One Is the Loneliest Number: How the WHO’s Redefinition of Infertility Provokes Contestations of the Body and the Body Politic

Abstract

Few decisions by the World Health Organization have elicited as much attention or criticism as its recent announcement to redefine as both infertile and disabled – and thus as eligible to receive publically funded artificial reproductive therapies – single women and men who are unable to have children solely because of their inability to find a sexual partner. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine two other lesser-discussed but nonetheless significant dimensions of this decision, namely, its theoretical and philosophical import for conceptions of both disability and parenting as a public good. Toward that end I draw upon Christopher Riddle’s philosophical definition of disability and Tamar Ezer’s exploration of parental positive rights to make the argument that just as defining singleness as an infertile disability undermines the latter’s conceptual integrity, so too does redefining parenthood as the exercise of autonomous right render it incapable of producing the kind of moral and political goods integral to a flourishing democratic society.