Law &. Ethics for Medical Careers 5th Edition by Karen Judson,Carlene Harrison

Exercise 10

Reproductive science has progressed so rapidly that laws have not kept pace. For example, in 1996, a couple lost their adult, sin­gle daughter, Julie, to leukemia. Before her death, Julie had paid a fertility clinic to harvest and freeze several of her eggs. When Julie died, her parents inherited the frozen eggs, along with Julie's furniture and other material possessions. Julie's parents then paid a surrogate mother to carry one of Julie's implanted eggs, fertilized by a sperm donor. Julie's parents did not plan to raise their grandchild themselves.
"This field [reproductive medicine] is screaming for oversight, regula­tion and control," Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post in 1998 when asked about the above scenario. "If you are going to make babies in new and novel ways, you have to be sure it's in the interest of the baby."
Although no laws prevented the parents in the above situation from paying a surrogate mother to carry one of their deceased daughter's fertil­ized eggs, in your opinion, did they act ethically? Why or why not? What values are involved in your answer?
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