Making families: Whose interests count?
This is a guest post by Daniela Cutas (Lund University). She discusses her new book, co-edited with Anna Smajdor and Kristien Hens, entitled The Ethics of Human Reproduction and the Family: Individual and Collective Interests. It is now available, with open access, from Bloomsbury.
What are the effects of maternal norms on mothers’ decisions to donate their womb to their daughters? What does milk kinship tell us about the nature of motherhood? What should happen when women’s procreative interests come into conflict with those of the state (and can the state be said to have procreative interests)? All these questions, and many more, are discussed in a newly published collective volume that addresses the interplay between individual and collective interests in family-making.
The contributors analyse reproductive interventions facilitated by medical advances, especially those that transcend the limits of consent or bodily integrity. These include, for example, the collection at the parents’ request of reproductive tissue from children facing conditions or medical interventions that are a threat to their reproductive potential. Another example is that of uterus transplantation from mother to daughter. And yet another example is the collection of reproductive material from comatose or deceased people in order to use it to create children. How are such interventions justified?
They tend to be justified by appealing to the interests of the person on whom the intervention is performed. The removal of reproductive material from children has a therapeutic purpose, of allowing the child to become a parent later in life. It is in the interest of women to be able to carry a pregnancy and become mothers. A man who has lost his life before becoming a father is assumed to have an interest in his wife having his child, or his parents having grandchildren, even after his death.
These explanations sometimes obscure the expectations and interests of those who request or carry out the interventions. Parents could also request fertility preservation interventions on their children in order to preserve their own potential to become grandparents. Researchers who create extraordinary opportunities could also stand to gain prestige from such achievements. The wife or parents of a man who can no longer choose to become a father might also be acting in their own interests.
It is inevitable that the interests of family members, patients and doctors, research participants and researchers do not always coincide. The problem arises when the interests of some of the participants in a decision or intervention threaten, compromise or completely replace those of the very individuals who are the subjects of the decision or intervention. Moreover, certain conceptual entities such as the family are sometimes treated as having their own moral status and interests that may conflict with those of family members. When they do, the family’s interests are sometimes given priority over those of its members. The volume examines such situations.
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