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Parental Responsibility in the Context of Neuroscience and Genetics pp 189–205Cite as

Should Parents Take Active Steps to Preserve Their Children’s Fertility?

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Part of the book series: International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine ((LIME,volume 69))

Abstract

It has been argued that, when there is a probable imminent risk of loss of children’s fertility, their parents should take active steps to preserve their reproductive potential if possible – or even that children have a right to such interventions being undertaken on them on their behalf, as an expression of their right to an open future. In this chapter, I explore these proposals and some of their implications. I place the discussion of fertility preservation for children into the more general context of the choices that parents might have to help keep their children’s future reproductive (and parenting) choices open. I discuss the role of desert and fairness in arguments for fertility preservation and their relevance for framings of infertility in general, as well as the relation between having a (slight) possibility to reproduce and becoming a parent.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There may be disagreement on whether this condition really lies at the core of the legitimacy of parental decision making. For the purposes of this chapter, I will assume that it does.

  2. 2.

    I am grateful to Guido Pennings for raising this point during the Q&A following my talk on this topic at the Maastricht symposium “Parental responsibility in the context of neuroscience and genetics”.

  3. 3.

    I thank my co-editor Kristien Hens for inspiring these concerns.

  4. 4.

    As my co-editor Dorothee Horstkötter pointed out, such a proposal “might also be tricky, because one could turn the argument around and say that ‘foreseeing and treating reproductive desires’ should entail a clear discouragement from engaging in a same-sex relationship, or – for women - in higher education and employment as that facilitates postponement.” This may be true, but by doing so they would restrict their children’s futures in other, more predictably harmful ways – and thus fail more, and more actively, at safeguarding their children’s interests than they would by not taking fertility preservation measures on their behalf.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Umeå University, SE-901 87, Umeå, Sweden

    Daniela Cutas

  2. Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Daniela Cutas

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  1. Daniela Cutas
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Correspondence to Daniela Cutas .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Kristien Hens

  2. Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Daniela Cutas

  3. Department of Health, Ethics and Society School of Mental Health and Neuroscience (MHeNS), University of Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Dorothee Horstkötter

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Cutas, D. (2017). Should Parents Take Active Steps to Preserve Their Children’s Fertility?. In: Hens, K., Cutas, D., Horstkötter, D. (eds) Parental Responsibility in the Context of Neuroscience and Genetics. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 69. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42834-5_12

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