Made With Love & Science: Queer Reproductive and Family Ethics

Abstract: In my ongoing book project, I argue that lgbtq+ perspectives are missing from philosophical bioethics, impoverishing that literature; I show this by
centering lgbtq+ people and experiences while engaging with, assessing, and rebutting some dominant views in the mainstream literature. The most developed case I take up centers on the morality of (anonymous) donor conception; in contrast to the going views in the literature which understand I conceive of the issue as a matter of pure parental/procreative ethics, I frame the issue as a conflict between procreative/parental ethics and the moral responsibility to resist unjust social systems and norms, e.g. bionormativity. This broader framing of the issue demands a new ethical lens: the “ethics of complicity, meaning that lgbtq+ potential parents ought morally to approach reproductive decisions in ways that provide for their children’s interests and needs, while simultaneously resisting the unjust social norm of bionormativity (and other injustices), which helps to shape their children’s needs and interests. I then apply this approach to several specific lgbtq+ reproductive practices including conceiving of queerness as a kind of infertility, reciprocal IVF (for female/female couples), fertility preservation prior to gender-affirming treatment, and surrogacy for (male/male couples).