Category: Weekly Questions

Brandon Keim interviews James Hughes in his article, “Designer Babies” that we are reading this week. Hughes believes that parental autonomy has to be held in the highest regard, even if parents are trying to “ design” their babies, selecting for various traits that they prefer. Assuming that there comes a day when it’s possible to select for all sorts of things: smartness, athleticism, hair color, etc., do you think that Hughes is right and that it’s ethical to do this? If you argued two weeks ago that it’s ethical to select against disability, do you have to remain consistent and argue that it’s also ethical to select for your idea of perfection? Or are there other moral considerations you would want to introduce when debating “designer” babies?

Forman’s affecting memoir, This Lovely Life, tells the story of the daunting health issues facing Forman’s prematurely born twins at just six months’ gestation (23 weeks). Though she begged the doctors to “let them go,” the doctors refused the “do-not-resuscitate” order, providing instead every possible medical intervention.

What part of Forman’s story moved you the most?

Using prenatal tests to prevent the birth of babies with disabilities seems like a good idea to most people. Some members of the disability rights movement disagree, arguing that it violates the movement’s central tenet that living with disability need not be detrimental to disabled individuals, their families, or society. Write a response that might satisfy disability rights activists – either by agreeing that prenatal genetic testing is morally unsound OR by arguing that it is ethical, yet does not need to compromise the work of disability activists. (Or you can come up with another argument altogether, as long as it addresses the concerns of disability rights activists).

There are approximately 600,000 frozen embryos in storage at fertility centers around the world. When couples are arguing about what to do with them, whose interests should prevail: those who want to gestate the embryos and become a parent? Those who want to discard the embryos and not become a parent? Or do the embryos themselves have an interest? 

Why has reproductive tourism become such a profitable transnational phenomenon? What are the consequences and implications of the practice for all the parties involved? (please refer to the articles to answer these questions.)

I decided that you don’t have the read the Glenn Cohen chapter for this week. So that’s one less thing to do! I’ll tell you about it in class.

This week your assignment has a slightly different format: Write an editorial for a hypothetical student newspaper about egg donation.  Drawing on all of the reading about egg donation, should women be paid for their time undergoing the medical procedures or for their particular eggs? (By “particular eggs” I mean eggs that might produce smart, tall, blond, future Ivy League babies)

Should fertility clinics treat egg and sperm “donations” the same way as each other in terms of who they accept as donors, how they write the profiles, and how they deal with the question of anonymity?

On page 109 of Go Ask Your Father, Lennard Davis admits, “The whole idea of worrying about who your father is seems all of a sudden rather foolish. Can the invisible submicroscopic bits of DNA in the invisible millions of humans down there be of any real consequence?”

For this week, please explain exactly why it is that Davis becomes so obsessed with finding the truth of his paternity. Do you think sperm donation should be anonymous?