Facebook
and Apple will now give up to $20,000 in benefits to help employees pay for
infertility treatments, sperm donors and even to freeze their eggs. This from a
recent Associated Press article.
Shelley
Correll, a sociology professor and director of the Clayman Institute for Gender
Research at Stanford University stated “It potentially addresses the conflicts
between the biological clock and the clockwork of women’s careers: The time
that’s most important in work, for getting your career established, often
coincides with normal fertility time for women. This can potentially help
resolve that by pushing women’s fertility into the future.”
Good to
know we’ve got our priorities straight.
Some experts claim other companies will follow
suit “because it’s the right thing to do. It’s telling women they have the
‘opportunity’ to put off child bearing and focus on their careers.” (And) not make decisions based on certain reproductive limits women have. Apple’s and Facebook’s reproductive benefits policies also appeal to gay and lesbian couples who want to
use a surrogate or a sperm donor to have a baby.
This is
certainly a brave new world we are entering. Insurance and health care are
evolving quickly. We may not be able to get
health insurance through our employers anymore, but if we do it damn sure better
cover the cost of our contraception to prevent us from having a baby now! And
it also better cover the cost of any
and all procedures necessary to see that
we can have a baby sometime in the
future! This used to be a matter of private- not public- policy.
I, for
one, can’t wait to see how we expand- or
perhaps eliminate- our erstwhile “reproductive limits”! Think of the
possibilities! Maybe we can recreate
our reproductive limits to better suit our modern era. We could, perhaps, get
pregnant at a much earlier age and also at much older ages than currently
possible. And, of course, we already have eliminated the anachronistic, archaic- and frankly sexist-
burden of needing two different sexes
to come in contact with one another in order to start a family.
But
let’s not put all our eggs in one basket! Let’s think outside of the box. What
if we could extend our “reproductive limits” all the way to include other species?
Forget “One World Government”. Hell, perhaps one day we could get most of the
creatures on Earth to be one big family…literally!
On the
other hand, of course, there must be “birth panels” as there are “death
panels”. We should restrict these infertility treatments, etc., to people we
know deserve it. Folks we don’t think should have offspring should not be
offered this coverage!
Many of
us don’t believe in God anymore, but we sure love playing Him on t.v.! What
could possibly go wrong?
Okay, I
got a little carried away, I know, but as quickly as technology is changing,
our code of ethics is changing faster. And as these two facts combine… we
will have given birth to a very unpredictable future.
So for
now, I will just imagine a parent a few years hence, a beneficiary of
Facebook’s and Apple’s new reproductive insurance coverage. Sitting at the
kitchen table with their son or daughter and relating their heritage, beatific
smile on their face saying “Your sperm donor would be so proud. You were the
Apple of my I-Pod honey! You were on facebook when you were just a non-viable
tissue mass. Just kidding, you were the
cutest little zygote, dear!”
#itsallaboutme
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