"Hi! I'm doing extra reading apropos of my ethics class, can I read your policy handbook?"

The Healer blinks and looks nonplussed about this request. "Ask Neapa, I think? She's the head Healer on duty today - she's over there."

Aza goes and repeats the request verbatim to Neapa.

Neapa blinks. "I - don't see why not. Let me go dig you up a copy."

"Thank you!" chirps Aza.

When she has her copy she finds somewhere out of the way to curl up with it and skim till she finds something about who makes medical decisions for babies, generally speaking.

Most of the policy handbook seems to be about how often gryphons should get various kinds of preventative care and check-ups, and when the junior Healers and un-Gifted staff should refer them on to a senior Healer for investigation. Gryphons apparently get a lot of weird digestive issues; they're obligate carnivores, as were both of the source species, but apparently combining raptors and great cats still leads to some weirdness there. They also have a lot of issues with feathers and skin oil.

There's an entire section on gryphon births and care of new gryphon chicks in the first week. Gryphon births aren't as fraught as human ones on the mothers end, not being bipedal means that their hips are set up differently and leave more space for babies to come out, but they tend to have twins or triplets a lot, and it's still very common at this stage for the newborns to have health problems. Most of these are treatable, or resolve on their own with supportive care, and just mean that it's standard to keep the chicks at Healers for a week so they can be monitored. There's a long list of health conditions that are considered curable, and then another list of rarer more serious conditions that aren't, and protocols for catching and diagnosing conditions appropriately. A subcategory of the non-curable congenital problems are listed under a "supportive care only" protocol.

The manual...doesn't actually make it all that clear whose call this is, though.

She copies bits and then goes and looks for the equivalent manual in the human patients' section.

She has to talk to a different senior Healer to get access to that manual, and they're again confused about the request, but they grant it. 

Human babies have a lower rate of fatal-in-early-childhood congenital defects, and most of them are recognizable enough to see when the child is still in the womb, at which point the policy says it's up to parents whether they still want to carry the pregnancy to term. There is an official policy, at least here, against trying to provide curative or even life-prolonging treatments for babies with unavoidably fatal birth defects, or in cases where the child's life could be prolonged but they would be unavoidably in pain, but it's up to the parents whether they want to stay with the baby at the hospital while the Healers provide pain relief for the child, or whether they want to give birth at home. 

Hmmmmmmm. So maybe it's just that the gryphons have good reasons to always give birth at Healers'.

She goes looking for Skan.

Skan is not too hard to find! He flies down and lands beside her. "Did you go talk to the Healerss?" 

"Yeah. It turns out the policy isn't actually very different and it's just gryphons are born there and not at home like human babies sometimes are. And that part makes sense since some of them can be fixed if they get help straight away. I'm still kinda concerned though... Do your parents get paid for their jobs?"

"I think a sstipend, pluss living here is free and food is free. ...I think ssome gryphonss left to live on their own but we're expenssive to feed. We eat a lot of meat. It'ss harder to pay for it on a normal ssalary." 

"Yeah, that makes sense, but there is a stipend. And you don't need clothes, either, though probably that doesn't tip the balance. Okay. I'm less worried now but it still doesn't really seem fair Urtho is, like, breeding you like horses."

"...I mean, if he wassn't then I wouldn't even exisst. I like exissting." 

"Well, yeah, but you could say that about a lot of things! My parents shouldn't have gotten married even though I like existing. And I still exist even though they got divorced and you'd still exist even if you could have kids with whoever whenever you thought it was a good time."

Skan nods hard. "Yess! I think you should tell Urtho that." 

"I'm hoping he will come to the class session on this. If he doesn't I guess I'll have to go schedule a meeting again."

Urtho isn't at their next seminar class, as it turns out, but they end up covering a different (and less interesting) topic anyway. 

He does appear at the class the week after, sitting in the back of the room as the students arrive, and when everyone's there the teacher introduces the topic as 'ethics around created species' and asks if anyone has any opening remarks on it. 

Aza DOES. She DOES have remarks on this.

"I think," she says, "that people should probably not create person-species at all; that if they do so, they should make it not require a research project to determine whether those persons are legally chattel; that presuming they are not, they should not then proceed to breed them like livestock however soft the pressure they place on people whose environments they've controlled since infancy. I think this is a great example of mages accruing, by virtue of being mages, power that magehood does not render them exceptionally suitable for."

Ma'ar is carefully not smiling. This is requiring a lot of carefulness. 

"I see." Urtho doesn't seem upset, or angry, just - politely puzzled? "I think I disagree with you on the question of creating species; I believe the world benefits from a greater variety of intelligent living beings to contribute to it. That being said, it is not at all unreasonable to disagree on how this ought to look, since I myself have some disagreements with the creator of the hertasi on his process. Assuming you had decided that it was positive for the world - and for the gryphons themselves - for my gryphons to exist, how do you think you would have gone about it?"

"I like having gryphons and hertasi around too. But just because somebody's going to be positive for themselves and the world doesn't mean it's right to create them! Gryphons would still be nice to have around even if many more of their babies were born defective than the already huge fraction that actually are, and even if you could have made them have bigger litters and more surviving babies who'd be positive for themselves and the world by existing if you'd made them in a way that also had more dying malformed ones, you shouldn't have done that. The additional surviving gryphon babies wouldn't be worth killing more of them on purpose. But if I decided I just had to have a new species I'd practice a lot on non-person species and try to solve the birth defect problem till I could get it right on the first try when I made people, and I'd also bet really hard that I was going to be able to make them smart enough to, given the amount of education and parenting I would also be responsible for supplying, figure out whether it was a good time for them to reproduce and with whom, and I would make sure it was very clear to everyone that they owned themselves instead of leaving that kind of unclear. Also I wouldn't make them obligate carnivores because that makes it hard for them to strike off on their own and afford their own food."

"Hmm. ...So something I thought about, when I was deciding whether or not to embark on this project, was how earlier species felt about the matter, so I spoke to a number of hertasi about it. They were, nearly universally, very adamant that they thought it was good they had been made, that the world would be lacking without them, and that they thought this reasoning ought to generalize and therefore it would be, by their thinking, very good for me to create another new species even if I did not make every decision perfectly along the way. Also, well, the early days of creating a species are more difficult, while the problems are being worked out, but that will end up being only a small fraction of their existence, right?" 

"I'm glad you asked the hertasi about that first. But even if I'm being too conservative about whether people should create species, and even if it's impossible to be perfect at it, that doesn't mean it isn't worth being as meticulous as possible about their design and care and course-correcting if still-fixable errors are pointed out, and making all that meticulousness very obvious to everybody so that no one will be inspired to carelessness if they try it."

"- Oh, certainly, if you believe I am making errors that can still be corrected then I wish to hear about it, I am simply making it clear that I am unconvinced of your first point." He turns to the rest of the class. "And I would like to hear if the other students have anything to add."