Abstract
According to theories of wrongful life (WL), the imposition upon a child of an existence of poor quality can constitute an act of harming, and a violation of the child’s rights. The idea that there can be WLs may seem intuitively compelling. But, as this paper argues, liberals who commit themselves to WL theories may have to compromise some of their other beliefs. For they will thereby become committed to the claim that some women are under a stringent moral duty to have an abortion: a duty that could, without injustice, at least sometimes be enforced by the state. WL theories in other words imply that some women will lack a right to choose, under which both the decision to abort, and the decision to carry the fetus to term, are protected against interference. The paper exposes a dilemma, then, for liberals who are committed both to (a) the rights of future people not to be subjected to a harmful existence, and (b) the rights of women to refuse an abortion.
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Notes
For example dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, the devastating symptoms of which are described in Glover (1992, pp. 129–130).
I here amend an example from Parfit (1984, p. 367).
I say that this view is available to believers in WL; it is an interesting question whether any philosophers actually hold it. Benatar (2006) and Shiffrin (1999) gesture towards it, in claiming that all procreation imposes significant harm. Yet they explicitly commit themselves only to the claim that procreation is pro tanto objectionable, and are agnostic about the further claim that it is always all-things-considered wrongful. Nonetheless, both make comments which strongly imply the radical view. For instance, Shiffrin (1999, p. 137) says, of all procreation, that it seems ‘in tension with the foundational liberal, anti-paternalist principle that forbids the imposition of significant burdens and risks upon a person without the person’s consent.’
Considerably more controversial is the question whether a person is under a duty so to act when she is blameless, or only partially responsible, for imposing the threat of harm. I return to that issue in the paper’s final section.
Note that some conditions that render life not worth living manifest themselves not at birth, but only later. For instance, Tay-Sachs disease strikes after six months of normal neonatal development. In cases where the fetus has a condition that is incompatible with a worthwhile life, but of delayed onset, WL theories do not imply that the woman is duty-bound to abort, since the harm to the infant can be prevented via postnatal euthanasia. However, for conditions that would be symptomatic at birth (such as dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, mentioned at fn. 1) abortion is the only post-conception option that will forestall the harm.
Shiffrin uses this example specifically to illustrate how an act performed now can violate the right of an individual who does not yet exist. I also use it to illustrate how acting in a way that will lead to a rights violation, and then failing to take preventative action when one can do so, is especially wrong. That limited point is not undermined by the fact that the bomb case is not a perfect analogy to WL (principally because, in the bomb case, the act which leads to the rights violation does not cause the existence of the victim).
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for emphasising the need to confront this objection.
In the next two paragraphs I draw on May (2005, pp. 338–342).
An anonymous reviewer suggests that, because parents rarely know with certainty before conception that their child will have a harmful impairment, the cases that were central to my discussion will be so rare as to be largely irrelevant for practical purposes. However, recall that, although I focused on WL cases involving impairments, WL theories in fact claim that existence can be harmful for other reasons—for instance, owing to the severe poverty of the child’s upbringing, the abusiveness of his home life, and so on. I think that cases in which a person is deliberately created, in the knowledge that their lives will be unavoidably restricted on these sorts of grounds, are by no means statistically irrelevant.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to those who gave verbal feedback when earlier versions of this paper were presented at conferences in Edinburgh, York, Warwick and Manchester. I am also thankful for the valuable written comments given to me by Cécile Fabre, Anne Phillips, David Rhys Birks, and three anonymous reviewers for this journal.
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Williams, J. Wrongful Life and Abortion. Res Publica 16, 351–366 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-010-9135-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-010-9135-x