Medical Ethics Part 3 (When is a Life a Life?)

Down the Wormhole

Episode 87

For many people, pregnancy is an exciting and hopeful time, but for carriers of hereditary diseases, it can be a nightmare. For centuries, matchmakers and family historians have done their best to arrange marriages that would result in healthy offspring, but with modern genetic testing, we can take all the guesswork out of it. Couples can nearly handpick their future children and monitor every step of their development for potential problems. While there are so many opportunities for human flourishing, there are also plenty of moral and ethical quandaries to consider. When does a living tissue become a human being with rights? When does a human being take on the image of God or develop a soul? You might be surprised at what our sacred scriptures and religious traditions do and do not have to say on the matter!

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produced by Zack Jackson
music by Zack Jackson and Barton Willis

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated by www.otter.ai, and as such contains errors (especially when multiple people are talking). As the AI learns our voices, the transcripts will improve. We hope it is helpful even with the errors.

Zack Jackson 00:05

You are listening to the down the wormhole podcast exploring the strange and fascinating relationship between science and religion. This week our hosts are Zack Jackson UCC pastor and Reading Pennsylvania. And before I had kids, I wished that they would inherit my thick brown hair, which I had gotten from my father and his father before them. And at least one of my children has it.

Rachael Jackson 00:32

Beautiful. Rachael Jackson, Rabbi at Agoudas, Israel, congregation Hendersonville, North Carolina. And before I had a child, I wished that they would inherit a combination of my dark hair, but my husband's thick, wavy, wonderful hair.

Zack Jackson 00:55

Well, as it turns out, I have two sons. And one of them has thick blond hair, and the other one has thin brown hair. So genetics, how about you how to work out for you,

Rachael Jackson 01:06

so works out. So my husband's hair is a blonde with some red undertones. And his beard is, you know, definitely blonde, brown, red combination. I have for those that haven't seen pictures of me, I have extremely dark chocolate brown hair, where it looks black in some light. And our son that has just straight up watered down chocolate brown hair kind of looks like oh, maybe cappuccino or something like that. And its thickness is a combination to it's not nearly as thick and whatever, I can't think of the right adjective to describe my husband's hair. But it's also not as thin as mine, I have very fine hair. So my son's hair is not very fine. But it has a mind of its own. And that's just hilarious. And now that he's seven, I was under the impression that maybe we should start combing it or something. We hadn't really before this. combed it. And so I tried to do that the other day, and he looks at me and he's just like, I don't care. I went, Okay, do your life. I'm not gonna carry you there. That's fine. That's fine.

Zack Jackson 02:31

You know, of all of the hard to believe crazy. Out of this world, complicated parts about this universe, genetics are one of the things that really blows my mind. Like it's just sexual reproduction in and of itself, that you can take the building blocks of one creature and another creature, and just like strip them down into a soup, and then make something new, that isn't like 5050. That could be any number of proportion of whatever of either one, and you have no idea what's going to come out the other side. And yet, what does come out the other side is often fairly recognizable, that you'd be like, yeah, my son really does look like me. And he's got my nervous tics. And he's my other son does not and my one son is allergic to the sun, which is not really allergic to it. It's a it's a weird short circuit in your brain where you get too much light and you sneeze. My mom had it. I have it. And one of my sons has it. But not the others. No, not the other.

Rachael Jackson 03:43

Yeah, well, genetics is so bizarre, maybe that's why we'd like Legos. Right? Like imagine that, that are four base pairs that make up our DNA at that combine. One again, from a scientific standpoint, we need one male and one female in our genetics to make this happen. combined these genes and next thing you know, you get a completely different structure. But what's amazing is that it's so similar. Unlike Legos, right? Where you sort of take one person, you strip them down to their base pairs, you take the other person strip them down to their base pairs, you combine it and it looks like their child's like it looks like their results. It could have the the possibilities that it could be something completely different is amazing. Right? So when you have there's this concept of recessive gene, add dominant gene. So if you have, let's say, for example, that you have two people who have brown eyes and their child is overwhelmingly Going to then have brown eyes. But perhaps let's say the mom, her mom has blue eyes, right? So this, this would be child, this hypothetical child's grandparent has blue eyes. So there's the potential of this child to then have blue eyes. But it's such a low potential, because it is a recessive gene, not a dominant gene. And that question of what is recessive and what is dominant? And what is just, you know, not for us to decide, and it's just sort of like a grab bag. And where are these things? And do we know where they are? What are the traits? How do we find them and mapping that on to this genetic code, or the genome is absolutely fascinating. And humans have their own particular genome, fruit flies, like anything that has DNA has a genome, this is one of the things that we talked about several weeks ago, when we were talking with Professor Dan Janis, and looking at the genome of these viruses, right, so they were using RNA, and we use DNA, but it's the same sort of concept that we can figure out where these things are, and what happens if we mess with them. And, and that's where the conversation that I wanted to go today is what happens when we mess with them. So in our series, we've been talking, sort of going through the life cycle of people. So last time, we were able to talk about puberty and different ideas there. And so this week, I really wanted to focus on sort of the next stage of life, which is pregnancy and all the things that come up for people around that time of life. And a caveat, something that I feel that I, I need to say, not just that I feel like I need to say, if a person or people choose not to have children, that is their choice. And that is a perfectly good way to live. And if people choose to have one, if people choose to have 10, that is their choice. And so that's something that I also want to be very clear today that just because we're talking about this does not mean that it is the way to live in our worlds, and I feel the societal pressure that, wow, you're not really, you're only having one, what's wrong with you, or you're choosing to be child free, not to child less. And so there is nothing less about not choosing to have a child. So even if you yourself, our listeners have not had a child or choosing not to have a child, I think this conversation can still be important because it's going to bring in questions of ethics, and medical ethics. So I just I just wanted to put that out there. And also I'll be using the terms male and female to identify rather than gendered terms of woman and man. Because we recognize and we support and our allies, to our LGBTQ family, and our friends. And so we recognize that the human species needs to have male and female in order to reproduce, how a person expresses themselves and who they are gendered is not necessarily part of that conversation then. So I just wanted to add those caveats in those that understanding in our conversation today. So all of that, all of that to say, it's totally amazing that we can take DNA from two different people split it up the middle and then combine it and create another creature like another human being not a creature a human being.

Zack Jackson 08:46

Not just a random,

Rachael Jackson 08:47

just some random

Zack Jackson 08:49

person chances

Rachael Jackson 08:52

are like that question. So I, I carried my child. And so when I was pregnant with him, people would say so what are you having? And like, That's such a weird question. It's like a dinosaur. I'm having a Stegosaurus like. This is like, I don't know if Nicole has a question. Or if you ever had that question on her behalf

Zack Jackson 09:14

a time people are so preoccupied with unborn fetuses, genitals, it's unsettling.

Rachael Jackson 09:21

Yes. Like, what else? Do we ever talk about it? Like really? When Elsa read or, or worse? So are you going to have another? Like, when else do we casually talk about people's sex lives? Like that is literally none of your business. It would be like asking the question, so are you and your partner having unprotected sex tonight?

Zack Jackson 09:45

Yeah, anytime a couple says like we're trying for another one. That's all I think is like wow, you just told me that you and your your partner are just going to have a lot of sex. Thanks for that. I didn't need to know that.

Rachael Jackson 09:56

This is like somehow in our semi period in society, we're allowed to be that invasive and that open about this topic.

Zack Jackson 10:07

It's someone like, So, have you thought about getting a nose job? And like, you know what this is my body? Maybe we don't talk about this right now, it seems kind of.

Rachael Jackson 10:19

Right, it seems kind of not appropriate, because we're just not in that kind of relationship. And that's, that's a boundary crosser. But we, what we do we ask that question of like, so what are you having, which is a question of genitalia. And we now, in the last, I'm just gonna not go through the whole medical thing. So I'm just going to use very broad, broad decades, within the last 100 years, we've now been able to be clarified what the genitalia will be, of an of a fetus have a yet to be born fetus using ultrasound techniques, right. So plus or minus 60 years, we've been able to do this, which is pretty cool. But it doesn't really actually change anything, just FYI. doesn't doesn't change anything. But now we know. And then, within the last few decades, we've been able to do more than ultrasounds. ultrasounds give us a glimpse into what is going on. And we hopefully, focus on the genitalia. And I say hopefully, because that means everything else is fine. That means the heartbeat is going well, that means the shape of the head is forming. That means you can see the organs that are happening and forming and that the brain is going right that it's all connecting. And it's working. And if you're getting to the point where you're really excited about if it's a boy or a girl, then that means everything else is okay. And that's not always the case. That's not always the case with ultrasound. So what do we do? What do we do? But before we get to that conversation, I want to take a step back, when we're talking about recessive and dominant genes. Now we're gonna get into some odd territory to have ethnicity. So have you heard of the royal blood disease?

Zack Jackson 12:31

In royal blood disease, like in Russia? Oh, in Russia, are we talking about like, the Czar's that are so inbred that they have all these medical problems. They had a whole there was a whole stick on that on 30 rock for for a while.

Rachael Jackson 12:50

Okay. So there's there's two, there's two royal families in the European continent that are pretty famous for medical issues. One is sort of the Russian side, which is Haemophilia. Which is sort of a royal blood disease royal, because a lot of the Royals had it. And the other is the Hapsburgs where they were so inbred that it caused massive issues. And by the end of the line, the person was sterile, right, there was just so many genetic issues that the person was sterile and couldn't then have any more of their own children. And there there went the end of the line. Right, so the Habsburgs and that, so that's an inbreeding. But there's other ways of of Ashwin is the way I'm looking for, of being in relation ship in a small group without having these dramatic inbreeding issues. One of those that's fairly common that I'm mostly intimately familiar with, is the Ashkenazi Jewish list. And the reason that that exists, is Ashkenazi Jews or central or Eastern European Jews. And for a very, very long time, it was illegal punishable by death to marry a Jewish person. And it was illegal punishable by death to convert to Judaism. So what do you do with our population? Right, they just breed with each other. Luckily, the population was large enough that it didn't cause these massive inbreeding issues that we see in in some cultures or and then the Hapsburgs. But that has caused some genetic issues and genetic traits. And we know that now. And one of the things so there is this idea of genetic screening between two people and to see what is their genetic recessive disorders recessive meaning they themselves are its carrier status, right? It's, you carry this gene doesn't affect you, but you hold it. And you could pass it along to your child. And the question is, if you're holding it, and your partner is holding it, your child's 25% gonna get it. Right. Like that's. So if you're holding something and your partner is holding something, but neither one of you have it, your child will have a 25% chance of getting it,

Zack Jackson 15:30

and then a 75% chance of being a holder if they don't get it.

Rachael Jackson 15:34

But 50% chance of being a holder and a 25% chance of not even carrying if not even being a carrier. Got it? Beautiful, right? That's sort of how these things work of all genes being equal. That's how it would work. Well, the Ashkenazi Jewish population has around 100, pretty nasty diseases, some less nasty than others, right? Most are achy, but not traumatic or disastrous. So what we do is if we have an ethnically, and this is where I'm where I'm saying, It's getting a little sticky, because we recognize that people are people. And every, you know, diversity is amazing. And we want people to just love and live and Yay. But the reality is that if you have and that also, I just want to say that when a person converts to Judaism, you're Jewish. But genetically doesn't have the same gene pool.

Zack Jackson 17:01

You mentioned Ashkenazi Jews. Yes. That's not the only group. And before I met you, I didn't know this. So I imagine a lot of our listeners also don't know, these distinctive genetic groups.

Rachael Jackson 17:16

Thank you. I does, I'm so absorbed in that world that I forget that Thank you. So Ashkenazi Jews showed up in central Eastern Europe, plus or minus 1000 years ago. Right? So we'll just use that timeframe. Where else were Jews in the world about 1000 years ago, in what's considered the ancient Near East or the Middle East, or however you want to understand? Israel, Egypt, that part of the world, right? And then in the 1500s 1492, not talking Columbus talking, the expulsion of Jews, right, and these are Sephardic Jews. And that's the, that's one of the other terms, right? Sephardic Jews are those that come from Spain, or the Iberian Peninsula to be more accurate. But 500 years ago, they were kicked out of there, and they had to go somewhere. And so where did they go? They went to the Ottoman Empire or South America. So those are Sephardic Jews, as the primary differences. There's also different rights are it e Yemenite, its Iraqi, etc, those are much smaller populations, mostly coming from a mix of Sephardic and the local populations. So even the Jews that are living in India, and those were, most of them were considered Sephardic Jews, right? Because prior to the prior to the expulsion in 1492, their families came from Spain. So when we look at a genetic, when we look at from a genetic standpoint, it's really two groups of people, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi,

Zack Jackson 19:03

and the Arctic have had more intermingling outside of their own group, BINGO,

Rachael Jackson 19:09

BINGO, because Spain and Portugal was like, get out of here. And so where did they go? They spread. Right? They went to lots of different places, and they intermingled. So their genetic their gene pool was much larger. Ashkenazi, not so much, tiny little shuttles. And the entire shuttle would be picked up and move to a different place.

Zack Jackson 19:36

And so being Christians are awful,

Rachael Jackson 19:38

right?

Zack Jackson 19:40

Historically, I think that's pretty uncontested. Yeah. So

Rachael Jackson 19:44

the Jews living in those regions, then we're had a much different experience in the Sephardic Jews. So their ability to find someone to marry was challenging. Without going into all of the details of how not quite accurate This was Fiddler on the Roof. If anyone has seen that one of the challenges that tavia has is he has to marry off his daughters. And there aren't any. There aren't any suitable Jews in their city. Right. So where does he has to find them from elsewhere? Right that that that kind of challenge of like, Okay, I've got seven daughters. What do I do? And they they brought in a matchmaker. Yay. Right? And if no one's got the song, right, Matchmaker, matchmaker maker, find me a Kashmir catch. And so they did the matchmakers job and this is getting us back to the genetic question. The matchmakers job was not just to match them with someone who could produce children, someone who could keep a roof over their their heads and, you know, happiness and love sure, but that's that's a new issue. But the matchmakers job way back when, right pre pre maternity was to know this family, did they have any issues? And were there lots of issues? Did they lose children not miscarriage? But did did their children die at young ages? And knowing that piece of information and saying Ah, and I have a family over here, right? This, this, this bride's family her, her family has had all these little graves, these little baby graves, and this groom's family, his family has all these little graves for children, do not combine them. Right. And they just know that, again, they didn't understand genetics, but they knew that there was something in this family's blood that caused these issues. And if the same issues arose in someone else's gene pool or someone else's bloodline, you don't combine those people. So that have that's one of the roles of the Ashkenazi Jewish matchmaker was to make sure that those genetic issues sort of stopped with the families as much as they could. So what we do now, is we actually do genetic pre testing, test the adults. So Zack, if I can ask the personal question, did you and Nicole have this question or wrestle with this? Or did anyone even bring this up to you to have your own genetics tested?

Zack Jackson 22:41

know, a little, that would have been so strange and invasive, and no one would have ever thought to do that.

Rachael Jackson 22:51

Okay. And after you had conceived, did that even come up?

Zack Jackson 22:56

There were no I know. They they know. Like, maybe a little bit when we're thinking about like, well, heart disease runs in both of our families. So we just need to make sure we're eating right. But like, that's, that's kind of,

Rachael Jackson 23:15

right, right. For our segment of the population, we actually talk about pre genetic testing, where we say okay, if you two want if you're both genetically Ashkenazi Jewish, let's get you pre tested and see if you're a carrier, see if this is a recessive gene. One of the most famous ones that people might have heard about is Tay Sachs. And Tay Sachs is a neurodegenerative disease, basically, where there's a piece of fat, right that the brain just turns to fat, rather than being a muscle. And because it's a muscle, or should be a muscle, it controls things. And starting around six months old, it just stops. So if you've ever been around a child, an infant who's about six months old, they're not. They're just starting to develop any ability to have language, right, just as an ooze and whatever, just somehow forming things. They're just beginning to really sit up and hold themselves, right, but they're not really mobile, right? They're not crawling, they're not walking, but they're there but you can just plop them down on the floor and be like, okay, here's your key ring, have go to town, right, those plastic keys. And starting around that age with Tay Sachs, that's when it starts to become degenerative to the point of losing all muscle control, going blind, going deaf, having zero physical ability and eventually suffocating with lungs and most children die by the age of five, if not sooner, and it is a horrific death, the the dying, the degeneration is traumatic and the death itself is awful. Well, that's a sex. And that's one of several diseases that are like that. So we suggest, and that I think I have to double check with the numbers are, there's been much more intermarriage recently, which is good for the gene pool. Not gonna say how it is for the religion, but it's good for the gene pool where the numbers are going down. But I one point I looked at was something like one and 21 and Trey were carriers of Ashkenazi Yeah, huge. And if if anyone has been to an ultra orthodox enclave, there is a lot more infant graves than the general population for all these different genetic issues.

Zack Jackson 25:53

So are people getting people are getting tested before they get married?

Rachael Jackson 25:56

Correct. So they can see if they're right, are you a carrier? And if you're not a carrier, okay, then Hmm.

Zack Jackson 26:06

I like if, if you were to get tested before you got married, and you found that you're both carriers, right? Like, would that change your decision to get married at all?

Rachael Jackson 26:19

What do you think? What would you do?

Zack Jackson 26:24

I think, well, if I'm back when I was getting ready to get married, I think I could have found out that Nicole was, you know, secretly, a Martian, or she had a disease where her hair would catch on fire every 10 years or something. And I would still probably if married her and be like, well figure it out down the line, I don't care that you've been cursed by a witch or something. That's futures x problem. Right? Right. Because has Zach was puppy dog love, and so I wouldn't have cared later down the line, though. You know, as time went on, and we thought about kids and thought, like, that's just gonna be, that's gonna be so dangerous, potentially. I don't know if I want to do that. And then maybe we'll have felt regret. I don't know. This is this is all brand new thought experiments to me.

Rachael Jackson 27:13

So let's keep going with that thought experiment. Right? So let's say you do get married. Because love triumphs and love is amazing. And kids don't make marriage, right. Marriage is its own entity. And so you can say, Yes, we choose to start a family. Turns out, we don't want to do that to us. Right. Very few people, I think would say, Oh, I'm a carrier and my partner's a carrier. Let's try it. Those are good odds. No, those are not good odds. Those are bad odds, because the result is so bad. So the answer is no, let's not do this, quote unquote, the natural way? Well, let's say you're just so tied to seeing those ticks in your kids to knowing that your kid is like you, genetically, that you're just tied to that idea. So what are some options? Right, exactly. You know, what, what are your options?

Zack Jackson 28:17

No, I would have no idea. I mean, if both partners are carriers, yeah. I mean, we don't have the technology to like, isolate and splice out those Sure

Rachael Jackson 28:26

do. What should we do?

Zack Jackson 28:29

No, we do not.

Rachael Jackson 28:31

Here's what we do have Stop it. We have the ability to create zygotes where you take a sperm and you take an egg in IVF. Right. So you make the woman like, okay, so just a little bit of medical technology. And sorry, I'm dominating the conversation. Take a little bit of technology.

Zack Jackson 28:49

I glad it's not me dominating the conversation about pregnancy and, and Jewish genetics. Very appropriate that way. Thanks. So Turkey,

Rachael Jackson 29:01

generally speaking, a woman oscillates and yields one egg per monthly cycle. Right. And then if things if, if intercourse happens at that time, and everything is right, then there's pregnancy that's able to happen. But you don't want to just take one at a time when you're trying to do IVF. You want a whole bunch, so you just like load the woman up with hormones and all these other things. And then you go in and you grab a whole bunch of eggs at the same time. It's like, I got 10.

Zack Jackson 29:38

I can't help but imagine like a farmer, right? We're doing picking chicken eggs,

29:43

bacon, chicken eggs. That's right.

Zack Jackson 29:45

This is all very scientific,

Rachael Jackson 29:47

tinier, tiny little pinchers, right. You take all of these, and you take the sperm and you take you take a sperm and you're just like, Hi, meet your partner, and they come together in a petri dish. Or test to write test two babies. And we've had that technology 40 ish years, right? And now what but the sperm and the egg get together and you're just like, Oh, it's so beautiful. Let's make more of us. And they go from that one to two to four to eight and then pause. you pause everything at eight cells.

Zack Jackson 30:20

What do you mean, you pause it,

Rachael Jackson 30:21

you stop the reactions from continuing you stop that. You freeze them. Like I don't, I don't know the science behind it.

Zack Jackson 30:30

Like actually freezing them in and like it like

Rachael Jackson 30:33

you just like you put it like you put it in spaces. That's not the right word. But like, you just stop the reaction.

Zack Jackson 30:40

This is all science fiction to me. So

Rachael Jackson 30:41

you go. And then you take one of those eight cells. You do this, lots of sperm, lots of eggs, and you take one of those eight cells, and you look at it and you say, Alright, this is going to tell me all of the genetics of the future fetus and child. Oh, yeah. And you can say, Ah, this child will have Tay Sachs, this child will have cystic fibrosis, this child will have brown eyes, brown hair, generally be tall will have no heart disease will be male. And 1/8 of a set 1/8 of this will tell you that and then you say, ah, I've taken a look. I know that this one doesn't have a six it doesn't have any genetic disorders. Fantastic. let it continue to grow. Let me pop it in your uterus, or a surrogate unit uterus if yours is not a good place to grow things. And then you grow the child's and you're fine.

31:42

Helmets off.

Zack Jackson 31:44

So wait.

Rachael Jackson 31:46

I'm blowing Zach's mine. Okay, so I know that I know that audio and Zach's head is like literally flooded?

Zack Jackson 31:53

I know, we should have been recording the video and smacking into my microphone and everything. Yeah. Okay. So you get a bunch of bunch of fertilized eggs. And, and then the doctor says to you, all right, we've got 16 here, and seven of them are with are not going to have k sex? Do you then get the choice? Like, do you want a boy? Do you want a girl? Do you want to tall kid a short kid? Or are they sequencing the full genome are just looking for those markers?

Rachael Jackson 32:27

And that's where this becomes an ethical question. Where are we asking? We I believe I Rachel believe that when we say I don't want the trauma. And I know I'm using that word again. And the tragedy of bringing a life into this world only to see it suffer and die. And we are preventing that. And that is amazing. And I completely support that. I think we should use our technology in those ways. The question then becomes, how much information do you get? Because yes, generally speaking, when you're doing the Royal you, when you're doing these investigations of the genome, it's all found, you know, what gender you know what sex it is, you know, what? hair color and all of these other things that we have genetic markers for, you know what those are, and they test for them all. And so you can have this picture of what this child could look like. And so the question becomes, okay, now you have four, three are male, and one is female. Which do you implant? Who gets that choice? Should anyone get that? Drake's? What do you think?

Zack Jackson 34:14

This is where it'll be really helpful to have more guests on the show.

Rachael Jackson 34:19

Put the pressure off of you.

Zack Jackson 34:24

Yeah, right, take the pressure off of me because it's somehow feels different when we're talking about minimizing suffering and death and weeding out something like Tay Sachs, or something else that would inevitably end in suffering and death. And then there's like the next level down, where it's like this could potentially cause suffering and death. So like markers for heart disease, or diabetes or something like that. That is may cause suffering down the line. But it's it's kind of your baseline average it sucks to be human suffering. And then there's like things that won't really affect that. But maybe the family ones that are more cosmetic, you know about height and, and weight and hair color, hair color, eye color, things like that. And then there's like this whole other category of things that are like, would cause social suffering, right? Like, you might say, Wow, it is much better to be born a man in this day and age. So if I have a choice, I'm going to raise somebody who's going to be able to get ahead easier in the world, and be like, I'm worried. So we're gonna have a son to pass on our name and get a good job, we'll make him tall, tall, dark, handsome, as best as we can. And set him up for success. And then that feels like a different ballgame that feels like custom humans and but not custom humans in the way of like designing a genome and then spitting out something. But custom humans in a sort of process of elimination, wasteful kind of a way that then feels like if we're fertilizing a bunch of eggs, and only keeping the healthy ones, because we're trying to minimize suffering and death, for some reason that feels morally better than creating a bunch just so that we can find the one that's the best, that feels a little more shady. For all of the nerds out here, my my brain is immediately going to all of those hours I spent breeding Pokemon and Pokemon field recently on switch, and putting two in there catching an egg checking to see how strong it is, and then releasing it into the wild, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of strays running around the world right now because I wanted to find the perfect one. And now when I kept and trained, and I even in a video game I felt a little dirty about

Rachael Jackson 37:09

that's good. I think that means your ethics is kind of in check. But those are the questions that people face every time they go through this process.

Zack Jackson 37:21

Yeah. And so then created, they're not intentionally,

Rachael Jackson 37:25

right. And then the question becomes, who gets to decide if there is a decision to be made? Again, so let's let's just agree that the suffering the immediate and error, irreversible or blanking on the word, guaranteed suffering and death, that were just that those, those are just not going to be implanted? Right? We just, we just, that's part of the reason for doing this, right? We're just saying, okay, no, but now we've got four healthy ones. And let's keep it at a reasonable number for that you implant to now and then you can have a sibling later and implant to in a couple of years. Right. But if you have more than that, like, who's making the decision? Is it the parents? Is it the doctor who's doing the implantation? Is it the geneticist who found this information? Right, so from my perspective, we can we have to have layers of trust and layers of ignorance. We where the trust is we trust the geneticists finds the ones that would cause suffering, and said, these ones, these ones aren't going to be good, right? To use a very subjective term. These five are great. And I'm not going to tell you anything more about it. And then the doctor, the implanter, and the parent say, Okay, I've got five good eggs. How many do you want to try now? And that's all that that's all they know. It creates a barrier, but then we'd need to check and balance with the geneticist to make sure that the genetic so then the geneticist doesn't have any say into Oh, well did. The geneticist really likes girls that the geneticist really likes brown hair, right there, that's what's good or bad.

Zack Jackson 39:22

Right? And then years down the road, there's gonna be some big breaking story about this geneticist who was like a white supremacists, right. patriarchy guy who's been intentionally implanting only men

Rachael Jackson 39:36

for why they're only boys, right? The rest are bad, right? So there has to be some sort of check in that situation of what's identified and someone to then audit using a bookkeeping term, right to audit what this geneticist is doing. So in Judaism, the answer is at this point, right because we have questions and answers called Holocaust. response and response basically says, if it's going to be suffering and death, don't implant them and just destroy the embryos. Other than that, anything other than that heart disease, Down syndrome, right, diabetes, things that just naturally occur that might make it harder in society. No, you don't get to abort, or you don't get to choose to not implant those ones for those reasons. You say, yeah, I've had enough kids. The difference in Judaism, which I personally disagree with some of this is from a gendered standpoint, or a sex standpoint, where if you already have two boys, you're allowed to choose a female one. Or if you already have two females, you're allowed to choose a male one, to ensure a balance in your nuclear family. So that's, that's sort of where the Holocaust rests.

Zack Jackson 41:06

Okay, it feels like a concession that someone made,

Rachael Jackson 41:08

right. But it's, it's exactly that you get a little bit more, because if you if if this if you're both carriers, and you want to have multiple children, and you're like, Ah, well, I've already had two boys. Make sure that this one's a girl, then they can. Mm hmm. So, but now let's, let's get forward on your ethics. Let's say you don't go through that testing, like the majority of people don't. And you're pregnant. Yay. Yay. And you have an ultrasound and something's not Yay. And they ask the question, do you want an amniocentesis? Or do you want some other genetic testing of the fetus and amniocentesis is basically where they go into the belly, and into the amniotic fluid, take some of the fluid out and test that fluid, which means that they're puncturing the amniotic sac, which is basically the baby's life. Yeah, right. So if they puncture it, and something goes wrong, there's a 1% chance of miscarriage at that point, which is a decently high percentage, for a question mark, right, of what's going to come from this. So what do you do then?

Zack Jackson 42:24

defer 100% to my wife. I feel like with most of these decisions that have to do with childbearing and, and the creation of life, that these decisions should be made by the one carrying the life and fostering the life much more than the person who had a little bit of say in the beginning. But I think at the end, I know what what she would say would be, okay, well, what what are we going to do with the information we get? And are we considering terminating the pregnancy? If we find that it's something awful? And if that's the case, then it's worth taking the chance? If we're not going to terminate the pregnancy, that it's not worth taking the chance? And we'll see what happens.

Rachael Jackson 43:21

Yeah, exactly. I think that's wonderful way of looking at it. If you ask the question, what do you do with the answer? If the answer is nothing, right, that you're doing nothing with the answer that you receive, then why ask the question

Zack Jackson 43:35

is just for peace of mind.

Rachael Jackson 43:39

Great, like, why? Right? Nobody asked that question. Nobody had the ability to ask that question. 100 years ago, right, didn't have that ability. So why is the question now if you're not going to do anything about it? which then gets us to the religious side of things. So Zack, if you could tell us about the various stages of what life is like, when does life happen? When does a soul happen? When does like in your tradition? When do those pieces happen?

Zack Jackson 44:21

Well, the various strands of Christianity are all over the place, as is true with almost anything. I came from a church that taught very strictly that life, human life begins at conception, at the moment that the sperm enters the egg and they do their little dance, and there is a single cell. Or maybe when that single spouse splits into two, that's when life exists. That's when there is a soul present. That's when this is a human being and anything you do to That human being in that womb, that would be equated to what you would have done to a person, an adult human. Essentially. We were that church who protested at Planned Parenthood and had awful giant banners of aborted fetuses and just leave without those people. And I'm horrified now. That tradition I'm in now, the United Church of Christ is kind of work. congregational denominations, every church is allowed to do their own thing. But from a national standpoint, they would say that life begins when a child is on their own, when a child is out of the mother, and is able to live by their own means.

Rachael Jackson 45:56

Almost a medical definition then, right? Yes, is it it's a viable, that it's viable,

Zack Jackson 46:01

that it's viable on its own. So after, after birth, essentially. So we're not talking like, you know, 36 weeks or whatever, but like, after the child is out on their own, then they are a, a life, and we just, we don't bother ourselves with the question of souls, entering bodies and whatnot. One person, I pointed out that up to 14 days, a, an embryo can still become twins. And so after 14 days is when the soul enters the body, because then you'd need two souls, if it was going to be twins. And so that's the moment that it happens. And when I heard that, it said, I thought to myself, this whole thing feels very arbitrary. Like, we are really trying to shove very ancient, almost mystical ideas about how the physical and the spiritual intermingle in what makes humans special from animals. And we are trying to shove that now into scientific understandings of life. And it gets messy, and then we pretend like it's not messy, and that makes it nastier.

Rachael Jackson 47:32

Is there a differentiation of something which is alive, and something which is a human life?

Zack Jackson 47:44

modern progressive Christians would say, Yes. That though, like a tissue in the uterus, is alive on its on its own, it is also so heavily connected to the mother, that it is, in some sense, a part of it. And is is just is not a human being as itself an autonomous being. Just definitionally, I mean, my own perspective, is that I try not to have a perspective because it's not my body. And I would rather listen to the people who have those bodies and have those experiences to tell me what is happening within them.

Rachael Jackson 48:31

Although I will push you on that and say that, especially as a, as a man, being an ally, is also important. And so to understand where your ally ship feels in accordance with your morality is important. But I appreciate that I applaud the idea that the person who's making these decisions as the person going through these decisions themselves,

Zack Jackson 48:59

it also helps that I no longer have a, an individual theology of a human soul. Which then kind of changes a lot of the conversation. Like if you believe that there is an immaterial spiritual thingness that resides within you, and without you, that enters into you, or is formed into you, and then once you die is freed, to continue its everlasting life in whatever afterlife, like that idea, which honestly, is a bit more Hindu than biblical. This is the Atman we're talking about more than what the Bible would talk about as a spirit, a soul, a life a person or whatever. And I mean, when I say Bible, I mean both Christian and Hebrew Bibles. A lot is read into it. I think what the the the Christian Bible Promises is a resurrection of humanity. That the dead ur dead, ur dead are dead. And that the promises not that they die and then are washed away in some ethereal state. But the promise is that the God who remembers them will resurrect them and give them new life here on earth with a physical Earth and a physical garden and trees and wildlife and all those things, there's not really a promise other than in a couple of isolated places, in Paul's writings that talk about being freed from this mortal coil. There's not really a whole lot of indication of an individual eternal soul that is present with in a person, despite the fact that it's so present within Christian theology historically, it's not really biblical. And so if you no longer have that hinderance theologically speaking, then this question becomes a lot more scientific. Like if that if that embryo that is growing into a fetus, as growing into a child within the womb is does not have an eternal essence to it. It doesn't have a them that is them that is then that is them yet, then it's an entirely different ethical question, then it is that thing, a, a divine, a carrier of the Divine?

Rachael Jackson 51:23

Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you for, for adding to that I've not really thought about it in in those ways. That also

Zack Jackson 51:31

might get me in trouble. So I'm sorry, all of you who are listening, who are a member of my church, don't tell anyone. All three of you.

Rachael Jackson 51:42

And I'll just say, gay Judaism, big

Zack Jackson 51:51

man,

Rachael Jackson 51:52

because we basically have this idea that there are so we don't just stick to the Bible. The Bible just influences other conversations such as the Tom Budd, which is really just 2700 pages of people arguing with each other. And what does this mean? And what does this mean, and going on from there, and in these pages, one of those examples, basically says, there's this, this I got, I just got, I just got to actually share the share the line, right, so we've all heard, and a hammer Robbie's code, right? An eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth and iron for a lar, or a limb for a limb a life for a life. And there's so many ways of answering What does that mean? You know, it's like God's revenge. And then the answer is, actually, it's proportionality. And another is actually it's just talking five different kinds of damages and using the body as an example of that. Yeah, that's that's like, Torah gymnastics right there. So we, we still have that, right. So if you keep that in mind, and that that's written down in the Bible, right, written down in the Old Testament, and then there's this line in Exodus 21. Exodus 2122. For anyone that would like to check on me. It says, If men strive together, right, so you got a bar brawl going on? Right? just let's just set the scene. I'm just gonna quote the whole thing. You got a bar brawl? Right? The bar brawl happens. And this woman comes out and says, Come on, has been Time to go home. Like you got to get work in the morning. She's just like, walking up there and she's pregnant. And and like a fight ensues and the non husband accidentally kicks her and hurts her. And she miscarries. Right. And that's it. Like nothing else. She's not even bruised in the ribs. She doesn't have a scrape on her knee. She just miscarries caveat parents medical aside, it's not just a miscarriage, it can be very traumatic. I am so sorry if that's ever happened to you. I honor that challenge. That's not the point of this conversation. But I want to recognize that miscarriages are not just miscarriages. Close parentheses. So she's fine otherwise, physically. So then they say, Oh, hey, you damaged my fetus. You owe me money. The person who did the damages What is he supposed to do? And it says, yet no harm follow, he shall surely be fined according as the woman's husband shall lay upon him and he shall pay as the judge determines because the only harm came to the loss of the fetus, not to her, but it's in the same same category as a limb for a limb alive. For a life, but it was a miscarriage. And the person who caused it is not paying with any body part, including his life from that lie and there is the not so far leap of, therefore the fetus is not a life. Hmm. It had potential hay, that could have been a boy that he could have worked in the farm and you owe me for that damages, you hurt my cow, you hurt my property, and therefore you owe me for the damages of my property. But it is not a life. And it's from that line that more than that, that our understanding of So when is this life thing happening. And there are other lines that I won't go into the gruesome nature of what they talk about, basically, it says up to 40 days, it's like water. So 40 days, which, scientifically speaking, you know, it's about six weeks. So if anything happens before six weeks, whatever, like, it's just like water, like there's literally nothing else, or we're not even going to do anything if if a miscarriage or an abortion, a spontaneous or an intentional miscarriage happens, great man gonna do anything about that. And then comes that other period of it's still really attached to the female that it is living within as a parasite. Loving pregnant, totally a parasite,

Zack Jackson 56:50

your bones,

Rachael Jackson 56:51

Oh, my God. Again, loved it was not was not did not feel like

Zack Jackson 56:58

my calcium child,

Rachael Jackson 57:00

and my blood supply and my brain cells, please go on. Thanks for that. That it is not considered a nephesh it is not considered a soul a life until the moment that the entire head is outside of the body. At that point, when the entire head is outside of the body, then the life of the person delivering it and the life of this child, this infant are now equal. Up until that point, it is considered as a limb of the mother. So if you imagine a limb, and you're just like, this limb has become gangrenous, I must get rid of it. Okay, let's get rid of the limb. If your life is in danger, because this limb is going to cause you death, then you get rid of it. It is considered and so using that language that it is as a limb, I think really changes, who owns it? Who makes the decision? And what can happen to it. I know this is all new for you, do you care to react?

Zack Jackson 58:25

And it sounds like it's being treated like a person who would trample on seedlings. And the question then is do you are you then guilty of destroying my tomatoes? Or just with the things that would one day bear tomatoes? Yeah, and that's a distinction I hadn't really considered. And coming from a place like that. Yeah, Exodus. That was, I came out of left field. Because we in the evangelical world, we would often quote from especially from Psalms from some of the more poetic places of you who formed my parts. my innermost being you knew me from in my mother's womb on all of these, this language of personal autonomy before birth and intentionality of creation. And all of those were used to, to give autonomy to the thing before it's born. So it's really interesting to hear that the people who wrote those books, interpret them differently than the people who inherited them. Which is so often the case so are doing Christians and Jews.

Rachael Jackson 59:44

So So holding that holding that idea of of imbuing all of these characteristics into something that is not yet born. Here's a piece from the mission of then that I'll share with you and this is trigger warning. It's a little bit graphic and used as hyperbole, okay? Because they didn't actually enforce capital punishment. But this is using that example to highlight and underscore what they're saying. So, in the case of a pregnant woman who is taken by the court to be executed, the court does not wait to execute her until after she gives birth. Rather, she is killed immediately. But with regard to a woman who is taken to be executed, while sitting in the throes of labor, on the on the birthing stool, the court shall wait to execute her. And then the following conversation is, well, isn't it obvious that the court executes a pregnant woman rather than waiting? After all, it's just a part of her body, the fetus is considered her property? If so, the courts should wait until she gives birth before executing her and not cause him to lose the fetus. And this is no actually this is not taken into account at all. So who gets so a woman who is pregnant, who is meant to be murdered by the state right? capital punishment? Yes. Up until the point where she is in active labor, on the birth. And so for those of you that are aren't so familiar with midwifery, on the birthing stool means the woman is pushing. She's not just in labor, like she is pushing, and that baby's head is like coming out. Only until that point, they can execute her up until them

Zack Jackson 1:01:40

worth noting, too, that the mission is not a modern

Rachael Jackson 1:01:44

document. Thank you. Yes, the mission was written down approximately 1900 years ago. Yeah. So contemporary with other Christian with Christian sources that might be interpreting this in a completely different way. So that's sort of the Jewish way of understanding this.

Zack Jackson 1:02:03

Okay. Interesting, though, that it's considered a part of the mother's body and not the father's property, as I would imagine a patriarchal society would want to do that, like, don't execute her until she's given birth, because that's that child is my property is how I would imagine them back then, to be thinking, but

Rachael Jackson 1:02:19

no, and that was that was the question that came out in the gamar, which was written about 200 years later, like, wait a minute, it's his property, he should get a say, right, he doesn't. And it's like, actually, it's not his property on till it comes out.

Zack Jackson 1:02:33

Wow. So 2000 years ago, there were people saying that a woman's body is it's her body, her choice? Yeah. And

Rachael Jackson 1:02:42

it's her body. And who gets to choose? She does? Hmm. Yeah.

Zack Jackson 1:02:51

Well, the early Roman Christians got real weird about sex and REL controlling about their patriarchy. And that really went a long way into informing what Christianity in Europe would develop as for the next couple 1000 years, and we are still recovering a lot from from that. And so it's actually kind of refreshing to hear that contemporaries of early Christians, and probably some early Christians as well. We're Reading these verses and thinking about life in these ways.

Rachael Jackson 1:03:23

Yeah. So when we're thinking about life in these ways, I think it's really important for us to recognize that it's not so clear cut, that these are difficult choices, that there's no easy answers, there are no, frankly, actual answers that everyone can follow. It's right. It's not math. It's not two plus two equals four, it's that every situation is unique and of itself, and the people who are actually impacted should be the one to be making these decisions, not somebody else. And I'll just sort of use this platform to also say that lawyers and politicians have no place in the gynecological office at all, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. They don't. They don't ever have a place that I think the only people that even dare to have a place in there is the person whose body it is their medical practitioner, and their partner. Those are the people that get a say, and no one else

Zack Jackson 1:04:37

in that order,

Rachael Jackson 1:04:38

in that order, in that order, until we come up with some other way of reproducing in that order. Yeah. So go support Planned Parenthood. Go yell at your politicians who are not choosing this who are not recognizing that and there's a few things that I'll just say that I'm going to put in the show notes. Because for those of you that have not had the experience of having yourself or a loved one or a person in your circle of concern, go through an abortion to have to make that choice. It's really easy to assign blame. And it's really easy to say what you would have done, but you've never been in those shoes. And anyone considering that choice is not taking it lightly. It's and so I just want to dispel that it's, it's never used as a birth control option. It's never used as a ploy of oops, I just forgot, well, let me just go down the street and have an abortion, right? There's no, there's no casual this to anyone that's had to make this decision. All the more. So the later in a pregnancy, this decision has to be made, the more you've heard felted kick or heard its heartbeat, or watched your own body change to accommodate this. That is not a choice that anyone wants to make. So I will be including in the show notes, some stories of people who've had to make those choices, and how they've, how they've dealt with it. Oh, I know that kind of took a serious turn. This isn't quite where we're going.

Zack Jackson 1:06:25

But I think one excellent place to land.

Rachael Jackson 1:06:28

And when we're talking about ethics, I think that that's part of our conversation is who gets to make these decisions. When we're when we're speaking ethics. And when we look at medical ethics, part of the part of the list is do no harm. Personal autonomy and resources. Right fair justice and fairness and those ways. So yeah,

Zack Jackson 1:07:01

thank you for leading us in this discussion that I'm I'm so glad it was you. And that the fact that there were so few of us here today meant that you had the space to explore that a little bit further.

Rachael Jackson 1:07:15

No thank you for doing that. And listeners please please, please tell us your your your questions. Give us your questions. Give us your your experiences that you're feeling comfortable enough to share, give us your opinions, right tell us engage us with this conversation because it's it's even more meaningful, the more we hear from you