Progressive Dialogue and Procreative Freedom

There is a principle known as procreative beneficence, which states that parents are somehow obliged to select, of all potential children, those most likely to lead the best lives based on available and relevant information.

This philosophy has been argued for in some transhumanist dialogues, however, I see it as somewhat short-sighted and in tremendous need of better explanation and refinement.

Defenders of procreative beneficence often point out that parents already take such measures as prenatal vitamin supplementation to alter the course of various aspects of development, often toward what is considered "normal" or "nondisabled". This is a valid observation -- but not one that really addresses critiques of the application of procreative beneficence, as you would be hard-pressed to find any disability advocate arguing that expectant mothers shouldn't take vitamins or practice good nutrition. It may be a subtle distinction to say that there should not be an obligation to enforce a prescribed set of "normal" abilities and characteristics on a potential child -- but I argue that it is an important distinction.

Peter Singer-style ethics are sometimes invoked in transhumanist discourse, and while I certainly support Singer's notions with respect to the personhood of nonhuman animals, I think he's somewhat off-base when it comes to procreative obligations. In his attempts to fit all situations neatly into a self-consistent ideology, he makes the error of calling irrelevant or throwaway much that many people might actually consider tremendously significant.

Opportunities, Not Coercion

Procreative beneficence -- when applied in a strict sense -- cannot help but lead to a coercive-eugenics state or society, in which one trait after another is pathologized on the basis that anyone who cannot function optimally in the existing society is better off not existing at all (a mindset which plunges firmly into the territory of naturalistic fallacy, since it assumes that the way society is now is is somehow superlative).

And it is important to note that with diagnostic criteria widening and new "disorders" showing up on the scene at a frenetic pace, it definitely seems plausible that some of the very people in favor of strict, narrowly-defined procreative beneficence today might tomorrow be in one of the very groups of people up for elimination.

Part of the solution to this issue can likely be found in progressive policies that favor widespread access to consensual modification technologies and services -- this would, of course, eliminate the need to define certain variations as pathologies for the sake of allowing people with these variations access to helpful services and technologies.

If a progressive technology-access policy were implemented, the compulsion to group people along the lines of "healthy" and "defective" for the purpose of deciding who should get the (apparent) lion's share of the resources would likely evaporate. Access to consensual modification technologies and treatments would allow people who want to change their morphology or cognitive abilities in any way to do so, without fear that their doing so would define, for all time, that type of change as either therapeutic or cosmetic.

I don't think anyone should have to prove they have "subnormal" memory abilities in order to gain access to a memory-enhancing treatment, but the way society is set up at the moment, people who desire to change their ability set for any reason are at the mercy of whatever the major, large policy-making bodies have defined as pathological or nonpathological.

One only need walk into any local drugstore (or open their e-mail spam folder) to see that "enhancements" are a hot commodity. From Viagra (and its numerous herbal knockoffs) to dubiously-effective focus-enhancers to Retin-A creme to caffeine pills, shelves are stocked to brimming with things that fall far outside the "therapy" category. I don't see this as a bad thing at all (aside from when the various advertised "enhancement" products turn out to be ill-tested, ineffective, or just plain quackery); I see it as evidence that people want the freedom to define their own ability sets and configurations, based on whatever meta-goals they might have for themselves.

I also see similar phenomena in the prenatal nutrition and early childhood care and education market. Women are quite concerned about the future health of the children they carry, and most these days try very hard to make sure they eat nutritious meals and supplement appropriately while pregnant. I've also seen baby formulas and foods appearing over the past few years that include such things as DHA and omega-3 fatty acids, which are thought to help promote brain development.

I also see such things as "Baby Einstein" videos and educational computer software designed for toddlers barely able to control a mouse. I heard an amusing anecdote recently about an acquaintance's preschool-aged daughter -- she is apparently already quite adept at navigating her own computer games, and one day turned to her parents to solemnly announce, "Just wait. It's loading" (when the screen froze briefly between activities). The next generation of middle-class youngsters is growing up "enhanced", or at least changed, right before our eyes, and even in advance of the existence of more serious genetic and somatic modification technologies.

And while again there are certainly plenty of "pushy parents" seeking to live out their own unrealized dreams through their offspring inappropriately, this group by no means includes all parents, and (as noted by Ron Bailey in Liberation Biology), "a ban on cloning [as an example of one of the more controversial biotech breakthroughs likely to arrive in coming decades] won't abolish pushy parents."

So, if it's okay for parents to make choices for their offspring before these offspring even fall under the umbrella of "persons" (such as in the case of prenatal nutrition), how can a concept like biodiversity in humans survive? After all, (say advocates of procreative beneficence) shouldn't parents by default (or according to social pressures) simply select, if possible, the potential offspring with the lowest risk of experiencing hardship? If not, what are the possible justifications for not doing so?

Avoiding Oversimplification

For an illustrative example, consider the case of a couple incapable of producing any embryo which does not show evidence of some kind of genetic "abnormality" (which honestly probably encompasses all couples, since there's really no such thing as a "standard human" in the first place, except within the pages of anatomy texts).

If none of these abnormalities are fatal -- consider, perhaps, a couple who produces three embryos, one with a propensity toward blindness, one to deafness, one to autism -- what is the proper course of action? Certainly, it should not be to deny these parents the right to have a child at all; that would fall under the category of the kind of Nazi-esque eugenics policies that any society worth living in must maintain a more-than-comfortable distance from.

The very idea that some kinds of people should not exist because they represent a "drain on society" is utterly reprehensible. This attitude also flies in the face of progressive ideals that would encourage the provision of needed survival and enrichment resources to everyone. Remember that artists, musicians, and poets have been put in the category of "useless" at various times throughout history in the minds of certain groups.

So it seems that in cases of nonfatal conditions, procreative beneficence degrades into pointlessness at best and anti-choice claptrap at worst. If parents are allowed to abort a developing fetus, for any reason (a right I fully support as a pro-choice woman), I also think that parents should be allowed to have whatever child they want, even if this means taking no steps to assure that the child is maximally normal.

The idea of coercing women to abort (or not select) potentially deaf, blind, or autistic children is completely at odds with reproductive freedom.

Just as nobody should be forced to have a child, nobody should be forced not to have a particular child. As noted above, regardless of the fact that pre-implantation embryos are not technically persons, this doesn't mean that these embryos are interchangeable.

A given embryo isn't just defined by "disability" or lack thereof, but by a robust and complex set of initial conditions. You could have a child that is deaf, extroverted, and talented at drawing and painting, or a child that has no apparent disabilities but who ends up becoming a bully or a drug addict (again, based on genes, but so far I haven't heard of anyone looking for "bully genes").

The simplest solution here seems to be to not force or oblige parents to undergo pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Parents with potentially deadly conditions in their families will likely seek out this technology themselves, no coercion required, when they decide to start a family.

Potential Persons, Rights, and Choice

The suggestion that bringing a child with a particular condition into existence is somehow the same as inflicting that condition on an existing child easily fails any sort of rational analysis. After all, choosing to have a female child rather than a male child is not the same thing as taking a five-year-old boy and forcing him to undergo sex-reassignment surgery.

And moving for a moment into the "dissolving species boundary" realm of personhood discourse, if we put bonobos into the category of "persons" (which I certainly do), it makes absolutely no sense to suggest that since bonobos lack some of the cognitive and speech abilities humans possess (ignoring for a moment that bonobos certainly possess some superior abilities to those displayed by the average human), we ought to just sterilize all the bonobos in the world on the basis that the places of the babies the bonobos would have had will somehow be "taken" by human children.

That would frankly be genocide, and while anti-miscegenation laws are every bit as morally wrong as racism is, it should never be assumed that a group of people sharing a certain trait (whether it be something like skin color, "bonoboism", or dolphinhood) must be eliminated systematically, ostensibly for the good of "all persons" -- that way, as they say, leads to the Dark Side.

Sometimes, even the most benevolent intentions can end up drastically restricting freedoms that ought to instead be protected. But there's a difference between a society that evolves to be a certain way based on consensual modification and the exercise of free choice, and a society that is fairly molded to be a certain way based on coercive tactics, ignorance, and status-quo bias.

Attempts to merge principles of procreative beneficence with pro-choice philosophy and personhood theory have so far created a muddled, tangled web of politics and confusion.

If an embryo is not a person, then it cannot be said to have rights -- it has no "right" to be configured a particular way and certainly no "right" to be implanted and brought to term in the first place. And even if a fetus is defined as a person after a certain point during gestation, if it is still permissible to kill that fetus for whatever reason (which I think it should be, on the basis that women should have the final say regarding what goes on in their bodies), then it should certainly be permissible as well to bring that fetus to term and try to give it the best care possible once it is born, regardless of difference or disability.

While most people alive today would not jump at the chance to acquire a disability if given the opportunity, most people who already have disabilities don't sit around bemoaning the fact that they were ever born to begin with.

And while I certainly think societies are obligated to help assist people in living effectively and obtaining appropriate care, treatment, and modification (if desired), I do not think that societies have any sort of obligation to prevent the existence of people who might be considered "disabled". Note that "obligation" is the key word here. Certainly, parents might wish to take folic acid so their baby won't have spina bifida, but if the condition occurs anyway, these parents should not be coerced to abort that child on the basis that they really ought to just try again for a nondisabled baby.

Trusting Parents, Eschewing Ignorance

A parent who feels perfectly up to the task of raising, say, an autistic child (or who might even prefer such a child, on the basis of being autistic themselves) should not be guilt-tripped or made to feel as if they're "hurting" their child by allowing him/her to be born, or that they are somehow draining resources in society that would be better spent on neurotypical children.

To assume that just because someone is autistic that they're somehow by default not going to be able to contribute "meaningfully" to existence (or be happy, or intelligent, etc.) is to presuppose a lot of things on the basis of ignorance that often leads to outright bigotry.

Just because the media is sloppy and prone to stereotyping in its descriptions and portrayals of a particular kind of person, that doesn't give anyone an excuse to just accept, unquestioningly, what they are spoon-fed by this media machine.

Of course I am not saying it's all a fine idea for prospective parents to drink radioactive waste and play tackle football while pregnant. But this sort of behavior is really too rare to be of much, if any, relevance to discussions of procreative beneficence and related concepts. Furthermore, consensual modification technologies (including germline therapies and alterations) may well change the face, shape, and form of humanity over the years to come -- and I find myself quite intrigued, rather than horrified, by this prospect.

However, I think that as this occurs, it must occur in the absence of subscription to naturalistic fallacies, in defiance of intellectual laziness, and without bigotry or prejudice. A worthwhile society must necessarily embrace difference, while acknowledging that a strength in one area can mean a constraint in another.

In Citizen Cyborg, Dr. James Hughes notes that:

If people choose to modify themselves to live underwater, with gills and flippers, and then choose to have children to share their underwater society, would this be child abuse or enhancement? It takes away some abilities but adds others. Trusting parents to navigate the increasingly diverse choices will be hard, but nonetheless essential in a free society.

Hughes makes some points in the same book that I do not agree with (an understatement -- Hughes has a tremendously irritating tendency to ignorantly decry disability-rights advocates as "disability extremists", and to completely ignore power differentials when it's convenient to do so, which in my opinion dramatically weakens any valid-seeming points he might be making elsewhere).

But I wholeheartedly agree that a range of increasingly diverse choices is upon us. Prospective parents need accurate information, not scaremongering, and not hype. And everyone needs to avoid making superficial assumptions about the quality of life of someone they themselves can't imagine being. Sometimes, apparent "sub-optimal" functioning of a person in a society is a warning sign that the society itself is built upon an unstable and transient foundation, and that said society is in desperate need of an upgrade to make it more flexible and inclusive.