Lindsay Beyerstein gets it precisely right. Though on the question of taking measures in utero to determine the orientation of a child, I’m a bit fuzzier: Certainly, to the extent these are risky, it seems grotesque to chance leaving your child with some kind of serious physical defect just to ensure it comes out straight. But if it were safe? Certainly I’m out of sympathy with the sorts of motives we readily imagine as the source of such a choice—though it’s also not hard to think of some less repugnant ones—but it’s hard to argue it constitutes a wrong to the child, as such.
UPDATE: Lindsay has more on her reasons for proposing tampering in utero to affect sexual orientation. She leans pretty heavily on the notion that “homosexuality is not a disease”—and certainly I agree, but that’s neither here nor there. Brown eyes aren’t a disease either, but if there were some (safe) intervention to turn them blue, I wouldn’t object to that either.
Ultimately, the argument Lindsay wants to make here has to put a great deal of weight on the idea that :
It’s frivolous for parents to start doing the equivalent of plastic surgery on their unborn children, with all the attendant moral and physical risks.
I don’t know what the “moral” risks here are, above and beyond the idea that it’s immoral to raise the likelihood that your future child will be burdened with physical defects as a function of the procedure. But that’s double counting, so let’s suppose we’re just talking about physical risks. It sort of depends how extensive there are, doesn’t it? Parents expose children to some risk whenever they take them on car trips, many of which will presumably be for “frivolous” purposes, so I don’t think it will do to say that any risk of any undesirable physical consequence makes the procedure immoral. Moreover, Lindsay would, I think, agree it’s permissible to start the procedure and then abort the fetus if it looks as though it is causing such side effects, to the extent this can be detected early on. So for a sufficiently safe procedure, this objection has to fall away.
Even if we assume the physical risks are significant, though, there’s an added wrinkle. Since we agree that the fetus is not a person, whatever physical consequences result from these in utero will be intrinsic features of the person who later comes into being. It’s then at least an open question whether the child who comes into being after such a procedure can coherently be described as “the same person” as would have existed in the absence of any such intervention. If the child would not be the same person, then we don’t have available the objection that the parents have made the child worse off than it would otherwise have been, since it would not otherwise have been that child. Now, you might agree with this and just aver that it’s wrong to bring a child into the world with certain kinds of physical defects or burdens, regardless of whether these can coherently be described as harms relative to some alternative condition that very child might have been born in. But if we agree that the intervention takes place before the child is a person, we’ve got another bullet to bite: We’ve got to infer that it’s similarly immoral to risk conceiving a child with similar defects, which seems wrong.
More succinctly, compare these two scenarios:
1. A couple creates a series of embryos in vitro. One has various characteristics they find desirable, perhaps including sexual orientation. It also has a certain risk of developing Physical Defect X. They implant this one and discard the others.
2. A couple conceives The Old Fashioned Way, and has a series of treatments that alter the uterine environment to produce various characteristics they find desirable, perhaps including sexual orientation. This also creates a certain risk that the child later born will develop Physical Defect X.
If, as Lindsay and I both believe, the fetus is not a person, what is the morally important distinction between these methods?
5 responses so far ↓
1 Lindsay Beyerstein // Mar 16, 2007 at 3:19 pm
I think testing and in-utero “treatment” are interestingly different.
I’m of the opinion that fetuses aren’t people and that a woman has a right to abort any fetus for any reason. I certainly find it creepy that people abort fetuses based on their gender. I also find it creepy that people spend a lot of money centrifuging their sperm in order to sex-select their children pre-conception. It unnerves me that people care so much about gender, but I won’t say that these specific measures are wrong.*
My tentative view is that it’s okay to abort a fetus for any reason, including the result of some hypothetical medical test for heterosexuality or blue eyes or left-handedness. It’s okay to abort a fetus just because now’s not a convenient time to be pregnant. If you don’t like the fetus you got by luck, you can abort and start over. The factors that influence such a decision might reflect very badly on your character. If you’re aborting for height or body build or sexual orientation or gender, you’re revealing yourself to be a horrifyingly shallow person, or worse.
On the other hand, I think that it’s wrong to keep a fetus and start subjecting it to so-called medical treatments in utero to change its orientation before birth. It’s frivolous for parents to start doing the equivalent of plastic surgery on their unborn children, with all the attendant risks (moral and physical). Heterosexuality is not a disease, and neither is homosexuality. Having a big nose isn’t a disease, nor an adult height of 5’2″. There’s evidence that your life will go significantly better if you’re better looking, but nobody thinks it’s okay for parents to start doing plastic surgery in utero.
*It might be irresponsible to sex-select your child in a society where sex selection is throwing off the gender balance of an entire generation, but that’s a separate question. Likewise, it’s probably somewhat socially irresponsible to encourage couples to order up their future children a la carte. We’ve seen what humans do to the gene pools of purebred animals by aggressively selecting for superficially desirable characteristics.
2 Michael B Sullivan // Mar 16, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I can pretty easily construct a consistent framework of beliefs about a fetus which allows abortion for any reason, but does not allow pre-natal testing or treatment of the fetus for things like homosexuality.
Suppose that a fetus is not morally valueless or without rights — it’s just that its right to life is judged less valuable than a woman’s right to bodily integrity. (Some people, in fact, believe that the fetus is fully a person and still that its right to life does not trump the mother’s right to bodily integrity, though this is not a view that I hold).
The key insight, I think, is to point out that “bodily integrity” is a fairly narrow right. Your bodily integrity is not affected by whether your fetus is homosexual or heterosexual. Thus, you have no affirmative right to know the fetus’ future sexuality. If one holds that, for example, the fetus has a right to privacy with respect to its future sexuality, there is no particular right of the mother’s that trumps that right. The mother could still choose to abort the child for any reason (maybe she learns that the father is homosexual), she just doesn’t have the right to ask someone to poke the fetus and find out.
Note that the mother WOULD have a right to find out if the fetus has or would likely develop any medical conditions which would complicate the pregnancy, as there her bodily integrity right comes into play.
Similarly, we might imagine a view that a fetus has rights to self-determination with respect to most of its medical state, where the rights of parents only narrowly intrude, and thus no treatment is possible. (It would make sense, in this case, to similarly restrict any treatment until a person had become a legal adult — so you couldn’t force a homosexuality “cure” on your kid at age 8, if that someday becomes possible, but an informed adult could get his or her sexuality medically changed if he or she wanted to).
Certainly, if it someday becomes possible to learn things like “is person A homosexual” via a genetic screening, we will want a personal right to genetic privacy. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to extend that backwards into the pre-natal world, as otherwise the right could be pretty easily abrogated.
(I think it is unlikely, that anything more than a statistical tendancy towards particular sexual orientations will be found on the genetic level, which, if anything, makes the idea of treating/screening for homosexuality pre-natally more horrifying.)
3 Lindsay Beyerstein // Mar 17, 2007 at 11:02 am
If it were sufficiently safe, I wouldn’t object to having parents change the sexual orientation of their offspring. If you could influence the sexual orientation of your future child by exposing the fetus to ACDC in the womb, or moderate exercise, or positive thinking, or something virtually risk-free, I’d say that’s fine. It’s no worse than trying to influence your kid after they’re born by painting their bedroom pink or signing them up for sports, or whatever parents have done since time immemorial.
However, when you start talking about biomedical interventions that are sufficiently invasive that they have to be administered by a health care professional, I think that’s a pretty good heuristic for “too risky.”
I don’t think parents have the right to subject their future offspring to any significant risk in order to secure a preferred sexual orientation, or eye color.
4 Justin Nisly // Mar 19, 2007 at 4:42 pm
These arguments all seem well reasoned, but I don’t understand the continuing insistence on equating eye color and sexual orientation. I would see the same world whether or not my eyes were blue or green. But my sexual orientation impinges on all sorts of issues beyond the biological, including philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, religion, love, etc. Yes, we try to influence our children after they are born, but a parent who would give a child an injection to, say, insure they remain Episcopalian would be rightly seen as infringing on that child’s freedom of choice. If we want to avoid a brave new world in which parents can create children in exactly their own image, we should protect difference whether it originates in genes, pre-natal care, child-rearing, personal choice, or as is usually the case, some combination thereof.
5 Joshua // Mar 21, 2007 at 6:02 am
The Episcopalian example above is irrelevant as regard sexual orientation. While I’m not convinced that sexual orientation is sole the product of controllable biological processes (genetic or hormonal) for the basis of this argument, we have to assume it is. In which case, it’s no different from any other large number of potential “defects” parents may wish to fix in the womb. Either it is ethical to select for certain traits or it is not. The specific traits can’t be placed easily into ethical and not ethical categories.
And why should it be okay to abort a fetus (because it’s gay) but not to turn it straight? If a person came up to me on the street and said, “Either I’ll crack open your skull and suck out your brain, or I’ll make you straight,” I suspect I’d go ahead and pick the latter.
Fetuses are not, in a moral sense at the very least, human beings. If killing them isn’t unethical (and it’s not) then giving them “plastic surgery” surely isn’t either.