Early intervention aims to identify children or families at risk of poor health, and take preventative measures at an early stage, when intervention is more likely to succeed. EI is concerned with the just distribution of “life chances,” so that all children are given fair opportunity to realize their potential and lead a good life; EI policy design, therefore, invokes ethical questions about the balance of responsibilities between the state, society, and individuals in addressing inequalities. We analyze a corpus of (...) EI policy guidance to investigate explicit and implicit ethical arguments about who should be held morally responsible for safeguarding child health and well-being. We examine the implications of these claims and explore what it would mean to put the proposed policies into practice. We conclude with some remarks about the useful role that philosophical analysis can play in EI policy development. (shrink)

By meeting needs for individualized love and relatedness, the care we receive deeply shapes our social and economic chances and therefore represents a form of luck. Hence, distributive justice requires a fair distribution of care in society. I look at different ways of ensuring this and argue that full redistribution of care is beyond our reach. I conclude that a strong individual morality informed by an ethics of care is a necessary complement of well-designed institutions.

There are three stages at which procreative outcomes can be prevented or altered: (1) prior to conception (2) during pregnancy and (3) after birth. Daniel Engster (Soc Theory Pract 36(2):233–262, 2010) has ably argued that plans to prevent or alter procreative outcomes at stages (2) and (3)—through abortion and adoption—introduce financial, physical, and emotional hardships to which women are disproportionately vulnerable. In this paper, I argue that plans to prevent or alter undesirable procreative outcomes at stage (1)—through contraception use—similarly disadvantage (...) women. I suggest that accounts proposing moral responsibilities to delay or permanently avoid procreation are insufficiently attentive to the methods through which undesirable procreative outcomes might be prevented and how such methods unfairly burden women. In conclusion, I propose several ways that men and women might more equitably share contraceptive responsibility. (shrink)

Fertility specialists, adoption agents, judges and others sometimes take themselves to have a responsibility to fairly adjudicate conflicts that may arise between the procreative and parenting interests of people with disabilities and the interests that their children or potential children have to be nurtured, cared for and protected. An underlying assumption is that having a disability significantly diminishes a person's parenting abilities. My aim is to challenge the claim that having a disability tends to make someone a bad parent by (...) arguing that the interests of prospective parents with disabilities and the interests of their children or potential children are often aligned and mutually supporting. (shrink)

Disability activists' redefinition of “disability” as a social, rather than a medical, problem attempts to reassign causality. We explicate the untenable implications of this approach and argue this definition is maleficent, unjust, and inconsistent. Thus, redefining disability as a socially caused phenomenon is, from a moral point of view, ill-advised.

Discussions of reproductive responsibility generally draw heavily upon the principles of nonmaleficence and beneficence. However, these principles are typically only applied to women due to the incorrect belief that only women can cause fetal harm. The cultural perception that women are likely to cause fetal and child harm is reflected in numerous social norms, policies, and laws. Conversely, there is little public discussion of men and fetal and child harm, which implies that men do not (or cannot) cause such harm. (...) My goal in this paper is to begin to fill the void in the academic literature about men’s reproductive responsibility by highlighting the health-related, economic, and social harms men can cause to potential fetuses and children and then examining what it would mean to hold them responsible for preventing these harms. Applying the principles of nonmaleficence and beneficence to men, I conclude that men have a moral duty to use contraception if their behavior—past, current, or future—could harm the potential fetuses and children who result from their unprotected sexual behavior. (shrink)

Having and raising children is widely regarded as one of the most valuable projects a person can choose to undertake. Yet many disabled people find it difficult to share in this value because of obstacles that arise from widespread social attitudes about disability. A common assumption is that having a disability tends to make someone unfit to parent. This assumption may seem especially relevant as a factor in decisions about whether to allow, encourage and assist disabled people to reproduce and (...) raise children. Yet there are reasons to doubt whether there is such a close connection between having a disability and lacking the ability to raise a child well. The aims of this paper are, first, to identify and clarify some values that are relevant to questions about allowing, encouraging and assisting disabled people to procreate and raise children, second, to give an overview of how these values can help us to address certain legal questions that arise for disabled people who aim to procreate and parent, third, to raise concerns about how to properly assess the parenting capacities of people with disabilities, and fourth, to suggest some ways in which having a disability can actually make someone a better parent. (shrink)