Wired: wanting your own biological children is immoral

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For most of Western history, it was a given that a parent would want their children to be their direct progeny. A child’s biological provenance was believed to ground the parent-child relationship in a hardwired, irrevocable bond. If anything, it was morally preferable that your child be directly related to you, since this was thought to provide a healthy foundation for growth and self-actualization. The bioethicist J. David Velleman expresses this line of argument when he writes that knowledge of one’s biological parents is a “basic good on which most people rely in pursuit of self-knowledge and identity formation.”

Yet this prioritization of biological inheritance (“biologism,” as some call it) has recently become unsettled. Previously, if you gave birth to a child, it was a simple certainty that they were genetically related to you—the biological fact was inextricably linked to their existence. Over the past few decades, however, practices like gestational surrogacy have shown that this need not be the case. Evolving family structures, advancements in fertilization and embryonic screening technologies, and changing moral sentiments have all contributed to a growing reevaluation of this deceptively simple preference. Once we begin to disentangle what is truly possible from what we simply assumed was necessary, we are forced to look at this “natural” preference with fresh eyes.

What we find is that, when contextualized amongst our other modern ethical norms, this preference can feel downright ancient—a vestigial remnant of a different epoch, a fossil no longer animated by the same moral intuitions that gave it gravity in the past. In fact, many of the arguments that might be made in favor of this prejudice run precisely counter to other changing attitudes toward parenting, family, and the role of biology in culture.
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On the contrary, this biological desire reinforces norms that we are explicitly aiming to dismantle. It places undue emphasis on genetic similarity as a criterion for our ethical relations, running against our stated hopes to expand our nets of responsibility and care beyond the borders of nation, ethnicity, culture, and even species. Instead, it normalizes a certain conception of family that reinforces these parochial categories. It’s for a similar reason that bioethicists like Hane Htut Maung have pushed back against the desire for prioritizing racial sameness when selecting gametes for assisted reproduction, arguing that this practice ultimately perpetuates a “particular normative conception of family that places undue emphasis on resemblances based on racialized traits.” Using things like biological similarity to ground a parent-child relationship deconstructs the notion that parents should love their children unconditionally, undermining what the scholar Rosalind McDougall calls the “parental virtue of acceptance.”

Moreover, the argument that this genetic tie has unique intrinsic value because it is “natural” steps into particularly dangerous territory. It’s precisely this argument that has been used for decades to discredit same-sex couples as unfit to be parents. An appeal to naturalism also easily leads into what the bioethicist Ezio Di Nucci calls “patriarchal prejudices,” the idea that it is only natural for mothers to serve as primary caretakers because of their biological-gestational relationship with a child. Language around what is “natural” and “unnatural” should always be viewed with suspicion. Ethnographic research of the Na in the Himalayas—who do not have a social category for biological fathers—for instance, shows us that even a concept as fundamental to us as fatherhood is not an inevitable product of human biology. Eliding the social phenomenon of parenthood with the biological phenomenon only sets us up to reinforce a dated conception of the family at odds with our hopes for a more inclusive ethics.

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This is part of Next Normal, WIRED's series on the future of morality and how our ethical beliefs may change in the years to come.

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