Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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The impact on attitudes about disabilities. Many critics think that
these technologies foster an unhealthy preoccupation with perfection,
thus fostering prejudice against people with disabilities.
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It is often noted
that this category will include all of us who live long enough, and that
it is therefore in our own best interest to acknowledge its inevitability
and our consequent reliance on networks of support. Thus, Ruth
Hubbard and Elijah Wald comment that “all of us can expect to expe-
rience disabilities—if not now, then some time before we die, if not our
own, then those of someone close to us.”
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If these are serious problems, they would seem to call for limits on
consumer choice. But abortion politics has made it difficult for those on
the political left to argue in favor of limiting procreative liberty in the
service of other values. In the United States, access to abortion has been
defended on the grounds that women have an absolute right to control
their own bodies, and given that rationale, the procedure should be per-
mitted for any reason. To argue that some genetic grounds should not
be respected, or that other reproductive choices should be barred, is
implicitly to limit the scope of that principle. Politically left skeptics of
genetic engineering tend to assert the necessity of being resolutely pro-
choice and just as resolutely opposed to human genetic modifications.
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But if reproductive autonomy is an absolute right, it is hard to see how
this can be managed.
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A move commonly made to resolve this quandary is to implicitly
suggest that choices about the use of genetic technologies are not truly
autonomous. Thus, structural constraints and social pressures are some-
times said to vitiate the claim of “free choice” (a phrase typically encased
in scare quotes or characterized as so-called choice) in reproductive deci-
sion making.
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There is no doubt that women's decision making is influenced by eco-
nomic factors and social expectations. Genetic counseling, in practice, is
sometimes directive.
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The costs of caring for a severely disabled child
are large, and the fate of the child after the parents are no longer able
to provide care is a source of great anxiety even in systems with national
health insurance. There do exist social norms regarding what constitutes
reproductive responsibility, attractiveness, and health; social attitudes
about gender, sexual orientation, and race; and views about what life is
like for disabled people and their families.
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But these considerations are
