Nobel Prize for Medicine - Reflections

Hearing about this prize brought back several memories from many years ago. I remember a Sunday school class with my mother sometime in the early Seventies. We were going to a church of fairly liberal persuasion, probably Presbyterian. This was something done, "for the children," since my parents at the time, did not believe at all. We were following through a workbook, answering various hypothetical moral questions, one of which was, "Would a test-tube baby be moral?" My mother was of the opinion that they simply could not be. I was arguing the counter. She had the idea that something might be left out, some indeterminate something, which could not really be known in advance - and how could one take that risk? I was arguing that everything was completely known, or could be, in the abundant certainty of youth. My view has apparently won the day entirely, so that even she would not remember arguing to the contrary at the time, but actually, there was considerable doubt over the idea right up to the actual fact.

What sort of thing might be left out, one might wonder? Fairly obviously it would be something spiritual, the soul most likely. Indeed, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the soul finds the womb it will be reborn in by the smell of the sex act, which it finds particularly attractive, and is drawn to irresistibly. (At least this is my memory, it is years since I have read the text). Saint Augustine also has something to say about the matter, Original Sin is passed along from generation in the semen. So it would appear that in vitro fertilization would create people who had no souls, but were free from Original Sin.