Genetic Disability Case Study
Throughout society, there are disagreements on whether or not people should be able to screen and choose to have a child with a disability over a non-disabled child. Paula Garfield and Tomato Lichy are a deaf couple who currently have a three-year-old child, Molly, who was born deaf. The couple now wants to have a second child who they want to be deaf. Unfortunately, Garfield is now in her early 40s making it difficult for her to have children at this age, so instead the couple is looking into IVF for their next child. The problem of this situation is that a government bill in their country states that selecting a hearing child through IVF is allowed, but those found to have a deaf gene would be discarded. The couple believes that this is inhumane and deaf people should have the same rights as hearing people. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is a technique used to test the genetic abnormalities of an embryo through in vitro fertilization (520). With PGD, those embryos with genetic defects (in this case those embryos with a deaf gene) are rejected while those that are mutation free are kept to be implanted into the mother (520). There is controversy on whether it is acceptable to discard those embryos with high risk of mutations such as in the case of Garfield and Lichy. Garfield and Lichy are fighting against
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She believes that the main conflict with genetic selection for disability is autonomy. This is a battle between the autonomy of parents and the autonomy of the future child. Parents and children have different rights and one that is emphasized by Davis are “rights-in-trust” (pg. 555). These are rights which ought to be saved for the child until he or she is an adult. Unfortunately, parents violate these rights which is what Garfield and Lichy are trying to
She believes that the main conflict with genetic selection for disability is autonomy. This is a battle between the autonomy of parents and the autonomy of the future child. Parents and children have different rights and one that is emphasized by Davis are “rights-in-trust” (pg. 555). These are rights which ought to be saved for the child until he or she is an adult. Unfortunately, parents violate these rights which is what Garfield and Lichy are trying to