Reproduction and Rights: A Response to Dorothy Roberts: [Commentary

Abstract

We live in a liberal, rights-based society and gain immeasurably from the stability and freedom such a society offers. Yet some persons are highly critical of a rights-based approach to public issues. They think that an emphasis on rights ignores and political realities and hurts persons who lack the power or resources needed to exercise rights effectively. Dorothy Roberts's critical review of Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies is an example of the war on rights now being waged in many academic circles.' Although she grudgingly admits the importance of some rights, she is highly critical of my focus on negative procreative rights and my unwillingness to argue for positive rights for public funding of procreative services. She fears that a commitment to individual autonomy in reproduction can be achieved only at the expense of real social thereby further entrenching unjust social hierarchies (pp. 1006, 1016). In her view, claims of procreative freedom are seriously deficient unless they incorporate more fully concerns about equality (p. 1006). Despite her primary concern with issues of social justice, more than two-thirds of her essay is criticism of the book from within the liberal paradigm itself, questioning whether there is an independent basis for valuing procreative liberty and whether my account of tangible harms that justify