Thomas H. Murray, Ph.D., a prominent bioethicist, discussed the mutual benefits to parents and children in the child-raising experience. Dr. Murray presented the Frost Lecture in Ethics on March 30.
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In caring for their children, parents themselves become better, fuller human beings, taking the relationship beyond one of ownership or even stewardship, said Thomas H. Murray, Ph.D., a biomedical ethicist and author of the book “The Worth of a Child.”

“My child’s flourishing is intimately entwined with my own flourishing,” said Dr. Murray, president of the nonprofit Hastings Center. He visited The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio on March 30 to give the Frost Lecture in Ethics. The event was organized by the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics.

Dr. Murray said that raising children is one of the “many ways in which we grow and mature as human beings in the moral sense.” He called this ideal “mutualism” and contended that public policies should promote this type of relationship.

“I believe in family values, and I believe public policies should support what we value most,” he said.

Focusing on the parent-child relationship
Throughout the lecture, Dr. Murray discussed several examples of the parent-child relationship through the lens of mutualism: “I have been struck by all the issues in which the relationship between parent and child is central in my field.”

He told the story of a family that had a daughter with chronic myeloid leukemia. No one in the family was a match for transplantation, but the parents were told that if they had another child, there was a one-in-four chance that new baby would be a match. The father had a vasectomy reversed so the couple could try to have another child.

They did, and their baby girl was a match. The umbilical cord and placental blood was collected for the daughter with leukemia. Today, both girls are doing well, and they are very close to each other, Dr. Murray said.

But their parents faced criticism for having another baby partly in the hope that she would be a match for her sister. Some argued that a person should never be viewed as a means to an end. In this case, though, Dr. Murray finds the parents’ actions ethical because they were committed to loving and raising their new child regardless of whether she was a match.

Later in the lecture, Dr Murray reiterated that if adults are committed to the caring, wholehearted raising of a child, he supports it.

Ethics can be an issue in multiple births
He also considered the case of Nadya Suleman, the California woman who, after the recent birth of octuplets, now has 14 children at home conceived through in vitro fertilization.

Dr. Murray said the Suleman case raises many questions about what it means to be a responsible parent. Even having high-order multiple births increases the risks to each of the babies, he said.

He also said it was clear that the fertility specialist “was profoundly irresponsible.” But he also raised the possibility that the doctor was not acting out of line with the “customer is always right” ethos that surrounds fertility treatments.