[Download] "What are Parents for? Reproductive Ethics After the Nonidentity Problem (Report)" by The Hastings Center Report " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: What are Parents for? Reproductive Ethics After the Nonidentity Problem (Report)
- Author : The Hastings Center Report
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Life Sciences,Books,Science & Nature,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 211 KB
Description
Bioethicists often use the "nonidentity problem"--the idea that a child born with a disability would actually be a different child if she were born without the disability--to defend parents' rights to have whatever children they want. After all, a child is not harmed by being brought into the world with a disability; without the disability, she would not be brought into the world at all. But what happens if we turn the moral question around and ask, not about the benefits and harms to the child, but just about parental obligations? Will that lead to a different view of reproductive decisions? As Milton's Adam observes in a fit of pique after his fall from grace, one of the things that parents do for children--analogizing God as father and mother both--is to presume to bring them into being. No informed consent is possible on the part of children-to-be, and, once we are here, there is no not having been here. In Adam's words (in verse that reappears as the epigraph to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein):