Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T04:40:35.397Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dethroning Choice: Analogy, Personhood, and the New Reproductive Technologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Hilde Lindemann Nelson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

There is something about the debate over reproductive technologies of all kinds—from coerced use of Norplant to trait-selection technologies, to issues surrounding in vitro fertilization (IVF), to fetal tissue transplantation—that seems to invite dubious analogies. A Tennessee trial court termed Mary Sue and Junior Davis's frozen embryos “in vitro children” and applied a best-interests standard in awarding “custody” to Mary Sue Davis; the Warnock Committee drew an implicit analogy between human gametes and transplantable organs in its recommendation of a voluntary, nonprofit system for collecting and distributing gametes in the United Kingdom; Owen Jones compares the right to trait-selection to the right to abortion; Robert Veatch once claimed that if a woman had signed an organ donation card and then died while pregnant, she had in effect given consent to the attempt to sustain the pregnancy after her death; John Robertson has argued that contract pregnancy poses no problems we have not already encountered with adoption; and Andrea Bonnicksen has compared the wonders of preembryonic genetic screening to the riches housed in the gold museum in Bogota, Colombia.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Summer 1995 , pp. 129 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Davis v. Davis v. King, E-14496 (5th Jud. Ct., Tenn. 1989).Google Scholar
Great Britain, Department of Health and Social Security (chairman Mary Warnock), Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1984).Google Scholar
Jones, Owen D., “Reproductive Autonomy and Evolutionary Biology: A Regulatory Framework for Trait-Selection Technologies,” American Journal of Law & Medicine, XIX (1993): at 601.Google Scholar
Veatch, Robert, “Maternal Brain Death: An Ethicist's Thoughts,” JAMA, 248 (1982): 1102–03.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robertson, John A., “Surrogate Mothers: Not So Novel After All,” Hastings Center Report, 13, no. 5 (1983): 28–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonnicksen, Andrea, “Genetic Diagnosis of Human Embryos,” Hastings Center Report, 22, no. 4, Supp. (1992): at S5.Google Scholar
Robertson, John, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994): at 16.Google Scholar
When it comes to familial connections, it seems that people are not readily replaceable. That is why we laugh at W.C. Field's encounter with a distraught mother whose baby has just died. “No matter, Madam,” he leers, “I will gladly get you with another.”Google Scholar
For a more detailed account of this kind of argument, see Nelson, Hilde Lindemann Nelson, James Lindemann, The Patient in the Family (New York: Routledge, 1955): at ch. 5.Google Scholar
Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962): at 249. Sidgwick's argument is discussed in Jeffrey Blustein, “Child Rearing and Family Interests,” in Onoral O'Neill and Ruddick, William, eds., Having Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); discussion of Blustein on Sidgwick is found in Nelson, James Lindemann, “Parental Obligations and the Ethics of Surrogacy: A Causal Perspective,” Public Affairs Quarterly, 5 (1991): at 51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kant, Immanuel, Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right, trans. Gregor, Mary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): at PA 281.Google Scholar
Id. at PA 336.Google Scholar
Schultz, Marjorie Maguire, “Reproductive Technology and Intent-Based Parenthood: An Opportunity for Gender Neutrality,” Wisconsin Law Review, 1990 (1990): at 308–09.Google Scholar
Katz-Rothman, Barbara, The Tentative Pregnancy: Prenatal Diagnosis and the Future of Motherhood (New York: Viking, 1986).Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York: Pantheon, 1980): at 98, 39.Google Scholar
Id. at 107.Google Scholar
Id. at 73–74.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, trans. Bouchard, Donald F. Simon, Sherry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977): at 153.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage, 1979): at 29.Google Scholar
For excellent answers from the feminist ethics of care alone, see Held, Virginia, “Non-Contractual Society,” in Hanen, Marsha Nielsen, Kai, eds., Science, Morality, and Feminist Theory (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1987): 111–37; Ruddick, Sara, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Manning, Rita, Speaking from the Heart: A Feminist Perspective on Ethics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992); and Tronto, Joan C., Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar
See King, Michael B. Pattison, Pat, “Homosexuality and Parenthood,” British Medical Journal, 303, 3 Aug. (1991): 295–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar