 Hello, I am Christine Rosen. I'm senior editor of the New Atlantis Journal of Technology and Society and a former Future Tense fellow here at New America for the past two years. Welcome. We are the panel about the future. And so we get to invoke the Hollywood-esque gattaca, which hopefully we'll liven you all up a little bit. I know some of you have been here for most of the afternoon. I'm very pleased to introduce our panel. To my immediate right is Marcy Darnofsky. She's the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society and writes widely on the politics of human biotechnologies and focuses on social justice and public interest implications. And then we have Karis Thompson, who is the chancellor's professor and chair of gender and women's studies at the University of California at Berkeley. And most recently, she's the author of Good Science, the ethical choreography of stem cell research. And finally, we have Jane Meinstein. She is the regents professor and director of the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. She is the author of Embryos Under the Microscope, Diverging Meanings of Life, and specializes in the history and philosophy of biology, and the way biology, bioethics, and biopolicy play out in society. So actually, Jane's also kind of our ringer, because we're not just going to talk about the future. We're going to do so by looking a little bit at the past as well and the ways we've transformed the meaning of human reproduction, what we understand to be human life. So we're going to look forward, but we also want to take some grounding in the past. Just to get us going, I wanted to mention, if it hasn't been mentioned already, that we're actually not yet even in middle age, with a lot of these technologies. It's been 36 years since the birth of Louise Brown, the first test tube baby. And since then, quite a lot has happened. We have successful uterus transplants. We have sophisticated fertilization techniques, many of which we've been talking about today. We even have, I don't know if anyone's mentioned the, all the sensor technology that's being devised, that the one that I've heard about recently is called, there's an app called fetus care. And basically it measures fetal heart rate and uterine contractions in women who have high risk pregnancies, which of course immediately got me thinking about a future where when you go in to your obstetrician for your first prenatal visit, you swallow a little pill that contains a sensor that will then monitor the embryo from start to finish. And I thought, excellent, helicopter parenting will begin in utero pretty soon. So this is perhaps the future we have to look forward to. But today I want us to think a little bit about technologies, particularly reproductive technologies, not just as what Marshall McLuhan called extensions of man, but the way in which these technologies also extend some of our more emotional and psychological tendencies as human beings. In bioethics, there's a phrase called the moral stranger. This is something that is used to describe what happens when people don't share fundamental moral principles with each other. When they don't share a common language of moral values, we see this problem come up in a range of issues, if you think about euthanasia, abortion, genetic selection, and certainly when it comes to the future of reproductive technologies. So I think what concerned me a little bit about some of what I've heard in previous panels is this assumption that, well, we have these things and everybody always gets scared, but then we all normalize and we realize it's fine and then we move along. What I'd like us to think about is, well, maybe just because we can do that, should we? And this issue of the moral stranger, sometimes we have real moral diversity, particularly in this country, and we have to acknowledge that, we have to respect that. So as we go forward, I'm gonna ask each panelist to just say a few words about what they think the future of reproductive technology is. With in mind the question, how do we set reasonable limits on some of these technologies, and as well as what does the history of some of our past efforts to set limits have to teach us about what we should do going forward? So I'll start with you, Marcy. Couple of loaded questions. Well, I think that framing it that way is really helpful. I think the idea that we should be thinking about these reproductive technologies, they're very powerful technologies, and they have implications for us personally, they have implications for our families, they have larger implications, social justice and human rights implications that we really need to look at very carefully. And so I think, and there will be a range of opinions on a lot of them, and the idea that if there are concerns, or if there are skepticism, or if some technologies there is opposition, that this can be explained by calling them irrational fears, that is not conducive to a thoughtful conversation. And I think we have to call that out of bounds. So that's one thing. And then I think that this question about moral diversity, it's so tough for us and for any society to know how to bring moral and ethical questions into the public sphere while not losing the tolerance that we value in a liberal public sphere. But it also is dangerous to pretend they don't exist. And that's where I think we're at now. The FDA is mandated to consider safety and efficacy, and boy, those are really important questions. But safety questions and policy questions and social questions and ethical questions are so entangled with each other that the FDA is mandated in ability to really consider the questions in their entirety, I think often hinders it. Kari? Thank you. So the first thing I wanted to say is to remind, what a great day this is to be having this conversation with the immigration reform or possible move on immigration, remembering that demography is not just about reproduction and dying, but also about migration and thinking about all the ways in which we currently choose among implicitly or explicitly who can be a member of our polity and who can thrive and who doesn't thrive. So I think, so for me, there's one big issue that I've come to really care about recently that I used to not care anything like as much about, which is eugenics, the new eugenics. The trouble with that is that if you work closely with individual people, so I myself have both a science and a social science background, I've been through some of these technologies myself in my own reproduction. I have an interest in arguments on all sides of these debates and a great love and excitement for the science. But when you work with actual people going through the technologies, everybody has a really compelling story. Everybody has some reason why they're doing what they're doing, whether it's a scientist trying to discover something, whether it's somebody who had a child with a disease who died, so they're doing PGD to not watch another child die. So people have really good reasons why they do these things. And yet when we pan back to the social and political picture that's emerging over time, we find all kinds of things that are extremely worrying. So we find that there is mission creep in what we use PGD for. So I have it on good authority for many obstetricians and gynecologists and pediatricians that people increasingly will abort if they can get pregnant relatively easily again afterwards for more and more kinds of conditions. So for example, if you have an extra, if a baby seems to have an extra finger, that would be a reason to not have that child. I think we're also moving toward a time where we're supposed to take responsibility for the ways that our children are in the world. And the helicopter parent thing is absolutely apt actually. I think it's particularly pernicious at the after birth period that there's this enormous difference between children with privatized childhoods often who have a parent who takes part of their career is doing the portfolios of those children versus those children who are growing up in lower income or lower resource communities who have much more public childhoods and have a very different kind of outlook on life. And so thinking about all of these things together as moving toward a picture where we're becoming a much more eugenic society again and wanting to say that yes, it's great to monitor our own pregnancies. Yes, it's great to offer our children everything but what is that big picture and what role and responsibility do each of us have for that big picture and how on earth do we each deal with the pain and suffering each one of us individually is going through and those shared desires to be parents, to be feeling people and what we care about politically and the kind of society collectively we're making over time that we don't want to be part of and we don't especially like. As a historian and philosopher of science it's funny to be asked about the future but who gets to be the expert about the future so I guess we all do. I wanna make three points none of which quite answers your question but runs around it like they did. So it's okay. So my big thing as a historian is looking at the fact that we have very divergent ideas of what an embryo is and what it means and so there's a public idea life begins at consumption, embryo begins at consumption by which we mean fertilization and therefore everything about life and all of its protection should start at that point and therefore it even makes sense to talk about personhood in the current political arena so there's that which is really completely different from and divergent from what we know from biology which is an evolving understanding over time that says wait an embryo is a really messy thing cells fall apart, they come together you can stick together all different kinds of pieces which is not to say biology trumps but my number one point is at the least I think we should come up with public policy and make decisions that are not inconsistent with the biology at the least that's a radical claim these days but at the least so we should understand what biology is telling us and then try to really engage and understand how we can come to wise and reflective social decisions as a result of that rather than just yelling at us and think it's science versus society so that's point one, historically two points one it's only with Pope Pius IX in 1869 that we came to think that life begins at conception and hominization happens at that time historically that wasn't the case so there was a change at that point it's worth understanding why there was a change at that point and why we might change now and in the future so looking to the future it may not be just technologies that change but are thinking about what those technologies are and then my third and final point for now to throw out there is it's fairly recent that we came to think that we have a right to have our own children so the idea of reproductive rights and a right to have our own child is fairly recent to what extent it's promoted by and supported by the biologization of childbearing and the technology is a question but historically looks like a lot and so there's a right which then starts to turn into a responsibility to have one's own child and use the technologies that are available that at least should raise questions about why we came to have that view and do we all agree with it? Thank you, actually this was perfect I couldn't have plotted to have this better because since we're talking about the past and the future this one thing that keeps coming up is eugenics something that we think we have an understanding of about the past and that going forward we know how to avoid which of course is nonsense you ask most people first of all if you ask any high schooler advertised schooler in this country what eugenics is they won't even know what that word means they'll have no concept of it they'll have no understanding that right now the state of North Carolina is paying victims of state coercive sterilization that ran earlier in the 20th century from their coercive sterilization policies certainly anyone who does know about it thinks well we'll never do that again the state will never control people's reproduction with such a heavy hand again we learned our lesson we saw what happened under the Nazi regime never again never again but of course eugenics was far broader than just state sponsored coercive sterilization it had this positive side which for any of us who study pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or any sort of genetic testing you see it everywhere in the language in the talk about choice and hope and opportunity and open futures for children so I think that eugenics actually becomes this hinge point to the past and to the future that's worth really thinking about anyone who is going to be in New York in the next few months I highly recommend you go to NYU's exhibit where they have recreated the eugenics record office from earlier in the century in a building at NYU's campus with all the files and all the charts and it's riveting, it's a very good commentary in a lot of these questions you've, have you seen it? You're, yeah it's very worthwhile well I think there are two things two themes that I'd like to hear a little bit more from each of you on the first is something you brought up Jane this question of how socially and culturally we talk about this stuff what's the narrative of reproduction right now and how it certainly has changed over time are there some ways we can see it needing to change in the future to adapt to the technologies that we have so the sort of cultural conversation we have what do we talk about when we talk about human reproduction and then the second thing what, how do we get this historical information more widely understood as a context for maybe getting into these difficult ethical and moral issues that we don't always agree on the same language for we can, we can try to agree perhaps a little more on the past than we can on some of the moral and ethical issues in, in the future so anyone just pipe up we really can agree more about the past well at least about some, some things we at Arizona State University we have something called the Embryo Project which is not, which is not a cure-all but a lot of graduate students and a lot of undergraduate students are writing articles that are short articles accessible to the, to the general public I always say everything about embryos and reproduction from Aristotle until tomorrow and we invite anybody to contribute articles we want to franchise it so that people elsewhere will start writing articles and, and they're, they're all peer reviewed and just human embryos? No, no, everything everything about reproduction and embryos but in attempt to get multiple voices and multiple studies of what has happened which helps to inform where we are now Teres, your thoughts on the the need for history in the future? So I think on the need for history specifically I think things that are characteristic of a particular society don't go away so ways of deciding things in a polity at one point always are there as potentialities but I particularly wanted to address this issue of things that we like, we have as oppositions in the way we currently talk about reproduction that I've argued in good science and in making parents actually really shouldn't be thought of as oppositions but they should, we get better thought we get better science and better ethics if we actually can make the space and take the time to think about them together so we tend to think of, as Jane said science versus society so let me give one particular example I'm actually a huge fan of the idea of multiple parenthood and we've had multiple social parenthood for a very long time we've had lots and lots of ways of parenting and I just wish we would destigmatize single, multiple blended families the whole thing, I wish each one would be as good as each other and children in any of them would thrive as well as each other and I find it extremely exciting that we've moved into an era where biologically we can have multiple parenthood as well whether it's through someone being an egg donor someone being a gestational surrogate as long as we humanize all the players involved in that of course and as long as we pay attention to the class race and gender dynamics of creating those kinds of families so I would love to get to that point where we can celebrate multiple parenthood but if we sit and say that three parent or three reproductive material embryos are still only two parent babies I don't see I don't see what who I mean we can say there's only going to be two social people raising this child so for example in the mitochondrial DNA embryo we can say we decided as we have in lots and lots of cases of reproductive technologies that we're going to go with where the reproductive intent is and those are going to be the people we're going to consider as the parents and we can say we have very clear chains of custody of the reproductive material and of the intention but we still need to say that we're bringing three people to bear we're bringing three people into this there's somebody who's giving reproductive material through some offspring there's going to be some passing on of that genetic material however tiny it is and I don't mind if we call that person a parent or not but let's at least acknowledge it let's acknowledge the repertoire of people involved in making children biologically today and the repertoire of people involved in raising and making people children socially today and let's celebrate the whole damn lot so that everybody has a good life so let's see I'm going to start with the word and the concept that you raised Christine Eugenics and it's not just that high schoolers don't know the word I've been in front of a lot of classes at elite universities where you ask how many people know what that word means and you know half the hands go up but as you say they think it's Nazi Germany and you say how many people know there was a robust eugenics movement in the United States maybe someone has talked with the professor who invited me so they know but typically people don't know and without knowing that history and without knowing the way that ideas that ideas of biological superiority and inferiority whether it's dividing people by racial group or something that we might not call racial group now but that one time was called racial group which just shows you that it's not biology but these tendencies to assign different people different worths are not gone in our society and I think you know that's what you're getting at too Karras and it's why there are dozens of countries more than forty countries in the world where they've thought about new genetic and reproductive technologies in terms that were informed by our eugenic history and that's one of the reasons why all these countries have drawn a very bright policy line which is also a bright uh... technical line which is why it works well and the line is we can use gene transfer on existing individuals to help treat disease we can use all kinds of reproductive technologies uh... to help people form families with as many parents as they may have uh... and it's not that there's no social policy ethical considerations to be to be thought about in terms of any kind of gene transfer or any kind of assisted reproduction but we're going to draw a bright line against inheritable genetic modifications changes to the human germ line and the reason that all these laws exist is because it's so important to have some rules of the road and that's a one that can be really clear because it's a bright line, it's not blurry, there's not gray areas or there haven't been so now actually we're getting to the point where we are starting to there's a few techniques that will affect a few people that are blurring those lines and one of them is this mitochondrial manipulation it's actually a nuclear genome transfer technology and uh... there we get into the situation where we have to ask whether the social benefit of this technology because it's not a medical technology in the sense that it's not helping anybody who is suffering with mitochondrial disease so it's a social benefit to a very small number of people in the UK they think maybe if this goes through ten people a year might be candidates for it so is it worth it to cross this bright policy line that is meant to ensure the safety of future generations and to have a bulwark against repetitions in another guise of course of some kind of eugenics high-tech consumer-driven eugenics that could put us into the world of eugenica and i think that's more important than ever if you think if you look ahead to what in china is happening these sort of data banks gathering superior genes we have we see that their their companies in silicon valley and uh... camry and genomics is one where they're talking about uh... their their c e o i love him he just runs off at the mouth all the time about stuff and he says things like you know we're really all just machines like computers and where we have all these bugs and glitches and we should just make human life without the bugs and glitches are new forms of life that we just devise ourselves on a machine you know it's a very it's a particular kind of mindset that i think when it combines with an excessive individualism which we have here in this country which has brought us so many good things is is a danger when we think about how we draw lines in the future and and someone was talking about you talked about mission creep earlier i think that is that that's where i think that the the immediate future of these discussions has to start is at what point are we starting to see researchers usually on the front line saying you know we just want to do a little of this and that and we're not we're not saying this is something everyone should use we really have to be careful about those and that's where the policy and regulation point comes in earlier panels we heard people saying but if we have the technology we should use it but if we can let people have their own babies then what we want to use it if we can make them better wouldn't we want to do that and my students when we talk about eugenics and they have studied the history they say it's eugenics it's good breeding it's for public health purposes why wouldn't we want to use the technology that can make the population better that could prevent suffering and so we do need a very robust that just makes my just my stomach drop we need a very careful discussion instead of just saying hey don't you guys know about nazi germany i mean we need to talk about what it means what were the good reasons that people thought eugenics made sense in the past and might make sense now and then why did it turn out not to be so easy well i do i mean that's a very important point right i mean much of the rhetoric of eugenics uh... it was very progressive i mean it was championed by margaret sanger and other progressive reformers for a number of reasons often of which they were they were looking at the situation men and women found themselves in and said this is not tenable for them we need to do better the use of state power obviously uh... involved that in as as i mean i got interested in eugenics mainly because my people southern eastern europeans who are immigrating to the united states at that time we're part of the quota system we were bad gene we had bad genes we weren't supposed to be coming in so i do think uh... the the positive public health benefits of eugenics that the idea that we could even have a discussion about that today is worrisome because the history i think people check that box of we won't do that again because we won't use state power but there are a lot of other ways in especially in a uh... very privatized society such as ours to see that happen okay going to get you guys involved in the conversation hopefully so if there are any questions for a panelist now's the time i would love to quickly say something about frontiers that i think are exciting at the moment uh... i think some of the work that's being done the walking egg group that's trying to get and reproductive technologies to very low resource countries uh... i think the uh... the uh... great progress on allowing uh... trans men to to uh... retain their fertility uh... is really wonderful i think a lot of scott scholars of color who are talking about the uh... race and class dynamics of reproductive technologies and bringing to light the work that uh... has more population type effects is really really positive too so i do think the very near future there are some good and exciting uh... things happening as well as all the troubling i think you can't possibly all agree on the subject come on don't be shy there's there's one in the front technology do you worry about smartphones for me but you guys should probably say something about a different obsession i worry a lot about the technologies than willful ignorance yeah i worry i will also worry about people uh... especially when they're using the the rhetoric of facts to say things that aren't factual uh... really really it gets my gets my goat uh... but uh... do we know you like examples well i feel as if we heard this morning someone say there are only two parents who then said one egg another egg and sperm and one plus one plus one is three in my head and i you know sure don't say you know say to us why you don't think one of those is a parent but don't invisibilize that woman who gave that egg tell us about her bring her to life give her humanity so to me i i i worry a lot about that i also worry about the ways in which we're we're really rightly i think excited about some kinds of things but again the rhetoric take gets hold of us like for example the pro cures rhetoric with especially in this society where we're very into innovation we often synonymize research with the word innovation so we have in our heads this idea that anything that cures things is good but i do i i have classes where i'll have somebody come in from the disability justice movement and talk for one hour with my students and at the end of that class not only do they are they so much less sure that everything needs curing every kind of difference needs curing but they're also so much less sure what what perfect is and also the speaker when she asks them uh... who's perfect or i don't know if you okay well what's imperfect about you no student can end to their own list because we've perfectionalized ourselves in such a way that there isn't a bit of the body that we don't have a rhetoric of perfection about and that's sort of neoliberalization personalization and bringing it all into this private sector in this responsible ization of just this sort of manic perfect ability stuff is something i worry about much more than the technology per se i think i would answer in a way similarly uh... i worry about i worry about the idea that if something isn't caused by the government of the state there's nothing to worry about that because i think that uh... we know the market and market pressures are enormously powerful pressures in many many ways so if it's uh... conflict of interest between uh... for for a doctor who is retrieving eggs from a young woman for somebody else or for a researcher and uh... that doctor uh... if it's for a researcher for example is going to get his or her name on an important paper in a prestigious scientific journal i worry about you know the commercial dynamic that's creating a conflict of interest there when i think about egg freezing you know this is a whole new market for uh... the fertility industry that didn't exist before this is an attractive commercial uh... prospect for them and commercial pressures do come to bear and uh... we since we don't have policy we're leaving ourselves but very vulnerable to those commercial pressures we have the professional organizations and the ethics committees of these professional organizations often come out with statements that i find i mean i'd agree with every single dot and cross of the t but they're sensible they're thoughtful but they have no force and you know we can point to many many examples where the ethical guidelines are routinely ignored so i think that the commercial dynamics is something to really to really be concerned about no one other thing i would mention is uh... you know this uh... the polarization that we have in this country around the issue of abortion i think that really keeps us from looking more thoughtfully at a lot of these questions and a lot of these technologies and that's true on both sides so as a person who is very strong supporter of abortion rights and a right of a woman to decide whether to to terminate or not a pregnancy i'll therefore say that i feel often critical of people who are my allies on that issue because they uh... think that they often talk and think and reason uh... as of choice is the trump and every single issue and that makes uh... certain things disappear it makes all kinds of social questions and questions of social justice and questions of equity disappear and i think that's changing in the reproductive rights movement a lot under the rubric of reproductive justice uh... that women of color introduced for some of these very reasons but i think we still too often uh... fall into that kind of unthoughtful language so i have two questions actually one is uh... are you concerned about sperm donors in the same way that you're concerned about egg donors uh... and why either way is your sponsors uh... and the other is are you suggesting that if the uh... organizations uh... ethics committees and guidelines and uh... letters of recommendation uh... are not enforceable are you suggesting that the government should enforce the reproductive decisions of the people wanting to do uh... donations or donations we'll leave it at donations should they be regulated by the government not to do no do donations should i take a crack at that uh... so the first question i'm sorry can you remember sperm donors yeah some of the things about sperm uh... sperm providers is i think a better more accurate term actually same with eggs uh... yeah some of the things are there are similar concerns like uh... uh... anonymity i think is a really uh... thorny question and uh... you know what we've promised people who have uh... provided their gametes under conditions of anonymity is one question and moving forward is another question but uh... you know parents many parents put a lot of stock into having a child who is genetically related to them they think this is you know really many people find this very very important but then somehow we're surprised when children grow up and they think it's important to know their biological provenance so that's something that you know there's a similarity i think in situations of sperm and egg providers but of course the huge difference is that retrieving eggs uh... is invasive it's uncomfortable it does carry risks and because we don't have uh... mandated data collection and follow-up we don't know what we should know about uh... the risks short-term and long-term of egg retrieval and that's really i find that so disturbing that after all these decades in which this practice has been increasing we don't have good data about that very i think i think that's really troubling in some of what we do know is not not so reassuring that that would be a short answer to that question are definitely interested in registries for egg donor donor so it's not like our organizations are not interested in trying to do this i mean certainly our IVF um... a regulator uh... we at the asr m and sart have had uh... reporting to the cdc about uh... IVF uh... for a long time uh... we are interested in in donor registries i i just go back to sperm again because that has been going on for a very long time uh... and there certainly is in in reference to what you were saying about no one donors versus unknown uh... donors uh... there's also big movement within our organization and others to suggest that there should be more openness uh... but you know i i i guess my concern really is where where is the line uh... where you say to a person we demand that you go back and tell the people who you were when you donate it when you thought you were going to not have to do that uh... i mean where is individual right comes in in comparison to uh... regulatory agencies or the government stepping in to tell us what to do i think it is a slippery slope and i know we're supposed to be asking questions but i i feel that uh... we have to acknowledge that organizations such as mine are absolutely interested in doing this discussing extensively uh... and uh... i think that pretty much says it all i'd love to continue the conversation and i and i do give asr m credit for some really very thoughtful ethical guidelines for encouraging openness for many things have been good but what i think asr m and i think the question about where do you need policy and where should it be professional uh... responsibility and where should it be individual decision we have to get more specific because you know it's not there's not a one fits all answer but i do i would respectfully make one uh... suggestion which is that i think asr m could do a better job of educating its members or uh... that they need to follow the guidelines or have good reasons when they don't and where there are flagrant uh... cases of not following guidelines seems like there have to there has to be some kind of organizational sanctioned you know you can't be a member in good standing if you don't follow our rules position but that was you know sanctioned you know uh... i think that the uh... organization actually encourages distributes has on their website uh... provides uh... the guidelines to parent patients uh... all they have to do is go to uh... w w w dot asr m dot org and uh... click on patient portal uh... and you can act get access to many of these uh... statements i know that uh... many of my colleagues certainly i uh... recommend to all my patients that they go on the uh... asr m website to get information about these things uh... so i think that uh... organizations like acog asr m are are are doing a lot to uh... it's not like i you somehow or other the implication is that we have our heads in the sand and i just want to disabuse uh... uh... those net that notion no one would would say that i do think what what's emerging from a lot of the discussions of all the panel today is you know so far we've been dangling incentives and maybe you know a little carrot maybe we need more of a stick in the form of regulation or government involvement rather than just you know kind of peer pressure from from these organizations i think right i mean was that the sort of i'd like to say something about the sperm donors uh... and i'm a you know uh... two of my three children were born by IVF after i had uh... uh... an illness uh... and uh... so i'm a uh... you know i'm a user of the technologies a big fan of them big fan of data proper data collections scientific evidence uh... and follow-up as well long-term follow-up a asr m i think has been really progressive on telling women it's not a say it you know that the fertility declines you can't be a celebrity and have a baby at forty five just because you wanted to egg freezing isn't perfect pushing for for more insurance coverage uh... but but again it's it's uh... you know opening up to hearing more of the other issues making it more of a two-way conversation where it doesn't become uh... we're science and you're not science but where it becomes here are a bunch of things that are important to this conversation here a bunch more and let's talk together about where we want the society to go i think if a srm took more of a leadership role in also sponsoring some of those kinds of debates which would be maybe in collaboration with other people like like this organization but on the question of the of the sperm donors i think you know we this is a case where we really do need some some regulation with teeth in part we've just got to go through time to realize we're in and it's we're in a disclosure era now and you guys have been very helpful on that we're in a disclosure era that these there's biosocialty among these kids it's happening men need to first of all we need to not have what happened with the danish sperm bank where we find where people you know one guy has fathered forty three children or whatever it is that's just really idiotic non-data collection stop already you fathered two you're done just stop but of course part of what you're saying is we think that sperm donation is so easy you just have a nice magazine and it's really fun but actually it's quite rigorous you have to come regularly you have to produce on on you know so it's quite a rigorous process being a good good sperm donor but we also have this idea that that you know men are scared people who've been sperm donors are scared that they get that there's going to be a lot of economic consequences and we just we just need to get rid of that we need to make it not the case that this disclosure happens in the context that you could suddenly become responsible for twenty one years of costs to raising a child forty three children or forty three children so we need to be quite clear about about what we're what what we're expecting of people we've just given that we're in an era of disclosure i think and that is something that should happen at a federal level i believe uh... is this on uh... yes professor thompson i appreciated your question in the first panel this morning about uh... the third woman who is who donates genetic material uh... to the construction of this child and what her status is what we're to call her and that she not being visualized uh... and the concern generally to see that all of the people who are involved in these various arrangements are not invisible eyes uh... but the one person it seems to me who's been mostly invisible eyes throughout the entire day is the child marcie was saying that earlier yeah except to say that a child is a child a child by any other name is just a child and as long as they're healthy and happy everything's fine uh... of course that begs a lot of questions about what well-being consists in and it assumes that how and from whom one originates uh... is not intrinsic to that well-being it seems to me at least to be able to to speak as uh... lightly as we have about some of these things so to sort of get at the question and perhaps to get another way of thinking about what might be at stake for the child which seems to me to be invisible to all the ways that we've spoken and thought about this so far i would pose this question uh... and it's to the group uh... if you were to learn for instance uh... that you as an embryo have been frozen uh... for you know six months year two years whatever the extent length on that is would that bother you and would you be right to be bothered by that i mean off the top of my head interesting question never it's i'd assume i wouldn't be bothered i think that uh... we might ask other kinds of questions that uh... put the child in the center like would it you be bothered if you learned that uh... somebody was paid to carry you to gestate you and we don't know where that person is right now we don't know her name what where she lives what happened to her and it was a commercial transaction i i think i don't know how people how people in that situation will feel when they get older but i think i wouldn't be surprised if some of them have concerns about it and following on from that i think some of the uh... things that when your as was raised earlier if if say you were you were you were born with various uh... disabilities how did you fall between the cracks in this kind of prayer of suddenly finding that you had no no parents wanting you that seems something that would be very worrying i also think some of the examples of stateless children born with these technologies uh... where you your country doesn't recognize for example gestational surrogacy and and doesn't give citizenship to the child and you can't bring your child home with you that kind of thing knowing that i had had to go through that because it wasn't sorted out uh... but to me personally the idea that i had been frozen or not i guess i might might be you know happier if i was born in under a better regime than i might otherwise have been unless happy by you know in the opposite direction but and per se the idea of having been frozen doesn't trouble me think biologically i wouldn't care though if i discovered that i was and i was born in nineteen fifty it'd be really cool i would have been the first but i think biologically it wouldn't bother me but if my parents lied it would make me mad so it's not that having been frozen it's the weather we're honest about it which goes back to point keras and others were making about the importance of being having robust discussions and that srm and others really encourage us to do as well we have to wrap it up i think we've solved a few questions about the future maybe we'll all be live tweeting every reproductive you know thing we do from here on out for transparency purposes but thank you so much to all of our panelists