Ethical aspects of saviour siblings: procreative reasons and the treatment of children

Abstract

A great deal has been written on the ethical aspects of saviour siblings, with views largely converging on similar basic position: easy case saviour siblings are permissible and hard cases are not. The important distinction to draw here is between the reasons for having a child and the treatment of the resulting child. Saviour siblings are children whose tissue or organs will be donated so that a brother or sister will be saved. The treatment of existing saviour siblings immediately involves ethical questions about live organ donation by children. This chapter suggests that the appropriate standards for live organ donation by children should be adopted to decide the acceptability of the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for saviour siblings. This amounts not to an ethical judgement about the procreative reasons of prospective parents; instead, it is a practical judgement based on the permissibility of particular ways of treating children.