Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA.
Bioethics. 2022 Jun;36(5):569-575. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12976. Epub 2021 Dec 14.
Many contemporary ethical debates turn on claims about the nature and extent of our alleged procreative moral rights: moral rights to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. In this article, I argue that there are no procreative moral rights, in that generally we do not have a distinctive moral right to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. However, interference with our procreative choices usually violates our nonprocreative moral rights, such as our moral rights to bodily autonomy or to privacy. My argument presents hypothetical cases in which a state interferes with a person's procreative choices in order to promote aggregate social welfare, but this interference does not violate any of the person's nonprocreative moral rights. These cases not only undermine frequently made claims that widely recognized nonprocreative moral rights entail procreative moral rights, they also challenge the intuitively plausible claim that interference with our procreative choices as such violates our moral rights. What at first appear to be substantive moral rights are in fact a kind of illusion created by the frequent overlap of other rights, but lacking in substance beyond that overlap. While this argument against the existence of procreative moral rights has substantive implications for ongoing debates in reproductive ethics, I ultimately suggest that it is consistent with a progressive approach to reproductive justice.
即按照自己的意愿生育或不生育的道德权利。在本文中，我认为并不存在生育道德权利，因为我们通常没有按照自己的意愿生育或不生育的独特道德权利。然而，对我们生育选择的干涉通常会侵犯我们的非生育道德权利，例如我们的身体自主或隐私的道德权利。我的论点提出了一些假设案例，在这些案例中，国家为了促进总体社会福利而干涉个人的生育选择，但这种干涉并不侵犯个人的任何非生育道德权利。这些案例不仅破坏了人们经常提出的、广泛承认的非生育道德权利必然包含生育道德权利的观点，也对干涉我们的生育选择本身就侵犯我们的道德权利这一直观上似乎合理的观点提出了挑战。最初看起来是实质性的道德权利，实际上是其他权利经常重叠所产生的一种幻觉，除了这种重叠之外，没有实质性的内容。虽然这种反对生育道德权利存在的论点对生殖伦理领域正在进行的争论具有实质性的影响，但我最终建议，这与生殖正义的渐进方法是一致的。
