sex to generate a new life.
Yet it seems obvious and inarguable that the contravention of nature therein will almost undoubtedly lead to serious negative externalities.
What, exactly? We don't know, simply because this sort of thing has never been tried at scale before. But you can easily foresee what they might look like in general:
- Severe genetic abnormalities.
- Unexpected physical impairments.
- Psychological disorders.
- A consequent growing dependence upon ever-more-complex and ghoulish scientific interventions to remedy these problems, leading to an endlessly growing list of negative repercussions.
That's to say nothing of the huge numbers of human children who might, for the first time in human history, be literally without a mother or father. Not only will they be raised in households without that normal and healthy framework, they'll have a distinct absence in their lives — that of a biological mom or a dad — that will lead to pain and dysfunction the likes of which it will be hard to predict. The studies on this are clear.
You can scoff at these predictions. But come on — you know they're highly likely if not inevitable. You don't screw so profoundly with the balance of nature without inviting debilitating outcomes like this.
