The Welfare of Future Children: Reproductive Ethics and Disability Screening

This open access practical guide to reproductive ethics navigates the complex subject of the policy around IVF treatment and disability screening based on the concerns around the welfare of future children. It focuses on 3 questions in order to examine these often complex philosophical issues:

- Should we allow prospective parents using IVF to implant an embryo with a condition considered to be a disability?
- Is routine screening for Down syndrome in pregnancy ethically acceptable, even if there is evidence that individuals may feel pressure to accept this screening?
- Are we justified in attempting to evaluate the potential parenting ability of those trying to access fertility treatment (e.g. disabled people or individuals with past criminal convictions) and prevent access in some cases?

Rebecca Bennett walks the reader through different answers to these questions, exploring issues such as whether it is ever morally wrong to reproduce, whether we have a moral obligation to try and bring the ’best’ children we can into existence and how we can assess the quality of future lives.There is, of course, no consensus about what the ’right’ answers are to these questions, however answers are needed.

This area of policy and regulation is one that, Bennett argues, is heavily influenced by intuition, social norms and bias. The Welfare of Future Children invites us to question these norms and to come to a position on these issues that emphasises reason, transparency and accountability.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Manchester, UK.

Rebecca Bennett is Professor of Bioethics, Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, Department of Law, and Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning and Student Experience (Distance Learning and Online) Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester, UK.