Life Before Birth The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos and Fetuses, Second Edition

by Steinbock, Bonnie

• ISBN13: 9780195341621
• ISBN10: 0195341627
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-07-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Life Before Birth provides a coherent framework for addressing bioethical issues in which the moral status of embryos and fetuses is relevant. It is based on the "interest view" which ascribes moral standing to beings with interests, and connects the possession of interests with the capacity for conscious awareness or sentience. The theoretical framework is applied to ethical and legal topics, including abortion, prenatal torts, wrongful life, the crime of feticide, substance abuse by pregnant women, compulsory cesareans, assisted reproduction, and stem cell research. Along the way, difficult philosophical problems, such as identity and the non-identity problem are thoroughly explored. The book will be of interest not only to philosophers, but also physicians, lawyers, policy makers, and anyone perplexed by the many difficulties surrounding the unborn. "Bonnie Steinbock's excellent book is . . . consistent, thoroughgoing, and intelligible." --Nature "Steinbock's book is valuable for all interested in the ethical/legal issues surrounding abortion, prenatal injury and liability, maternal-fetal conflict, and fetal/embryo research. The author provides an excellent historical overview of these issues, but she also addresses the issues from the stance of a particular theory of moral status, namely, interest theory. This gives coherence to her discussion as well as allowing testing of the viability of interest theory." --Choice "A focused, lucid, analytically fine-grained discussion of a wide variety of problems. . . extremely useful as a survey of the current state of the debate." --Religious Studies Review "Merits serious consideration by physicians. Steinbock's interests-based approach treats all questions as open -- another and most welcome breath of fresh air." -New England Journal of Medicine "An extremely valuable contribution to the literature. The author carefully identifies the many bioethical issues to which the status of embryos and fetuses is relevant....She thoroughly reviews the extensive medical, bioethical, and legal literature on all of these issues, offering well-developed critiques of many standard positions. She articulates and thoughtfully defends interesting positions on all of theses topics. Anyone with an interest in these issues will learn a great deal from her knowledgeable and judicious treatment of them." -- The Journal of Clinical Ethics

Author Biography

Bonnie Steinbock received her PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974. She began teaching philosophy at the College of Wooster, and moved to the University at Albany in i977. Her area of specialization is bioethics, particularly reproduction and genetics.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. xiii
The Interest View	p. 1
Consciousness and Interests	p. 5
Is Consciousness Necessary for Having Interests?	p. 7
Is Consciousness Sufficient for Having Interests?	p. 12
The Interests of Nonconscious Individuals	p. 15
Dead People	p. 15
Permanently Unconscious People	p. 18
Infants with Anencephaly	p. 23
Future People	p. 31
The Parfit Problem and the Farther Future	p. 32
Potential People: Embryos and Fetuses	p. 34
Abortion	p. 36
The Moral Standing of the Fetus	p. 42
The Conservative Position	p. 42
Fetal Sentience	p. 46
Implantation	p. 50
The Person View	p. 52
The Right to Life	p. 55
The Argument From Potential	p. 59
The Logical Problem	p. 59
Contraception and the Moral Standing of Gametes	p. 60
The Future-Like-Ours Account	p. 65
Identity	p. 71
The Embodied Mind Account	p. 71
The Biological View	p. 74
The Interest View and the Time-Relative Interests Account	p. 76
Sentient Fetuses	p. 80
Possible People	p. 82
The Nonidentity Problem	p. 83
The Argument From Bodily Self-Determination	p. 92
Thomson's Defense of Abortion	p. 92
Roe v. Wade	p. 96
The Moral and Legal Significance of Viability	p. 99
Late Abortions	p. 101
Partial-Birth Abortion	p. 104
Beyond Abortion: The Fetus in Tort and Criminal Law	p. 108
Recovery for Prenatal Injury in Torts	p. 109
Against Third Parties	p. 109
The Irrelevance of Viability	p. 110
Preconception Torts	p. 111
Against the Mother	p. 115
The Woman's Right of Privacy	p. 116
Automobile Liability	p. 119
Prenatal Wrongful Death	p. 121
Wrongful-Death Actions	p. 121
The Implications for Abortion	p. 122
The Criminal Law	p. 125
Prenatal Neglect	p. 126
Homicide	p. 127
Wrongful Life	p. 139
Maternal-Fetal Conflict	p. 155
Moral Obligations to the Not-Yet-Born	p. 156
Risks to the Fetus	p. 162
Pregnant Women and the Law	p. 168
Delivering Drugs Through the Umbilical Cord	p. 168
Criminal Prosecution for Child Abuse or Endangerment	p. 170
Criminal Prosecution for Homicide	p. 172
Jailing the Pregnant Addict	p. 176
Termination of Parental Rights	p. 179
Compulsory Cesarean Sections	p. 182
The Implications of Roe v. Wade	p. 186
McFall v. Shimp and the Duty to Rescue	p. 188
Less Invasive Cases	p. 195
Assisted Reproductive Technology	p. 199
The Science of Assisted Reproductive Technology	p. 200
In Vitro Fertilization	p. 200
Health Risks to Women	p. 202
Health Risks to Offspring	p. 203
Procreative Liberty and Its Critics	p. 205
John Robertson	p. 205
Adoption and the Right to Have Biologically Related Children	p. 208
Core Values and Penumbral Interests	p. 211
The Interests of Children and the Nonidentity Problem	p. 212
Limits to Procreative Liberty	p. 215
Postmenopausal Mothers	p. 215
The Risk of Transmitting Disease or Disability	p. 218
Multiple Births	p. 224
Dispositional Problems	p. 230
Davis v. Davis	p. 230
Kass v. Kass	p. 236
Gamete Donation	p. 239
Sperm Donation	p. 240
Egg Donation	p. 244
Stem Cell Research	p. 255
The Science	p. 259
Adult Stem Cells	p. 260
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells	p. 262
Cloning: Reproductive Versus Therapeutic	p. 264
The Moral Standing of the Human Embryo	p. 268
The Twinning Problem	p. 269
Respect for Embryos	p. 270
Kantian Respect	p. 271
Moral Standing Versus Moral Value	p. 272
The Basis for Ascribing Moral Value to Human Embryos	p. 275
The Discarded-Created Distinction	p. 278
Payment for Oocytes	p. 282
Chimeras, Hybrids, and Cybrids	p. 284
Law and Policy in the United States	p. 291
Cloning Policy	p. 297
Law and Policy in Other Countries	p. 298
United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning	p. 301
Index	p. 303
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