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  • The View from Within
  • Georgie E. Kaebnick

I am a sucker for the Olympics. I am the kind of sucker that NBC likes (willing to sit through commercials) and that athletes despise (willing to sit out the four years between Olympics). But I am aware that the athletes spend that time, and much more, perfecting their talents. The attraction for me, in fact, is the anxiety produced by knowing that they have worked hard, that a momentary mistake or a random bit of bad luck can—and frequently does—wipe out years of effort and planning, and that most will go home disappointed. It’s no wonder that the Olympics generate such fierce debates about fairness.

This issue of the Hastings Center Report offers a set of essays that explore fairness in sports—what it requires, and what is necessary to ensure it. In the opening essay, Thomas Murray, president of The Hastings Center, explores the very meaning of fairness in sports. He argues that we identify fairness, and distinguish between enhancements that are fair and those that are not, by asking what that particular sport values. Athletes themselves will know best, he asserts. Following that advice, we sought some reflections from Jan and Terry Todd, world-renowned powerlifters, about the influence of doping in their sport. Two other essays set out the state of the art on identifying cheating: Susan Gilbert, our staff writer, reports on an emerging strategy for fighting doping, and Theodore Friedmann, a gene therapy researcher, considers the prospects for “gene doping.” In the closing essay, medical historian Alice Dreger considers the sex typing controversy that arose last year over the South African runner Caster Semenya; whatever the fairest policy is, she argues, it is not the one recently adopted by the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federations.

Both of the articles in the issue are about assisted reproduction. In the lead article, Aaron Levine, who conducts empirical research on the interface between bioethics and public policy, looks at the advertisements published in college newspapers and concludes that the fertility industry’s effort to regulate itself has not been successful. The compensation offered to donors sometimes ranges well above $10,000, and the placement of the ads suggests that compensation is sometimes keyed to the donors’ characteristics. Both the amounts and the correlation to donors’ traits would violate guidelines set by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. On the other hand, an editorial on the facing page by John Robertson, former chair of the ASRM body that formulated these guidelines, essentially shrugs off Levine’s concerns. “I am left wondering whether there is an ethical ‘there’ there worth worrying about,” he concludes.

The second article, by philosopher Bernard Prusak, considers how ethical concerns about reproductive decisions are often formulated. One part of the formula is an assumption of parental liberty: parents should be permitted to have the children they want, when they want them. Another part consists of the children’s rights, which leads to questions about whether parental decisions unacceptably harm the child. But as Prusak notes, harms to children may not constrain parental liberty, since any child that is born at least has the benefit of being alive, and the harm may be inseparable from the child—the parents may be able to avoid the harm only by having some other child. Prusak asks whether this is the right way to approach questions about reproductive decisions; he proposes turning the problem around and asking about parental obligations rather than about rights. Just as Murray believes we illuminate fairness best by talking about the values internal to sports, Prusak hopes to illuminate reproductive ethics by talking about the values internal to parenthood.—GEK [End Page 2]

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