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  • Choosing Children: The Ethical Dilemmas of Genetic Intervention
  • Peter J. Smith
Choosing Children: The Ethical Dilemmas of Genetic Intervention By Jonathan Glover. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006. Pp. 120. $15.95.

Parenthood is pursued for different reasons and through different routes. The different reasons may be good, bad, neutral, or questionable. Becoming a parent with the goal of selling the child for profit, for example, is a bad reason, whereas doing so because one values the life of the child independently of oneself is a good reason. People tend to value the lives of their potential children while also valuing the opportunity to parent them. In most cases, the reasons for becoming parents are probably mixed.

Most potential parents want to have biologically related children through the usual route of sexual intercourse. Where this is unsuccessful or poses medical risks for the woman or potential child, reproductive assistance may be obtained. Adoption is another route to parenthood, but this tends to be pursued only if biological parenthood cannot be achieved (Ravin, Mahowald, and Stocking 1997). With regard to the usual route, only since the advent of reliable birth control has it been possible for potential parents to choose whether and when to have a biologically related child. Moreover, only since the last half of the 20th century has it been possible to insure that a potential offspring is male or female, or free of a detectable disease or anomaly. Current advances in genetics and prenatal testing enable some potential parents to choose offspring with traits that others consider disabling. The possibility of choosing progeny with traits that the parents consider socially advantageous is a logical sequel to this progression. [End Page 471]

In 2004, Jonathan Glover, a professor of ethics at Kings College, London, addressed ethical questions raised by current and future reproductive technologies in his Uehiro Lectures at the University of Oxford. Choosing Children is an adaptation of these lectures. By focusing on preimplantation genetic diagnosis rather than prenatal testing as the means through which parental choices about future offspring may be implemented, Glover purports to avoid the moral complexity of abortion. In doing so, however, he assumes an operative definition of abortion as termination of a nonviable pregnancy. This is not only a common understanding of abortion; it is also the definition found in clinical texts on obstetrics (Cunningham et al. 1997). Nonetheless, to those who define abortion as termination of a human embryo, destruction of undesired in vitro embryos after preimplantation genetic diagnosis is also abortion. To them, the choices that Glover supports prior to pregnancy but after preimplantation genetic diagnosis are morally equivalent to those made after birth.

In his first of three chapters, Glover examines the controversial question of whether potential parents have a right to ensure that their children have a condition such as deafness or achondroplasia. His support of this right is based on a definition of disability as a barrier to human flourishing. Such flourishing, which all parents are obliged to promote in their offspring, is possible for everyone, regardless of whether they are impaired at birth. Individuals with impairments, therefore, are not disabled unless their flourishing is blocked by social circumstances. For Glover, if a potential parent can promote flourishing in a child with a specific impairment, he or she has a right to insure that the child has that impairment.

Next, Glover discusses parental efforts to avoid having children with disabilities. Here his argument is based mainly on respect for the autonomy of parents, for whom the demands of parenting may be exacerbated if they have a child with disabilities. As long as parental choices provide children with "a decent chance of a good life" (p. 50), Glover considers their choices justifiable. While explaining and defending this position, he opposes the view that avoidance of disability is morally required in order to make the world a "better" place. He does not, however, address the argument offered by some: that such avoidance implies that the lives of people already born with disabilities are not worth living (Parens and Asch 2000, pp. 12–17).

In his last chapter, Glover examines decisions regarding "non-medical enhancement" of potential offspring. The...

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