Wrongful Life?
In the last issue of Commonweal, my fellow columnist Barbara Whitehead wrote about the ambivalent reactions of now-grown children conceived by artificial insemination -donor. The Linacre Centre, a Catholic bioethics institute in England, has just announed the publication of a book entitled Who Am I?, which also outlines the largely negative reactions of people who came into existence in this way.
Whitehead suggests that this data may give us reason to “hit the breaks” –. It’s not clear what she means, but it may include banning such procedures.
I understand the concern with AI-Donor, but I am also concerned with the form of the argument. These children have problems with their lives — but the alternative for them isn’t life with both their natural parents –it’s non- life — non-existence. They wouldn’t exist if these procedures hadn’t been performed. In essense, to run this particular argument against AI-D, we’re running something that looks an awful lot like a wrongful life argument.
This argument based on experience is a dangerous argument. Not necessarily incorrect , but dangerous. It’s something that can easily be turned in directions that I don’t think the Linacre Centre would endorse, nor Whitehead. What would they say if someone gathered together a collection of people who lived with various disabilities, who said that they found life difficult — as a means of arguing that women over 35 should be discouraged from having children? What would they if someone talked to a bunch of people who came from big families, who said that they missed unique parental attention? More prosaically, what would they say if they gathered together a bunch of teenagers who said that their lives were diminished because they weren’t at the socio-economic level of their peers?
Furthermore, in a society that counts abortion as one of the morally available options, finding out you’re pregnant under one of those conditions may give you a good reason to have an abortion.
My view: Arguments are like snakes. Unless handled carefully, they can come around to bite you.
I guess I am having trouble seeing how making the point that some of these modern reproduction technology techniques have collateral negative effects – even for the life of the person so conceived – is dangerous or leads to a “wrongful life” mentality. I don’t think the people making the point are claiming that people conceived this way are better off not being alive, but that their method of conception had negative consequences for them. It gives a fuller picture on which to base the moral judgment about whether AI is proper in the first place, it is not an endorsement of an anti-life message.
If anything, most forms of reproductive technology result in an anti-life mentality even as they ultimately produce life. They treat infants as a commodity to be acquired and not as a gift from God. That the children born in this environment will suffer some of the consequences should not surprise anyone, and ignoring that they do doesn’t help the situation.
I largely agree with your comments, and would add as follows: The book supposedly “outlines the largely negative reactions of people who came into existence in this way.” Call me very skeptical. First, it is published by a Catholic organization that is predisposed to oppose most forms of ART, and therefore, can be presumed to be looking for negative outcomes. Second, I presume that it actively fosters the “largely negative feelings” of participants in its venture by, basically, making them feel like freaks. Third, the unhappy are always the loudest. This is true whether you are adopted, and sometimes even when your upbringing can only be described as storybook. Presumably, the happy ones are too busy getting on with their lives to dwell on the inadequacies of their upbringing.
You can add mentally ill and developmentally disabled to the kinds of people who shouldn’t have children under this rubric. I still have a “largely negative reaction” to being the child of a mentally ill parent, and if you think I’m damaged, you should meet my siblings.
I agree with Sean (I think), that you can say there are wrongful ways to conceive that do confer sin on the individual conceived. I wonder if looking at a child conceived through rape is a good analogy. The conception took place by way of a crime and a sin, but that does not make the person conceived somehow wrong or sinful.
Anybody who has kids knows there is no such thing as a perfect baby or a perfect child. And why should there be? There are no perfect parents, either.
When I conceived unexpectedly at 41, my doctor urged genetic counseling and amniocentesis. I found this to be a mixed experience.
On one hand, our risks of having a child with a disability were emphasized–often overemphasized. While it is true that a 40-year-old is far more likely to have a child with a disability than a 20-year-old, the chances of having a child with a disability are still only about one in a hundred. All kinds of maternal complications were also raised, none of which I developed.
On the other hand, we received through the genetic clinic a lot of excellent information about parenting children with Down’s Syndrome (the most likely disability among children born to older mothers) and other disabilities. Our worries about having a special needs child were allayed, and we found ourselves looking forward to the baby, however he turned out.
In the end, all the testing, predicting, statistical analyses, genetic background checks to have more perfect children are kind of moot. Children can often rise above even the most toxic genetic cocktail they get from their parents.
A read of Jeannette Walls’ “The Glass Castle” is a case in point.
YIKES! Typo …. “wrongful ways to conceive that DO NOT confer sin on the indivdual conceived.”
Maybe I need to clarify: My point is not that you can’t say that there are wrongful ways to conceive a child. I think you can make that argument on its own terms– rape, AID, etc. So go ahead and make that argument. Straightforwardly.
What I think Whitehead, and the Linacre Centre MAY be trying to do is to argue backward
Step 1:
These kids, conceived in this way, in these cumstances are miserable, unhappy, etc.
Step 2:
THEREFORE this is a wrongful way to conceive a child.
My point is that lots of people may be unhappy with the circumstances of their conception and birth. So the argument, by itself, may prove too much — or not enough.
Thanks for clarifying, Cathy.
I think you make a good point. It’s up to us to accept life once it’s here, under whatever circumstances.
I have heard fundamentalists argue that children born from cloning would have no souls.
I find this chilling.
Cathy,
I believe I understand your point, but I don’t think that is the logic of the argument in the piece’s you cite.
I don’t think they are saying that AI is wrong BECAUSE children so conceived are unhappy, but rather that AI undermines the natural law and parenthood and that the unhappiness of children so conceived is evidence of this. In other words, I think the argument is made on its own terms and this information is simply evidence of the consequences. They are not relying on on these negative consequences as a basis for the position but as confirmation of it.
Is this a distinction without a difference? I don’t think so. If an act itself was wrong, and our experience tells us that acting wrongly often entails negative consequences. I don’t see how examining those consequences undermines the moral argument.
Sean,
I think you can run the argument in the fuller way you describe.
The trouble is, and that’s why I say it’s dangerous, although not incorrect, is that I don’t see either Whitehead or from the ad– this particular Linacre volume — as doing this.
I think they are trying to run the argument the other way –because that’s the way lots of “secular” arguments run: These kids are unhappy, AID is a bad idea.
key quote from Whitehead:
“To be sure, these interviewees come from a small, self-selected sample. As Marquardt notes, it will take more time and further studies before we have a representative portrait. Perhaps the number of struggling donor-conceived children will be relatively small. But if it turns out otherwise, it may be too late. By then, the baby business will be entrenched.”
As far as this column goes, it looks as if the morality of AID turns for her largely or primarily on the subjective experiences of the kids. I’m sure that’s not the case, but she doesn’t state the full case.
The bookjacket for the Linacre Centre book looks like it’s simply a straightforward account of people who didn’t like being conceived in that way.
I normally have no problem with parts of an argument being advanced—especially in journalistic settings. I myself see this particular argument from unhappy experience as having unwelcome extensions — that’s why it may be correct, but it’s still dangerous.
If I’m not mistaken, wrongful birth suits have already been filed. I seem to remember one from some years back.
It makes for an interesting philosophical point: that one is suing because one has been given the opportunity to sue!
Cathy,
I agree with your point , especially as you clarified it. Moral judgment can never be solely concerned with the beneficial consequences of an action and for the same reason negative results do not establish that an action was morally wrong. The same kind of dubious reasoning is sometimes applied to the morality of abortion, e.g., many women have regrets for having had abortions, therefore, they should not have had them. It’s “dangerous” because you never know what the result of the next study will be.
Wrongufl birth suits are brought by the mother — they say that if the mother had had certain info the doctor ought to have provided her with, she would have had an abortion, and not have been faced with the prospect of rearing a child with disabilities. These have gone forward.
Wrongful life suits are different. They are brought by the child, to say that “I ought not to have been born” — against the parent or the doctor. I’m not aware of anyone of these being successful, both for the odd philosophical point you note, and because we don’t want to say for policy reasons that a life is not worth living. But I haven’t checked, so I could be wrong.
Pro life groups rail against both types of suits, for reasons having to do with the pedagogical function of the law. I think the matter is more complicated than it initially appears. Very frequently, raising a child with disabilities is expensive. the only way to get access to the money that is necessary is through an insurance policity –either the parent’s (in a wrongful life suit) or the physician’s (in a wrongful birth suit).
So parents in these situations are faced with a terrible dilemma: should I get the money I need to take care of my child by saying I wouldn’t have had her, or should I affirm that I made the right decision in having her, but forego getting her what she needs right now.
The upshot: Being pro life in the case of children with disabilities requires being pro social justice.
Re the clarification: Elizabeth Marquardt realizes, I think correctly, that the perceived wrongfulness of conception by something less than a consensus of the population cannot be the basis of a policy that would seriously interfere with reproductive rights. Therefore, she has to make the case that “wrongful conception” results in misery, even if selection bias and other factors (when and how these disaffected adults learned of their conception) call into question the validity of her hypothesis that the nature of their conception is inevitably a source of unhappiness. There are better, much more scientific, studies on this subject, but they don’t call for making third party reproduction illegal. (They do tend to agree that increased openness is a good thing.)
The problem that she runs into, as Cathy identified, is that there are many other situations in which parental status can also lead to a predictably high percentage odds of misery. These include being an unwanted child, a child of rape, poverty, or mental illness, the child of an alcoholic or chronic gambler, or being a military or state department brat who moves every two or three years to a new location.
Clearly, she focuses on the use of donor gametes because she thinks it is not just “wrong” but sinful. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world will join her in making that distinction.