Towards procreative justice?

Prof Bertrand Guillarme (Université Paris 8)

The right to reproduce is one of those moral rights that has been more assumed than argued for. What has been defended by various arguments is the right not to reproduce, in particular when abortion was involved, since it appeared obviously morally problematic to pursue the death of a future human being. When it is recognized, the right to reproduce is generally conceived as an instance of negative liberty: individuals cannot usually be prevented from having children if they want to have some. The development of new techniques and procedures applied to human reproduction (IVF, embryo frozing, embryo transfer...) in the last forty years has profoundly transformed the moral issue: a number of those who could not exercise their right to reproduce are now able to procreate, providing that society makes available to them the resources and services that they need. Procreation has thus become a distributive justice issue, in ways that it has not been before. In this presentation, I want to outline different ways in which procreative justice can be thought, and some of the normative implications of these strategies.