According to what we call the Principle of Procreative Beneficence, couples who decide to have a child have a significant moral reason to select the child who, given his or her genetic endowment, can be expected to enjoy the most well-being. In the first part of this paper, we introduce PB, explain its content, grounds, and implications, and defend it against various objections. In the second part, we argue that PB is superior to competing principles of procreative selection such as (...) that of procreative autonomy. In the third part of the paper, we consider the relation between PB and disability. We develop a revisionary account of disability, in which disability is a species of instrumental badness that is context- and person-relative. Although PB instructs us to aim to reduce disability in future children whenever possible, it does not privilege the normal. What matters is not whether future children meet certain biological or statistical norms, but what level of well-being they can be expected to have. (shrink)

In 2006, based on the advice of 50 international experts, the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society and the European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology issued a consensus statement on the nomenclature and management of children who have a phenotype that is neither typical male nor female (Lee et al. 2006). Responding to a decade of criticism over the terminology that had been in place, including such terms as intersex, hermaphrodite, or pseudohermaphrodite, they proposed to call those conditions in which the patient (...) does not have the typical male or female gonads, chromosomes, or anatomy "disorders of sexual development."While this proposed change in nomenclature is helpful, in order to truly effect a .. (shrink)