Article Text
Abstract
Is the wish to be biologically related to your children legitimate? Here, I respond to an argument in support of a negative answer to this question according to which a preference towards having children one is biologically related to is analogous to a preference towards associating with members of one’s own race. I reject this analogy, mainly on the grounds that only the latter constitutes discrimination; still, I conclude that indeed a preference towards children one is biologically related to is morally illegitimate because, in the context of parental love, biological considerations are normatively irrelevant.
- reproductive medicine
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- ‘These were made-to-order babies’: Reterritorialised Kinship, Neoliberal Eugenics and Artificial Reproductive Technology in Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love
- Assisted reproductive technologies and equity of access issues
- Willing mothers: ectogenesis and the role of gestational motherhood
- Multiplex parenting: IVG and the generations to come
- Fatherlessness, sperm donors and ‘so what?’ parentage: arguing against the immorality of donor conception through ‘world literature’
- Sinning against nature: the theory of background conditions
- ‘Are you pregnant? If not, why not?’: artificial reproductive technology and the trauma of infertility
- Should HIV discordant couples have access to assisted reproductive technologies?
- Who is a parent? Parenthood in Islamic ethics
- Having a child together in lesbian families: combining gestation and genetics