Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T18:51:51.185Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 27 - Ethical Platform of Assisted Reproduction

from VI - Practice Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2022

By
Julianne Zweifel  and
Jeanne O’Brien
Edited by
Sharon N. Covington
Sharon N. Covington
Affiliation:
Shady Grove Fertility, Rockville, MD
Get access

Summary

Patients who were once unable to have a child without assistance and patients wishing to have a child with desired traits are now eagerly seeking increasingly complex reproductive plans. These plans commonly involve multifaceted ethical concerns that may not be apparent to patients. The clinicians involved in patient care, including the medical team and mental health professionals, while beholden to reproductive ethics, may vary in terms of their perceptiveness of ethical concerns, their working constructs of medical ethics, and their comfort with addressing ethical concerns. This chapter endeavors to increase the clinician’s depth of understanding and skill in navigating and balancing reproductive ethical principles. In an examination of the core constructs of reproductive ethics, the chapter provides nuance on autonomy and challenges the reach of reproductive liberty.The perspectives of virtue ethics, including parental obligation to the child, feminist ethics, care-based ethics, and communitarian ethics are introduced.Finally, a seven-step decision-making process for considering and addressing ethical concerns is provided.

Keywords

reproductive ethicsclinical decision makingassisted reproductionprocreative libertynonidentity dilemmaautonomyvirtue ethicsfeminist ethicscommunitarian ethicscare-based ethics
Type
Chapter
Information
Fertility Counseling: Clinical Guide , pp. 274 - 281
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Kass, LR. Babies by means of in vitro fertilization: unethical experiments on the unborn? N Engl J Med 1971;285(21):1174–1179.Google Scholar
King, LP. Should clinicians set limits on reproductive autonomy? Hastings Cent Rep 2017;47(Suppl. 3):S50–S56.Google Scholar
University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics. Ethics of Organ Transplantation. 2004. Available at: www.ahc.umn.edu/img/assets/26104/Organ_Transplantation.pdf [last accessed June 16, 2022].Google Scholar
Robertson, JA. Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Steinbock, B. Review Essay/Procreative Liberty. Crim Justice Ethics 1996;15(1):67–74.Google Scholar
Robertson, JA. Ethics and the future of preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Reprod Biomed Online 2005;10(S1):97–101.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Robertson, JA. Genetic selection of offspring characteristics. B.U.L. Rev 1996;76(3):421–482.Google Scholar
Purdy, L. Children of choice: whose children? At what cost? Wash Lee Law Rev 1995;52(1):197–224.Google Scholar
Meilaender, G. Products of the will: Robertson’s children of choice. Wash Lee Law Rev 1995;52(1):173–195.Google ScholarPubMed
Prusak, BG. Parental Obligations and Bioethics. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandel, MJ. The case against perfection: what’s wrong with designer children, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering. The Atlantic Online. Published April 2004. Available at: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/04/the-case-against-perfection/302927/ [last accessed June 16, 2022].Google Scholar
Cohen, CB. Give me children or I shall die! New reproductive technologies and harm to children. Hastings Cent Rep 1996;40(4):19–27.Google Scholar
McDougall, R. Acting parentally: an argument against sex selection. J Med Ethics 2005;31:601–605.Google Scholar
Overall, C. Ethics and Human Reproduction: A Feminist Analysis. London: Routledge, 1987.Google Scholar
American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. ACOG Committee Opinion No. 390, December 2007. Ethical decision making in obstetrics and gynecology. Obstet Gynecol 2007;110(6):1479–1487. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.AOG.0000291573.09193.36Google Scholar
Parks, JA. Care ethics and the global practice of commercial surrogacy. Bioethics 2010;24(7):333–340.Google Scholar
Tam, H. Communitarianism, Sociology of. In: Wright, JD (editor-in-chief), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 4. Oxford: Elsevier, 2015, 311–316.Google Scholar
Doyle, P. The U.K. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. How it has contributed to the evaluation of assisted reproduction technology. Int J Technol Assess Health Care 1999;15(1):3–10.Google Scholar
What is SART? Available at: www.sart.org/patients/what-is-sart/ [last accessed June 16, 2022].Google Scholar
Weiner, C. Social responsibility in genetic engineering: historical perspectives. In: Nordgren, A. Gene Therapy and Ethics: Studies in Bioethics and Research Ethics, 4th ed. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Press, 1999, 51–64.Google Scholar
Timeline of Advances in the Field of Reproductive Medicine. Available at: www.asrm.org/about-us/history-of-asrm/ [last accessed June 16, 2022].Google Scholar
Dobzhansky, T. Genetics and equality. Science 1962;137 (3524):112–115.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×