Art Caplan–very pro choice–has an interesting article out warning against fetal testing technologies that can lead to sex selection and other eugenic pregnancy terminations. The context is a story in which sex can be determined in a blood test of the pregnant mother. From “Fetal Genetic Testing: A Troubling Technology:”
This new cheaper, safer and quicker form of sex selection is likely to become a modest business in the U.S. and a big business in India, China and other parts of the world. Should genetic testing — in combination with abortion — purely for sex selection be part of medicine? Is it ethical to end a pregnancy because you don’t want a girl? The answer to both questions is “no.” Being male or female is not a disease or a disorder. Wanting a boy is a preference, but it is not one that justifies ending a pregnancy. But ending a pregnancy because you don’t want a girl may be legal in the U.S., but that does not make it an ethical choice. As hard as it may be for some people to comprehend, there can be good and bad reasons to end a pregnancy. Gender preference is a bad reason. That said, ethical arguments may not win the day. I predict early fetal testing for sex selection will spread around the world quickly because there is an abundance of preference for sons and plenty of money to be made indulging it.
Here’s the thing: We can and should regulate IVF and do our best to prevent eugenic abortion. But the law can only do so much.
Society will rise or fall ethically by how we live our individual lives. Thus, we may want a boy or a girl, but that does not mean we should do whatever it takes to obtain our desire. We may be dying for want of a kidney, but that doesn’t mean we should go to China and buy one taken from a murdered political prisoner. We may find it difficult to live with cancer, but that doesn’t mean we should make doctors or family complicit in our killing via assisted suicide or euthanasia.
Caplan and I don’t agree on a lot, outside of the ethics of organ donation in which we are generally of one accord. But we agree about this:
We are used to the abortion clinic serving as ground zero in the battle over abortion. That may not be true for long. The combination of fetal testing very early in pregnancy and abortions that can be caused by a pill mean that the future battleground over abortion will be a woman’s conscience.
Yup. So those who oppose the emerging brave new world, by all means advocate for proper laws and regulations. If you are asked by friends to advise them on these issues, help them to make the moral decision that is consistent with human exceptionalism. But also lead by example. Our goal should be a society in which laws proscribing sex selection or buying organs from China are not really necessary. In the end, that takes people doing the right thing regardless of whether doing wrong is legal.
August 9th, 2011 | 10:43 pm
I’m glad to see, Wesley, that you appreciate the impossibility of looking inside a person’s mind to determine whether the reason for an abortion is sex selection. No sodium pentathol injections, lie detector tests or inquisition by trained interrogators will do the job for us. There is no alternative but to take a woman at her word, so it ultimately comes down to her personal ethical and moral sensibilities.
It’s no doubt frustrating to people who’d like to see an immediate end to the practice of sex-selection abortion, but education and open discussion of the ethics involved seem to be the only realistic way of addressing it. That is, unless demographics solve the problem first.
HW
August 10th, 2011 | 3:17 am
Society will rise or fall ethically by how we live our individual lives.
Exactly.
Utopia always fails at exactly the moment where the “perfect” society justifies departing from ethics.
Ethics = quality of life. It’s a collective thing – an all-or-nothing that we all either enjoy or all do not – what economists call a public good.
August 10th, 2011 | 4:22 am
Agree, changing hearts is the key to solving the ethical dilemmas we keep confronting.
However, no progress will be made until we get beyond even asking a question like, “Is abortion for sex selection ethical?” When abortion for personal convenience is considered OK, as it is in our culture, then logic-chopping on such a question gets us nowhere.
The more fundamental change of heart which we all must have is to realize that direct abortion is the killing of an innocent human being. This change of heart would cut the Gordian Knot of a number of intractable ethical questions such as the one posed in this article.
August 10th, 2011 | 8:54 am
Shouldn’t our goal be a society where no laws are necessary at all? We should repeal all laws, and everyone should just do the right thing.
August 10th, 2011 | 9:04 am
“There is no alternative but to take a woman at her word, so it ultimately comes down to her personal ethical and moral sensibilities.”
It’s kind of like stores that sell bongs and zigzags that have a sign on the wall reminding customers to call them “water pipes” and “tobacco papers”, or they’ll be asked to leave the store. But that little restriction does serve a purpose, it reminds people that smoking marijuana is illegal and not condoned by the authority of the people.
In the same way, a woman’s personal ethical and moral sensibilities are influenced by whether sex selection is legal or not. If it’s legal, then people will think it is moral and ethical and assume that everyone does it, but if it is illegal, then they’ll know that it is wrong and it’s not expected behavior. Laws influence behavior.
August 10th, 2011 | 9:14 am
Why are sex-selection abortions wrong? If an unborn child has no rights and is part of the woman’s body, why does it matter if the mother or father wants to pick the gender? Again, we see the problem with the dividing line through humanity; today’s dividing line is only based on what is acceptable for discussion at dinner parties, and tomorrow’s dividing line may find you behind it. Caplan says it’s wrong because gender is not a disease or disorder, but then abortion is based on the idea that pregnancy is a disorder; he cuts his own legs out from under himself.
There’s a simple way to prevent gendercide; stop killing unborn children!
HistoryWriter Reply:
August 10th, 2011 at 12:53 pm
@JustChris,
I think it’s wrong not because abortion is wrong per se, but because sex-selection abortion trivializes an otherwise serious matter. It has nothing at all to do with ensoulment, the presumed personhood of zygotes or other such arcana.
HW
JustChris Reply:
August 10th, 2011 at 1:58 pm
@HistoryWriter, HW, If picking a gender trivializes the issue of abortion, how is having an abortion because you’re not sure about your relationship to the child’s father, or because your child has a club foot, or because you already have two kids, or “selectively reducing” the ones that don’t look genetically up to snuff? What are non-trivial reasons to end the life of an unborn human being?
Canbuhya Reply:
August 15th, 2011 at 5:00 pm
@HistoryWriter, The pro-life view is not that abortion is wrong because of ensoulment. It is that just as it is wrong to kill born people, it is wrong to kill unborn people because it is wrong to kill people.
It is biology not the Bible that tells us that human life begins at fertilization. It is our moral views that tell us that human life has value.
If you don’t believe human life has value, that is certainly your right to believe that – just don’t impose that dangerous idea on others.
August 10th, 2011 | 10:42 am
[...] concerns. Pro-choice ethicist Arthur Caplan calls this a “troubling technology”, while Wesley Smith notes: Society will rise or fall ethically by how we live our individual lives. Thus, we may want a boy [...]
August 10th, 2011 | 11:04 am
[...] the concerns. Pro-choice ethicist Arthur Caplan calls this a “troubling technology”, while Wesley Smith notes: Society will rise or fall ethically by how we live our individual lives. Thus, we may want a boy [...]
August 12th, 2011 | 6:02 am
I want to make an odd point. I’m proudly and 100% pro-life. I think all abortion should be criminalized and looked at as the intentional murder it is.
But, looking at it from another angle (as any good debator should be able to do), there is a logical argument against sex selective abortion that can be made by otherwise ‘abortion on demand’ supporters. Their basic belief is it does not harm society to have an abortion. The world does not need more people, so the lack of live birth isn’t harmful, and they believe abortion doesn’t harm the woman involved. But having an unnatural imbalance in the sex ratio does cause a specific and well known harm to society (from increased violence among men to trafficking in brides), so they can logically defend the need to keep the over-all birth rate within it’s natural ratio while not objecting to any single termination. So banning sex-selective abortion or (like in India) banning sex-seeking ultrasound, can be logically defended as best for society while not being hypocritical. (Doesn’t make them or their logical RIGHT, there is real proof abortion *does* harm society, individual women and men, and most societies on earth need to raise their birth rate not lower it, but I’m getting tired of everyone jumping on sex selective abortion as this ‘ah-ha it proves you don’t really believe in abortion’ since that darn book came out a few weeks ago.)
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