Babies and Money
- Thread starter Orleander
- Start date
LOL, hey! You read my thread.
I vaguely recall it.
Seeing as we're talking after death ethics necrophilia was the first thing I could think of!
I don't think anything is ethical if somebody doesn't consent so unless it is done so before death it would be unethical, it's along the lines of rape or murder.
The unfortunate thing is if someone agrees to it before they do they cannot withdraw consent, but it's still an individual choice. I'll include organ donors, sperm donors, and necrophilia in that statement.
not if it gets tangled up in court. Just one person has to contest the will and its held up.
ANYWAYS!!!!! Do you think its ethical to have a person's kid in this manner after they are dead. What's to stop a man from harvesting his rich wife's eggs, fertilizing them and then using a surrogate for the rest of his life.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Only if his will is written that way. What if he wrote the will to accommodate the possibility that one or more women were pregnant with his children at the time of his death? What if he died before he had any children? If he didn't actually account for those possibilities the American legal system will rely on precedents set in other cases. These days if you intend to leave a will that in any way deviates from plain vanilla, or your life in any way deviates from plain vanilla, you'd better spend several thousand dollars on lawyers, at least in the USA.
The law on reproductive rights is pretty chaotic. I would not depend on that ruling being made automatically.
They do it all the time, dude! It's not rocket science.
That is certainly a post-Enlightenment, Eurocentric viewpoint. For thousands of years, the main--and sometimes only--purposes of marriage were to produce children and preserve the community. With the rise of politics and commerce, the consolidation of power and cementing of alliances became important reasons. It's only in the last few centuries that love was even acknowledged seriously as a factor in marriage choices, or that people were even given much of a voice in the selection of their own mates.
I've talked to people who had arranged marriages. They say that if you grow up in a society where that's what you expect, and your parents do a good job, one day you realize you're in love anyway. Which is kind of the opposite of the way it works in many of our marriages.
Pandaemoni
Valued Senior Member
This (along with slightly more conventional ways in which heretofore unknown children can spring up) is why any lawyer worth his fee will make the testator specifically name every child that the testator wants to leave something to. A wealthy man probably would spring for the good lawyer (though even the generic books of legal forms you can buy at amazon.com usually warn you against the dangers of bequests to "my children" or even "my wife" without naming them specifically).
As for whether this is "unethical or just tasteless" (why and "or"?), I'd need more information. If the testator knew that the wife wanted to have children with him and intended to have offspring post-mortal coil shuffling, then it's certainly not unethical (though it still might be tasteless). Assuming he had no such intent, then it's a question of what the decedent's thoughts woould have been had he known it was going to happen. If he'd have been cool with it, then I don't see it as unethical.