Abstract
This essay presents a challenge to the parental obligation objection. This objection is usually made by abortion opponents who argue that because child support laws hold men postnatally responsible for children they helped bring into existence (even when they did not intend to become parents), women too have prenatal parental responsibilities that should prevent them from ending pregnancies through abortions. My essay draws on recent publications in bioethics that distinguish procreative from parental responsibilities. This distinction was originally developed to clarify the duties of third-party participants in assisted reproduction. However, the distinction inadvertently poses a problem for the parental obligation objection, for it raises questions about whether women who do not wish to carry a child to term have parental rather than procreative responsibilities. It does not necessarily follow that the objection must be wrong. But rather, that there is an explanatory gap in it. If abortion violates procreative responsibilities, then drastic changes must be made to fertility medicine. Conversely, there does not appear to be non-question-begging criteria that would explain why pregnant women must have parental responsibilities, in addition to procreative ones, whereas third-party participants in assisted reproduction, such as fertility doctors, embryologists, gamete donors, and surrogates, have only procreative responsibilities.
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Notes
David Boonin calls this “the child support objection” [2, 246–254]. I should emphasize that I will be selective in my engagement with the secondary literature on this topic. The parental obligation objection overlaps with other areas, such as the abortion debate in general and the ethics of parenthood. Obviously, there is a massive secondary literature on these topics. I plan to ignore some of it on the grounds that my aim is to identify a puzzle internal to the parental obligation objection, not necessarily to take a stand on the moral permissibility of abortion in general or on the conditions of parental responsibilities.
I take most versions of the parental obligation objection to be claiming that women have parental responsibilities when pregnancies are the result of consensual sex. For the sake of readability, I will use the phrase “pregnant women” to refer to these cases–cases where pregnancies result from consensual sex.
An anonymous reviewer helpfully suggests that ensuring a minimally decent life should include “confidence that the child will be raised in the care of guardians willing and able to execute the full panoply of parental responsibilities.” This strikes me as reasonable. However, it may be challenging to defend. First, some accessories to procreation, such as gamete donors, may be so far removed from the children they help create that they probably cannot claim to have attained this confidence. Second, if parental responsibilities are sufficiently weighty, including, say, a responsibility to exhibit lifelong familial love, then arguably some children who are released into the foster care system, such as those raised in group homes, may not receive the full panoply of parental responsibilities. To be clear, I am not necessarily opposed to the idea that procreative responsibilities may include an obligation to ensure that a child by raised by parent-like caregivers. However, I worry that it is beyond the scope of this paper to defend it.
This essay’s focus has been the more common version of the parental obligation objection, where it is used to argue against abortion. However, these comments indicate how I would extend its arguments to the other version, where the objection is used to argue against requiring nonconsenting fathers to pay child support. I suspect that child support laws in these cases can be justified based on fairness, without referencing parental responsibilities.
Here, another problem might be noted. It is accepted in the secondary literature on procreational responsibilities that these responsibilities can be transferred to others more easily than parental responsibilities. For example, a woman who is unable or unwilling to gestate a fetus can contract her procreational responsibilities to a surrogate. However, it is unclear that we can “outsource” parental responsibilities in this way. For example, I cannot hire a surrogate to fulfill my responsibility to unconditionally love my daughter [9, 10].
If gamete donors were parents, then, presumably, the mechanisms by which they transfer their parental responsibilities should be more demanding than simply signing them away in contracts. So too, the processes by which intended parents acquire them should be more stringent. For example, adoptive parents must undergo background checks, home visits, and so forth before they can assume parental responsibilities. To my knowledge, parents using donated sperm and eggs do not undergo this type of vetting. These considerations suggest that we do not generally believe that gamete donors are parents, with full-blown parental responsibilities, the language of their contracts notwithstanding.
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Shaw, J. Procreative responsibilities and the parental obligation objection. Theor Med Bioeth 43, 111–125 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-022-09570-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-022-09570-7