ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on decisions pre-birth. To view the problem through the lens of parental responsibility is to focus on the decision-making process. To exercise parental responsibility is to plan parenthood sensibly, and with empathy for the needs and future of the child. It is thus not an exercise of parental responsibility to bring a child into the world whose life will be demonstrably awful. To see procreation as a huge responsibility rather than as a right or a privilege is relatively uncontentious. In emphasising responsible parenthood, in focusing on obligations, on agents rather than recipients, the chapter formulates a right overlooked by legislation, international and national — the right to have responsible parents. Couples should employ genetic tests for non-disease traits in selecting which child to bring into existence and that we should allow selection for non-disease genes in some cases even if this maintains or increases social inequality.
