Week 3 Post 2-Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life

     Currently there is genetic technology that allows perspective parents to get tested for the likeliness that their child would have a certain genetic condition. During this process a doctor will give a diagnosis of whether or not they believe a child would have a certain genetic condition. However sometimes a doctor is incorrect and a child is born with a genetic condition that the parents were assured would not occur. Some parents go through the tort, or private grievances, legal system where they try to convince the court of negligence, and get damages awarded. There are two main types of cases in these situation, wrongful birth, where parents sue a doctor on behalf of themselves usually asking for money for the extra costs of raising the child, and wrongful life, where the child themselves is suing claiming that they were given a bad life because of the doctor and is usually asking for the extra medical costs and emotional distress to be paid. Currently most states do not accept the wrongful life argument, especially when it comes to giving damages, believing that legitimizing those cases indicates that having not been born would have been preferable for the child than being born with a disorder or disability, which they believes goes against public policy, expect for in extreme cases. However, most states do allow wrongful birth claims made by  parents who state they would not have had a child if they knew they would have a certain condition, but there is some controversy over the extent of damages paid to the parents. In many cases liability suits are meant to deter a certain action of negligence in the future, but because the court's general opinion is that life is preferable to non-life, even for the parents, that no injury has occurred, even if negligence has, and there should be no damages paid. This creates a divergence between how deterrence is effective, and furthermore some courts do allows damages to be paid for the cost of raising a child. These types of cases also bring up bigger issues about parents selecting out negative traits in a child, or selecting for positive traits, which could lead to eugenics in the future, and currently the technology targets people with disabilities. Genetically filtering out embryos that have a genetic disability goes against the social model of disability which states that the problem is not with the person with the impairment, but how society structures itself around that impairment. Many people in disability communities are hesitant about this technology because of the long legacy of forced sterilizations and "population control" for people with disabilities. Others are worried that filtering out embryos could damage their collective power in society, create a view that people with disabilities should not be born, and lead to a destruction of specific cultures, particularly blindness. On the opposite side some people within are using this technology to select for certain traits that are considered by society to be impairments. One Deaf couple, who participated heavily in Deaf culture used a sperm donor with a history of Deafness to ensure they had a Deaf child. They faced criticism for doing this but argued that they wanted their child to be able to participate in their culture, which is something most parents want and do. Beyond genetic screening there are many processes of reproduction and because there is controversy about most of them, there is often varying degrees of government regulation that have are introduced, most of the time using the argument that it is the Best Interest of the Resulting Child (BIRC).  However, this argument is not a sound one, due to the Non-Identity problem. The Non-Identity problem states that any attempt to regulate when, how, or with whom someone reproduces with cannot be in the BIRC because that specific sperm and egg that would have combined did not and that particular child would have never been born. Since public policy is that life is better than non-life these arguments are not for the best interest of the child that could have resulted.

   Learning about the ethics of regulating reproduction is necessary when studying bioethics because one of the main growing regions in biotechnology is related to reproduction. Understanding how the law sees negligence in wrongful birth and wrongful life cases is important to knowing the limits of court protection, and the reasoning behind them that points to broader schools of ethics in this area. Understanding the history of eugenic in reproduction, specifically with the disability movement, helps to mitigate and recognize how technologies could be used for eugenics. Understanding the ways in which governments try to regulate reproduction and a fault in a common defense used for regulation is important because it can be important when fighting against or for certain government regulations