Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and Biopolitics

ISBN-13: 9789400736337 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 134 str.

Catherine Mills

Opis

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."

Spis treści

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