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Stories:
Coherent Conception
Coherent Conception
As the science of human reproduction advances, questions related to "existence-inducing" technologies become more vexing. Do we have a moral obligation to protect future children? If so, how do we decide when the risks of reproductive technology outweigh the benefits, especially considering the primary benefit is life itself? How do we protect future children without infringing on the "procreative liberty" of potential parents?
Philip Peters Jr., Ruth L. Hulston Professor of Law and director of the University's Biotechnology and Society Program, has written what may become a seminal text in the search for answers.
"The premise of this book is simply that the interests of future children matter and that their interests are frequently misunderstood," Peters writes in How Safe is Safe Enough? Obligations to the Children of Reproductive Technology. "Reducing that confusion is the objective of this book."
Peters, who has spent much of the past 10 years wrestling with ethical quandaries in the law, says he hopes the book will help "synthesize, refine and extend" ideas concerning society's obligations to future children. He begins by explaining why society can coherently speak of a duty to "potential people" at all. He then outlines specific situations in which a procedure or its management might create an unnecessary and unacceptable risk to potential life -- as when, for example, an injury results from a failure to screen sperm donors, or from the improper storage of frozen embryos. Peters next considers situations in which the safest procedure available actually involves a technique so dangerous that the benefits will never outweigh the risks -- some forms of cloning, for example.
Peters next turns to the thorny issue of protecting the welfare of future children: How might such protections be offered while preserving parental liberty?
The answer lies in some common-sense reforms. The fertility industry, he says, should be required to do more pre-market safety testing of new technologies. It also needs to collect more post-market data on adverse outcomes, and it should offer potential parents more information on how treatment choices might affect them and their baby. For their part, lawmakers must take care to restrict parental procreative liberty only when faced with credible evidence of unacceptable risk and then only to the extent necessary to avoid the perceived danger.
Peters devotes the final section of his analysis to cutting through misapprehensions on four high-profile fertility issues: cloning, germ-line genetic engineering, fertility treatments that cause multiple pregnancies and intracytoplasmic sperm injection, a form of in vitro fertilization.
We've been lucky so far, he says, in that our lack of regulation and the dearth of fertility outcomes data have not caused irreversible harm. But, he adds, "I don't think we can expect our luck to last forever. Even if we ban cloning, other new, risky techniques will someday be used if we are not more careful."
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