Disability and Procreative Diminishment
This chapter looks at how today's denials for ART treatment based on a prospective parent's disability are worrying analogues to the eugenics past, an era in which misguided judgments about parental fitness culminated in the involuntary sterilization of thousands of Americans. Whereas past eugenicists coerced the “feeble-minded” into surrendering their reproductive capacity through forced sterilizations, today's practices deprive the differently abled of their capacity to reproduce by withholding the technological means necessary to produce a child. By focusing on the meaning of disability in contemporary society as both an acquired and inherited characteristic, the chapter considers how the presence of a disability in a would-be parent and its likely appearance in any resulting offspring shape the conduct of physicians and patients alike.