Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
paired with modern technologies of reproductive and genetic engineer-
ing, dictate that it would be far better if human persons who are inca-
pable of choosing on the liberal model were not to appear among us.
So strong is the prejudice in this direction that we simply assume that
hypothetical unborn children with cognitive disabilities would, if they
could, choose not to be born. Reinders, a professor of ethics at the Vrije
University in Amsterdam, argues that the regnant view among liberal
philosophers is that human beings with mental retardation may be
regarded as members of the human species, but they do not have full
moral standing in the secular community. Because they lack such stand-
ing, the barriers to eliminating such persons will slowly but surely wither
away. To be sure, given the religious derivation of so much of our ethical
thinking, barriers to simply killing persons with disabilities remain. But
such barriers, Reinders contends, are under continuous pressure from
“secular morality” and are likely to be bulldozed out of the way by the
potent machine of biotechnology backed up by medical authority. So it
is not at all irrational for those with mental disabilities and their fami-
lies to worry about the future. The proliferation of genetic testing, con-
cludes Reinders, will most certainly have discriminatory effects because
it puts everything under the domain of choice, and parents of children
with “special needs” become guilty of irresponsible behavior in “choos-
ing” to bear such children and burdening society in this way.
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Increasingly we as a society expect, and even insist, that parents
must—for this is the direction choice takes at present—rid themselves of
“wrongful life” in order to forestall “wrongful births” which will burden
them and, even more important, the wider society. Women repeatedly
tell stories of the pressure from their medical caregivers to abort should
a sonogram show up something suspicious. The current abortion regime
often embodies in practice a burden for women who are told that they
alone have the power to choose whether or not to have a child and that
they alone are expected to bear the consequences if they do not choose
to do so. The growing conviction that children with disabilities ought
never to be born and that prospective parents of such children ought
always to abort undermines the felt skein of care and responsibility for
all children.
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This is at least a reasonable worry, especially when the machinery of
technology now surrounding childbirth turns every pregnancy into what
