Abstract
As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, like other nascent medical technologies ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC) raises no earth-shatteringly new moral questions. Rather, it poses old moral questions in new ways, thus shedding light not only on our old answers but also on our old methods of reaching them. My task here is to point out the ways in which OTC forces us to embrace important changes of emphasis in bioethics discourse around reproduction, changes that were already burgeoning and are now being reinforced by the unequivocal demands of this particular technology. All but the last of these is specifically tied to discussions that have preoccupied philosophical and religious feminism; the last, as a logical consequence of the first four, connects indirectly.
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- 1.
Adoption is not a substitute for gestational motherhood in Islamic cultures or in some Hindu communities [4].
- 2.
It can be argued that the existence of the ovaries could pressure a woman to use them; this is true, however, of the “biological clock” for fertile women. In both cases biology and social values combine to create pressures that exist independently of OTC.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the oncofertility consortium NIH 8UL1DE019587, 5RL1HD058296.
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Traina, C.L. (2010). Ovarian Tissue Cryopreservation and Bioethical Discourse. In: Woodruff, T., Zoloth, L., Campo-Engelstein, L., Rodriguez, S. (eds) Oncofertility. Cancer Treatment and Research, vol 156. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6518-9_12
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