Jane's female fetus has aborted
I assume you mean "miscarried" and you're not trying to muddle this discussion by bringing in the issue of abortion.
and it is decided she can never become pregnant again. She and her husband want their child anyway and have the money to do it. Specialists remove egg cells from the fetus
The devil is in the details and the details of this scenario are unfortunately not very well crafted. Why is it that Jane shouldn't become pregnant again? Obviously some dreadful information was learned from the circumstances of the miscarriage. Whatever is wrong with her, isn't there a good chance that it's genetic and was passed on to her unborn daughter? Otherwise they could just take one of Jane's ova. I don't know about everybody else here, but I'm sitting on the edge of my chair waiting to find out why the fetus's eggs are even under consideration, and it keeps me from concentrating on the puzzle.
, fertilize them by the husband and impregnate a surrogate mother with the fertilized eggs. It grows full term and a healthy baby is born. Who is the mother?
A more sordid question is: Who is the father? It turns out that Mister Jane is both the baby's father and the baby's grandfather. Incest is strongly discouraged in the U.S., even in Alabama.
This is probably not illegal since no intercourse took place, but I doubt that any reputable doctor would participate.
So genetic defects are more likely if sex and creating life is kept "within the family"?
There's some controversy over the consequence of a single iteration of incest. Someone posted the genetic math on SciForums and the risk from first cousins marrying is remarkably small. The problems come in when it becomes common practice within a family
But aren't we all related as cousins? We all are family right? Therefore, we are all involved in incest if we choose to have sex or if we are forced to.
Yes, we are all descendants of "Lucy," whom I'm sure you've heard of. Nonetheless, the risk dissipates quickly as you expand the number of individuals involved. This comes up in speculation about generation starships. I read an unsubstantiated assertion that if you have a community of at least 600 people who are not knowingly related, you have adequate genetic diversity to prevent the problems of inbreeding, even though obviously by the third or fourth generation everybody will be knowingly related. Royal families developed genetic problems by inbreeding because they were not observing the 600-person rule. Little communities in Appalachia that have been inbreeding for ten generations have been studied and found to be healthy because they have a large enough population.
At the beginning human beings people must have been "down with incest" in order for the human race to survive.
That's a reasonable assumption. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas, have no hangups about incest. I don't know much about chimpanzee life, but in one species of gorilla the pack consists of a patriarch and a group of adult females. All of their male offspring and some of their females leave when they reach puberty, finding other loners in the forest and forming new packs. But the patriarch continues to breed with his own daughters. (And perhaps granddaughters, I don't know how long gorillas live nor at what age they reach sexual maturity.) So incest is quite common and primatologists say the effects of the inbreeding are striking. If you look at the skulls of the gorillas of one tribe and those from a more distant tribe, they are so different you'd swear they were a different species. Nonetheless there is enough cross-breeding that it hasn't caused them any serious trouble.
If a fetus isn't a person, how can the fetus be a mother?
I think Charles was talking about biology, not ethics. It comes down to DNA and there's no question that the miscarried fetus is the mother of the live-born baby. Some hapless bureaucrat who is not at all prepared for this will have to figure out what name to list on the birth certificate.
