Ethics, Sexual Orientation, and Choices about Children

5. In Defense of Trait Selection

5 In Defense of Trait Selection In 1999, bioethicist Adrienne Asch opened an article on the ethics of selecting against children with disabilities by quoting from the 1997 Hastings Center Report article by Schüklenk and colleagues. Using that article as a starting point, she matter-of-factly notes that the quest for the origins of homosexuality is understood as homophobic in its nature, that it will lead to prenatal tests, and that these tests are dangerous for homosexuals who live in countries without legal protections.1 Asch treats this opposition to sexual-orientation research as more or less widely shared, as intuitively correct, and morally uncontested. She then contrasts the moral resistance to (the hypothetical) testing of fetuses for homosexuality with the (actual) testing of fetuses that now goes on with respect to genetic diseases, abnormalities, and disabilities. To make it plain where she is going with this analysis, she uses a neutral term—characteristics—to refer to these conditions. Although Asch indicates that there is some resistance among women to testing for these characteristics and to the implied termination of pregnancies , she thinks this resistance is the exception rather than the rule. Unlike the resistance that Schüklenk and colleagues raise against prenatal testing for homosexuality, she thinks that testing for genetic disorders is so widely accepted that it is treated as entirely liberating. By contrast, she would rather see more opposition to prenatal and abortion for perceived deficits, and she sees this prospect as an expansion of the choices that are available to women. Asch argues that most problems associated with having a disability stem from discriminatory social arrangements,“just as much of what has in the past made the lives of women or gays difficult has been the set of social arrangements they have faced.”2 It is only the social circumstances 80 Chapter 5 of people with genetic diseases, abnormalities, and disabilities that make prenatal testing and termination of pregnancy as desirable as they are. In addition, the boundary between health and disability is unclear since disabilities are often not as “unhealthy” or disruptive as most people imagine. Asch says,“My moral objection to prenatal testing and selective abortion flows from the conviction that life with disability is worthwhile and the belief that a just society must appreciate and nurture the lives of all people, whatever the endowments they receive in the natural lottery.”3 Rather than go with the trend in which children must increasingly conform to the expectations of their parents, Asch asks for parental values that are consistent with knowing that “every child inevitably differs from parental dreams.” She holds out the idea that “successful parenting requires a mix of shaping and influencing children and ruefully appreciating the ways they pick and choose from what parents offer, sometimes rejecting tastes or values dear to the parents.” Not only that, but “Testing and abortion guarantee little about the child and the life parents create and nurture, and all parents and children will be harmed by inflated notions of what parenting in an age of genetic knowledge can bring in terms of fulfilled expectations.”4 Asch does not want all testing to disappear and does not favor closing off abortion to parents, but she supports more questioning of the value of prenatal testing and more openness to children regardless of genetic characteristics, in the way that some commentators have argued against favoritism of heterosexual children over homosexual children. Her citation of the views of Schüklenk and colleagues does not tell the whole story about the meaning of using tests in choices about children. Among other things, her approach assumes that there is consensus about prenatal interventions for sexual orientation, which is untrue to the history of the debate. In a way, though, Asch expresses the rationale for noninterference with the sexual orientation of children better than much of the commentary on the subject does. If we read her analysis backward, not from homosexuality to disability but from disability to homosexuality, we can describe homosexual children as having valuable lives that should not be reflexively dismissed as inferior lives. Second, we could invoke her idea that women’s interests would be better served if there were no overriding assumption that they should always select against homosexual children. Let them decide matters for reasons of their own, freed from any master In Defense of Trait Selection 81 moral narrative about the use of...