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64 : Śramaņa, Vol 57, No. 2/April-June 2006
patient be given full information about the pros and cons of the procedure, so that the final decision reflects the patient's felt needs. Harms and benefit must be realistically evaluated on all relevant levels, without allowing monetary considerations to become the dominant factor. As an example : there is the question whether a baby should be conceived to save the life of another child in the family. The principle of ahiṁsā examines the case with reference to harm and benefit to all concerned.
First, an individual should be brought into the world and cherished for its own sake and for no other motive. Second, the above principle is not amended but added to when the baby that has been conceived can also serve a heroic purpose without harm to itself. In this case, the blessing of life is doubled. Third, it follows that the only legitimate purpose for amniocentesis during pregnancy should be to ascertain if the fetal tissues matched, so that the doctor could, on positive finding, save the baby's umbilical cord blood to give along with its marrow when the transplant is administered. In the event that the prenatal diagnosis yielded negative results, a decision to terminate the pregnancy would be deemed inhumane. That would clearly demonstrate that the baby had been conceived as a means to an end. There is no dilemma here; it is premeditated murder. On the other hand, even if it were found that the fetus did not have genetically compatible tissues necessary to serve as a donor, the ahimsă principle insists that the child must still be loved and cherished for its own sake.
(3) A third use of ahimsā as a moral principle is with reference to problems in which the benefit goes to one person and the harm to another. There are four such current problems, for healthcare ethics : "allocation of scarce biomedical resources, non-therapeutic experimentation on subjects incapable of consent, sterilization of carriers of deleterious genes" and abortion.32 We select the problem of abortion.
On one side there is the pro-life group which stands for the
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