Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and Biopolitics (International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine)

Issues in reproductive ethics, such as the capacity of parents to 'choose children', present challenges to philosophical ideas of freedom, responsibility and harm. This book responds to these challenges by proposing a new framework for thinking about the ethics of reproduction that emphasizes the ways that social norms affect decisions about who is born. The book provides clear and thorough discussions of some of the dominant problems in reproductive ethics - human enhancement and the notion of the normal, reproductive liberty and procreative beneficence, the principle of harm and discrimination against disability - while also proposing new ways of addressing these. The author draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, especially his discussions of biopolitics and norms, and later work on ethics, alongside feminist theorists of embodiment to argue for a new bioethics that is responsive to social norms, human vulnerability and the relational context of freedom and responsibility. This is done through compelling discussions of new technologies and practices, including the debate on liberal eugenics and human enhancement, the deliberate selection of disabilities, PGD and obstetric ultrasound. 1. Introduction  Disability, Gender and Selective Termination  Liberal Eugenics  What is biopolitics? 2. Normal life: liberal eugenics, value pluralism and normalisation  Introduction  Shaping People: human enhancement and normality  What is normalisation?  The vitality of social norms  Conclusion   3. Reproductive autonomy as self-making  Introduction  The presumptive priority of reproductive liberty  Enacting freedom: the ethical practice of reproductive autonomy  Conclusion 4. The limits of reproductive autonomy: prenatal testing, harm and disability  Introduction  Disability, harm and the non-identity problem  The expressivist critique of prenatal testing: a defense  Conclusion 5. Reproducing alterity: ethical subjectivity and genetic screening  Introduction  Genetic selection and ethical self-understanding  Natality, corporeality, singularity  Screening singularity  Conclusion 6. Ultrasound, embodiment and abortion  Introduction  Ultrasound images and the sympathetic imagination  The social production of sympathy: biopolitical reproduction  The ethical demand of embodied appearance: relationality and responsibility  Conclusion 7. Final Remarks