Procreation And Parenthood

Procreation, Parenthood, and Educational Rights explores important issues at the nexus of two burgeoning areas within moral and social philosophy: procreative ethics and parental rights. Surprisingly, there has been comparatively little scholarly engagement across these subdisciplinary boundaries, despite the fact that parental rights are paradigmatically ascribed to individuals responsible for procreating particular children. This collection thus aims to bring expert practitioners from these literatures into fruitful and innovative dialogue around questions at the intersection of procreation and parenthood. Among these questions are: Must individuals be found competent in order to have the right to procreate or to parent? What, if anything, can justify parents' special authority over, or special obligations toward, their children, particularly children they biologically procreate? How is the relationship between the right to procreate and the right to parent best understood? How ought liberal societies understand the parent-child relationship and the rights and claims it gives rise to? A distinguishing feature of the collection is that several of its chapters address these issues by drawing on philosophical work in the realm of education, one of the most controversial areas in the ethics of parenthood. This book represents a distinctive synthesis of topics and literatures likely to appeal to scholars and advanced students working across a wide range of disciplines.

Seven essays on some of the main ethical issues raised by producing and rearing children.

This volume contributes to the growing literature on the morality of procreation and parenting. About half of the chapters take up questions about the morality of bringing children into existence. The other half of the volume considers moral and political questions about adoption and parenting. This collection builds on existing literature by advancing novel perspectives on existing debates. It also raises new issues deserving of our attention.

This original, comprehensive theory of procreative ethics explains what kind of act procreation is and when we may permissibly engage in it.

"The book is replete with photos and advertisements from popular magazines from the 1930s through the 1950s."--Jacket.

A bold feminist investigation into the mother of all questions; whether or not to become a parent in these turbulent times. Should we become parents? This timeless question forces us to reckon with who we are and what we love and fear most in ourselves, in our relationships, and in the world as it is now and as it will be. When Gina Rushton admitted she had little time left to make the decision for herself, the magnitude of the choice overwhelmed her. Her search for her own “yes” or “no” only uncovered more questions to be answered. How do we clearly consider creating a new life on a planet facing catastrophic climate change? How do we reassess the gender roles we have been assigned at birth and by society? How do we balance ascending careers with declining fertility? How do we know if we’ve found the right co-parent, or if we want to go it alone, or if we don’t want to do it at all? To seek clarity on these questions, Rushton spoke to doctors, sociologists, economists, and ethicists, as well as parents and childless people of all ages and from around the world. Here, she explores and presents policies, data, and case studies from people who have made this decision—one way or the other—and shows how the process can be revelatory in discovering who we are as individuals. Drawing on the depth of knowledge afforded by her body of work as an award-winning journalist on the abortion beat, Rushton wrote the book that she needed, and we all need, to stop a panicked internal monologue and start a genuine dialogue about what we want from our lives and why.

Many sociological, historical and cultural stories can be and have already been told about why it is that parents in post-industrial, western societies face an often overwhelming array of advice on how to bring up their children. At the same time, there have been several philosophical treatments of the legal, moral and political issues surrounding issues of procreation, the rights of children and the duties of parents, as well as some philosophical accounts of the shifts in our underlying conceptualization of childhood and adult-child relationships. While this book partly builds on the insights of this literature, it is significantly different in that it offers a philosophically-informed discussion of the actual practical experience of being a parent, with its deliberations, judgements and dilemmas. In probing the ethical and conceptual questions suggested by the parent-child relationship, this unique volume demonstrates the irreducible philosophical richness of this relationship and thus provides an important counter-balance to the overly empirical and largely psychological focus of a great deal of “parenting” literature. Unlike other analytic work on the parent-child relationship and the educational role of parents, this work draws on first-person accounts of the day-to-day experience of being a parent in order to explore the ethical and epistemological aspects of this experience. In so doing it exposes the limitations of some of the languages within which contemporary “parenting” is conceptualized and discussed, and opens up a space for thinking about childrearing and the parent-child relationship beyond and other than in terms of the languages which dominate the ways in which we generally think about it today.