Selecting Difference
posted by Jennifer Collins
There is a fascinating essay today in the NY Times about the way some parents are using advanced reproductive technologies to select embryos specifically “for the presence of a disability” so that the parents and child will share the same physical challenges. The article focuses in particular on parents attempting to ensure either that their children will be born deaf or with dwarfism. I first began thinking about this issue several years ago when the Washington Post ran a very interesting article about a couple, both deaf, who elected to use a deaf sperm donor in an effort to ensure that their child would be deaf (their effort was successful). What do readers think? Should doctors go along with such requests from fertility patients?
December 5, 2006 at 10:42 am
Posted in: Current Events
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Responses (1)
Frank - December 5, 2006 at 2:02 pm
I think Kathleen Norris has crafted an eloquent and moving account of the immense and unique contributions made by disabled individuals (in her case, a sister with Down’s syndrome) in her book, The Cloister Walk.
On the other hand, one of the normative guideposts I take seriously in contemplating the ethics of reproduction is the Jonas-ian principle of “openness to the unbidden” (recently rearticulated in the NCBE report Beyond Therapy, Habermas’s The Future of Human Nature, and Sandel’s Atlantic Monthly article). And I think that, to the extent that we might want to invoke this principle to avoid eugenics, we should also be willing to apply it to limit parental autonomy in cases like this.
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