NOTION OF PROGRESS

PROGRESS

The notion of progress is a current topic which generates a lot of debates and polemics. Indeed, during the last two centuries, we witnessed to many technical, scientific and also social breakthrough. Scientific progress is defined by medical advances, cures for illness, cloning or genetically modified organisms. We're going to develop this idea of progress and especially the case of determined pregnancy.

What are IVF, artificial insemination and fertility treatment? What polemics this scientific breakthrough can convey? How is seen this new means to got pregnant by people in society?

To help us answer these different problematics, we're going to use three different documents whose two have been studied in class.

. Scientific research has know an incredible soaring in the end of the 20th century, and especially in the medical field. We have worked on several documents which were about this soaring medical, and in particular about medically asisted human procreation and designer child.

We can define medically assisted human reproduction as a pregnancy which is totally created and managed by doctors. There are several types : for example, there's the solution of IVF (in-vitro fertilization), which is a procedure to help infertile couples to conceive a child. There's also the solution of freezing eggs or embryos which consists in keep the embryos for later to postpone the pregnancy to few years later. But those solutions are in the center of a lot of debates ; people are divided on the moral dimension of these ways to get pregnant. In a way, it's normal that people are slightly skeptical about these new methods because they are recent, and like all the others medical advances, it takes a bit of time before people are fully confident. But, nowadays, in plus of the solutions that have been found to help infertile couples to conceive a child, there's the possibility to choose what your future child will look like and what genes it will have : for example, you could have a baby in good health, with a certain eye color or a certain hair color... Most of the time, people use this method to conceive a child in good health to save their first one, affected by some genetic illness, because scientists can chose the blood type, or can give any similar gene of the one who's sick to then give him some cells if he needs it.

The passage we studied in class, extract from the script of a science-fiction movie of the late 90s which is called “Gattaca” and directed by Andrew Niccol, is a dialogue between a couple, Antonio and Maria, and a geneticist. They're talking about the conception of their next child, because they want him to be genetically “perfect”. We saw an extract of the film and we understood that Vincent, the first child of the couple, is a child born “naturally” but at birth, doctors detected he would suffer serious heart problems and he wouldn't exceed thirty years old. So, for their next child, they decided to appeal to science and this one was at the height of their expectations. In this text, we see that Antonio and Maria have already chosen the characteristics of their future child : “blue eyes, dark hair and fair skin”. This passage is a true representation of what happens nowadays because we can now chose and decide about everything for our future children if we use this method. Even if it's still not a procedure many used, it remains a means to get pregnant for the richest infertile couples who want to design their future baby. But this is in the center of some polemics because some couples just want their baby to be “perfect” in the eyes of society, to enter in the beauty canons.

Thus, it can convey a lot of debates and controversies, because we can see both pros and cons in this method.

. This scientific breakthrough can be seen as a good one but also as a bad one. They're several points of view that we can analyze and discuss.

The method of in-vitro fertilization can actually bring a possibility to couples who can't

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