zlacker

> but is inhumane

Is it more humane to launch it without testing, producing the same effect for a much, much larger group of people than would have been involved in the intentional study? This seems to be a fairly gaping hole in the definition of humane. It reminds me of people who see an accident and don’t help because they might be held liable for the accident and they don’t want to get involved.

>>pfannk+(OP)
It's absolutely inhumane to expose pregnant women to chemicals unless you are highly certain that they are safe. Clearly it would be better if we tested aspartame exposure on a smaller population and detected this effect. I'm saying that if our confidence of it's safety is high enough to expose pregnant humans to the chemical in scientific studies our confidence of it's safety should be high enough to exposure it to the wider population.

>>htag+6g
Realistically though, that isn’t what happens, right? It’s not like if you release a chemical into the wild, that no pregnant woman will consume it. They will. Not studying the effects prior to release values the few individuals over the many in society, just because then the people who would do the study aren’t directly responsible for the negative effects. It’s kind of slimy IMO.

Prohibiting new chemicals outright would be fine, but that is pretty far from where we are today.