Storks, cabbage patches, and the right to procreate

2008

Few principles are as universally accepted in legal scholarship today, but based on such scant support, as the fundamental nature and broad scope of the right to procreate. What is perceived as a vague but nonetheless justified legal and moral interest to procreate freely without regard to others is, upon closer examination, based on little more than misconstrued or inapposite case precedent and blurry statements in non-binding sources of international law. By relying on this authority, conflating procreation with conceptually distinguishable behaviors, presuming its intrinsic value, and ignoring competing rights and duties, lawyers have largely overlooked procreation and its legal and normative limits. Interpreting U.S. constitutional and international law sources, and finally employing Locke's model of natural rights, this Article redefines the right in law and practice as satiable and narrow, acknowledging the competing rights and duties that both qualify and justify the righ...

Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 2019

Reproductive freedom plays a pivotal role in debates on the ethics of procreation. This moral principle protects people's interests in procreative matters and allows them discretion over whether to have children, the number of children they have and, to a certain extent, the type of children they have. Reproductive freedom's theoretical and political emphasis on people's autonomy and well-being is grounded in an individual-centred framework for discussing the ethics of procreation. It protects procreators' interests and significantly reduces the permissible grounds for interference by third parties. In this article I show that procreative decisions have far-reaching effects on the composition and size of the population. The upshot of considering these effects allows for the appreciation of the inadequacy of a framework that solely considers individual (i.e. procreators') interests to discuss the ethics of procreation. To address such inadequacy, I assess costs and benefits of past and present proposals to reflect on procreation in such a way as to consider its far-reaching effects. I conclude by arguing that reproductive freedom should be defended as an imperfect but instrumentally necessary tool. This framing would enable those participating in debates on the ethics of procreative decisions to work towards an ethical framework that accounts for the cumulative effects of these decisions.

I will show that what is respected the most in human reproduction and parenting is not a right to reproduce in the way in which this right is explicitly proposed. The only way in which people can become, and function as, parents without having to submit themselves to anyone else’s judgments and decisions, is by having reproductive sex. Whatever one’s intentions, social status, standard of living, income etc., so long as assistance is not required, that person’s reproductive decisions will not be interfered with in any way, at least not until neglect or abuse of their offspring becomes known. Moreover, none of the features that are said to back the right to reproduce (such as bodily integrity or personal autonomy) can justify one’s unquestioned access to the relationship with another unable to consent (the child). This indicates that the discourse in terms of the right to reproduce as is currently used so as to justify non-interference with natural reproduction and parenting coupled with the regulation of assisted forms of reproduction and parenting, is at best self-deluding and that all it protects is people’s freedom to have reproductive sex and handle the consequences.

2018

Until quite recently human reproduction was considered an entirely natural process, and the ethics of reproduction were governed more by cultural mores and religious strictures than by any serious philosophical or empirical inquiry. However, more recently reproductive ethics has exploded as a field for several reasons. At a cultural level, many things taken for granted a generation ago, including the increasing medicalization of birth and the heteronormative two-parent nuclear family, have been challenged, and new possibilities have arisen from these now contested ideas. It is important to remember that the explosion of reproductive ethics is as much from new thinking as it is from new technologies, and, at least in regard to reproductive possibilities for the LGBTQ community, it may well be fair to say that it is our new thinking that then led to new technological explorations. This compilation, we hope, touches upon many of the pressing questions in our field. Nonetheless, we recognize that no single volume of essays could possibly cover every aspect of our exciting field. As we underlined in our first volume as well, this is a field that benefits from a multidisciplinary approach, as its questions are informed by law, philosophy, anthropology, public health, and of course, medicine. From gene editing to birth support, reproductive ethics is rapidly evolving, and one need only consider whether any of the following chapters could have been written 5 years ago to recognize the truth of this.

Issues in reproductive ethics, such as the capacity of parents to ‘choose children’, present challenges to philosophical ideas of freedom, responsibility and harm. This book responds to these challenges by proposing a new framework for thinking about the ethics of reproduction that emphasizes the ways that social norms affect decisions about who is born. The book provides clear and thorough discussions of some of the dominant problems in reproductive ethics - human enhancement and the notion of the normal, reproductive liberty and procreative beneficence, the principle of harm and discrimination against disability - while also proposing new ways of addressing these. The author draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, especially his discussions of biopolitics and norms, and later work on ethics, alongside feminist theorists of embodiment to argue for a new bioethics that is responsive to social norms, human vulnerability and the relational context of freedom and responsibility. This is done through compelling discussions of new technologies and practices, including the debate on liberal eugenics and human enhancement, the deliberate selection of disabilities, PGD and obstetric ultrasound.

Bioethics, 2022

Many contemporary ethical debates turn on claims about the nature and extent of our alleged procreative moral rights: moral rights to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. In this article, I argue that there are no procreative moral rights, in that generally we do not have a distinctive moral right to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. However, interference with our procreative choices usually violates our nonprocreative moral rights, such as our moral rights to bodily autonomy or to privacy. My argument presents hypothetical cases in which a state interferes with a person's procreative choices in order to promote aggregate social welfare, but this interference does not violate any of the person's nonprocreative moral rights. These cases not only undermine frequently made claims that widely recognized nonprocreative moral rights entail procreative moral rights, they also challenge the intuitively plausible claim that interference with our procreative choices as such violates our moral rights. What at first appear to be substantive moral rights are in fact a kind of illusion created by the frequent overlap of other rights, but lacking in substance beyond that overlap. While this argument against the existence of procreative moral rights has substantive implications for ongoing debates in reproductive ethics, I ultimately suggest that it is consistent with a progressive approach to reproductive justice.

Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics, 2014

The social forms of human reproduction underwent radical change in the latter half of the 20th century, with the development of in vitro fertilization for the treatment of infertility. The dissociation of sex and reproduction led to a transformation of gender and kinship relations, while embryo and fetus diagnostics led to a shift from planning families to planning a child. Of all those involved, women were most deeply affected, since their bodies are necessary to mediate the technologies. But while advanced repro-genetic technologies have proliferated rapidly and brought benefit to many individuals, globally there are many women who lack access to basic reproductive health services for both fertility and infertility. Moreover, inter-country settings of third-party reproductive collaborations (sperm and egg cell donations, and surrogate mother arrangements) have emerged under market conditions that are ripe for exploitation. In addition, the existence of fertilized eggs outside the womb is a new form of human life which can be preserved and manipulated and the embryo in the petri dish has become the object of a market eugenics, driven by consumers and their claim to a right to reproductive freedom. All these developments challenge deep-set moral perceptions of human dignity and the relation of human beings to their own nature. The conclusion is that the prospect of a post-human future calls for an ethic of care and responsibility.

The Asymmetry in procreative ethics consists of two claims. The first is that it is morally wrong to bring into existence a child who will have an abjectly miserable life; the second is that it is permissible not to bring into existence a child who will enjoy a very happy life. In this paper, I distinguish between two variations of the Asymmetry. The first is the Abstract Asymmetry, the idealized variation of the Asymmetry that many philosophers have been trying to solve. The second is the Real-World Asymmetry, a non-idealized variation that applies explicitly to cases of ordinary human reproduction. I argue that the Real-World Asymmetry can be defended by properly acknowledging the general wrongness of causing someone else to suffer, the limits of what morality can reasonably demand of us, and the significance of respecting women’s autonomy. I then argue that the Abstract Asymmetry is indefensible.

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Journal of Medical Ethics, 1985

Author's abstract This paper addresses the changing ideology regarding reproduction, an evolving American, and potentially worldwide, value system regarding children and parenthood. Children are increasingly being seen as products, and the new technology ofreproduction, including the sale ofreproductive material and services and especially prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion, encourage this commodification ofthefetus. While the new technology does indeed offer new choices, it also creates nev' structures and new limitations on choice. In the contemporary American social structure, these choices are inevitably couched in terms ofproduction and commodification, and thus do not offer individuals