I recently found this story about a 28 year old woman who died of cancer. Her dying wish was that she could have children. Her eggs had been put on ice, and her mother went to court to persuade the Judge to let her use the eggs to give birth to her daughter’s children, which would be her grandchildren. The mother stated that her daughter told her to go through with the procedure and use an anonymous sperm donor for the IVF procedure. Unfortunately the mother was unable to produce enough evidence that her daughter had indeed consented to this. The Judge denied the mother her request. Now my question is, even though this was technically the legally right thing to do, was it truly the morally right thing to do? A woman dies of cancer at an early age, and her mother wants to do right by her last dying wish. Even though the mother didn’t produce enough legal documents, as long as she was physically approved by a doctor, what would be the harm in letting her go through with it? It appears to me that the Judge was using hard universalism instead of using deontology. “Hard universalism holds that there is one universal moral code. It is the viewpoint expressed by those who are on a quest for the code”. (Rosenstand, 2013)

References

Rosenstand, N. (2013). The Moral of the Story: An Introduction to Ethics (7th ed., p. 232). New York, New York: McGraw Hill.

Elgot, J. (2015, June 20). Mother loses bid to use dead daughter's frozen eggs to give birth to grandchild. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/15/mother-loses-bid-to-use-dead-daughters-frozen-eggs-to-give-birth-to-grandchild