[Barrin92]

>why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like playing god.

This I think is in some ways the most pathetic argument of them all because it reveals a profound moral cowardice. I just saw a chart today, 1 billion children under the age of five have died since 1950, a lot of them to disease. While you're afraid to play, god's racking up quite a score.

What's so astonishing about it is that the suffering doesn't seem to matter. Before modern medicine something like 20% of pregnancies ended fatally. Every time you play god what people seem to be afraid of is not the suffering, which is omnipresent because life in its natural state is pure carnage, but not having to attach your name to it and taking responsibility. It's okay if some old guy rots away miserably because if I assist in his suicide then I might make a mistake and I had to make a choice. Rather, forward it to god or nature, or what have you. And then in addition this cowardice, thinking that conscious inaction isn't an action, gets rebranded as a humanism.

[hollerith]

>Before modern medicine something like 20% of pregnancies ended fatally.

This source estimates 1% from 1700 to 1750 in England:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/014107680609901113