Abstract
Reproductive freedom plays a pivotal role in debates on the ethics of procreation. This moral principle protects people’s interests in procreative matters and allows them discretion over whether to have children, the number of children they have and, to a certain extent, the type of children they have. Reproductive freedom’s theoretical and political emphasis on people’s autonomy and well-being is grounded in an individual-centred framework for discussing the ethics of procreation. It protects procreators’ interests and significantly reduces the permissible grounds for interference by third parties. In this article I show that procreative decisions have far-reaching effects on the composition and size of the population. The upshot of considering these effects allows for the appreciation of the inadequacy of a framework that solely considers individual (i.e. procreators’) interests to discuss the ethics of procreation. To address such inadequacy, I assess costs and benefits of past and present proposals to reflect on procreation in such a way as to consider its far-reaching effects. I conclude by arguing that reproductive freedom should be defended as an imperfect but instrumentally necessary tool. This framing would enable those participating in debates on the ethics of procreative decisions to work towards an ethical framework that accounts for the cumulative effects of these decisions.
Highlights
Reproductive freedom plays a pivotal role in debates on the ethics of procreation
9 As argued by Alison Bashford: “[i]f population growth was to be reduced, the eugenic question was derivative: which kind of person might be reproductively restrained or encouraged?” (Bashford 2014, p. 242). It conceives procreation as a private matter and it fails to account for the effects of procreative decisions on third parties and their legitimate interests. Insofar as it rests upon this framework, reproductive freedom as a moral principle to guide the normative debate on procreative decisions and as a standard to make trade-offs between competing interests is limited in scope
Past and present population engineering programmes may be shaped upon normative considerations that are better suited to discuss the ethics of procreation and to consider the interests of people other than the procreators
Summary
Reproductive freedom plays a pivotal role in debates on the ethics of procreation. This moral principle protects people’s interests in procreative matters and allows them discretion over whether or not to have children, the number of children they have and, to a certain extent, the type of children they have (Buchanan et al 2001; Brock 2005; Harris 1998; Robertson 1994). Reproductive freedom’s theoretical and political emphasis on people’s autonomy, dignity and well-being is conceptually and normatively problematic, as it fails to account for other relevant interests than those of the procreators and for the effects of procreative decisions on these interests.
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