Comments on: Do parents have an interest in rearing biologically related children?

By: jam

jam — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:26:31 +0000

Start with A Little Pregnant. She has a long list of infertility blogs she's collected. Chez Miscarriage is well written.

By: harry

harry — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 12:39:02 +0000

YEs, jam, very interesting and useful. Could you give some links to the blogs? thanks, H

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 02:57:24 +0000

Jam—that is an interesting take on it. We considered fertility treatment briefly but everything pointed toward it being much more expensive and time-consuming and out of our control than adoption.

By: jam

jam — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 19:26:01 +0000

It looks to me that what you’re trying to do is get some kind of moral calculus where you can weigh the satisfactions parents get from alternatives to adopting against the satisfaction the child gets from being adopted. And you’re assuming the parents’ satisfactions arise from their child being biologically related. As you point out, it’s a widespread assumption that such satisfactions are justifiable. You question that assumption, without questioning the underlying assumption that that’s why couples prefer not to adopt. But that may not be the case. It’s an empirical question which used to be difficult to answer, but now there are a number of “infertility blogs” around, all apparently written by women, many of whom talk through their motivations for embarking on ART or deciding to adopt. What seems clear from these blogs is that for these women, at least, and we have no reason to believe them atypical, biological relatedness is not the most significant factor in their decision, in many not a factor at all. The fundamental desire is to create a family. Couples look for the most efficient manner of accomplishing this desire. Clearly the simplest and most efficient process is the “natural” process where sex (either as desire prompts or deliberately engaged in at the most propitious time in the woman’s cycle) leads uncomplicatedly to pregnancy. It turns out that adoption is the most costly, both in financial terms and in terms of control, though, for the infertile, it is also the most likely to result in a child. The simpler forms of ART (e.g. IUI) are much cheaper and as much under the couple’s control as sex was. REs regard themselves as empowering their patients. Even IVF is cheaper. It is not until one reaches really complicated forms of ART, for example the use of donor eggs or gestational surrogacy, that financial costs begin to approach the costs of adoption. Even then, although now a third person is involved, the couple retains considerable control over the process. There is no equivalent to the adoption application or, worse, the dreaded homestudy. There is no third person who considers him/herself as representing interests which may be oppposed to the interests of the couple. The total cost of ART from the time one starts it to the time one emerges with a child (if one does) may well be larger than the costs of adoption, but for any given cycle, the previous failures represent a sunk cost. The decision, at any particular time, is based on the cost (financial, emotional, physical—ART takes a physical toll on the woman) of the next cycle. ART is typically abandoned for adoption (or childlessness accepted) when either the next cycle is medically infeasible or the couple decides the emotional costs of another failed cycle will be unbearable. It is likely that cloning (if it ever becomes feasible) will take its place somewhere in the spectrum of ART, perhaps after IVF with a woman’s own eggs has definitively failed, but before one tries using donor eggs. So the satisfactions whose moral status needs to be weighed stem from a couple’s desire to create their family at as little expense as possible and to keep creation of their family as private as possible and as much as possible under their own control. Privacy and personal autonomy, at least, have long been regarded as morally justifiable desires. The moral status of wanting to spend as little as possible is more debatable, but there are many who would argue for it.

By: Joshua W. Burton

Joshua W. Burton — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:03:19 +0000

If I recall the doctor’s photo correctly, he was fat and unattractive, so the sociobiologist in me must conclude that his sleight-of-hand with the vials was adaptive. It would probably be falling into the naturalistic fallacy, though, to encourage such behaviour. I suppose it’s true that the circus encouraged early Xianity, but that was neither the Pareto-optimal outcome nor the imperial intent. The goal of spermbank deathmatches would be to drive a heat engine off the marginal propensity to procreate, which evolution should otherwise drive to infinity when the market absorbs the news that sperm banks are even supplying the cup. The challenge for the sociobiologists is to explain what’s siphoning off all that prostatic back-pressure today. (The Internet, presumably. You have to put your pants on and actually go outside to a physical sperm bank before they’ll let you donate.)

By: Daniel Elstein

Daniel Elstein — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 18:36:23 +0000

Maybe the argument should rely on the fact that since the government is not going to interfere in some objectionable way (e.g. “redistributing children away from their biological parents to those best suited to rearing them”) there will be an overwhelmingly strong link between having children and having biologically related children. So the acknowledged interest in having children simpliciter gets translated into an interest in having biologically related children, because if the government refused to interpret the former interest as potentially involving the latter, that would constitute illegitimate government interference into private life. That might seem to beg the question in favour of cloning, but I take it that it’s an essentially liberal idea that governments don’t impose their own conceptions of the good life on people. Whilst there is consensus that there is an interest in having children, there is no consensus in there being an interest in having biological related children. But any attempt by the government to interpret the former interest so as not to recongnise the latter would be to impose a particular conception of the good life. Thus the governments should do what they actually do: allow individuals to interpret their interest in having children themselves, so that it may and may not involve an interest in having biologically related children.

By: JamesW

JamesW — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 17:16:49 +0000

I think you need to take account of the nasty fact that the market for potential adoptees is very unequal indeed. In white-majority countries, healthy white infants are snapped up, coloured ones after that, and disabled ones find it hard to be placed. So the question needs to be restated. Do parents have an interest in raising a healthy child? Sure. Biological parents will accept bad luck, but taking on an unrelated disabled child is heroic. On the other hand, the disabled child has an even stronger interest in being parented. Skin colour: I believe adoption agencies accept that adopters have a right to specify this, because biological parents do. This also changes the interests equation. If white childless parents turn down a sole offer of a non-white adoptee, this does not invalidate their interest in raising a white child, though their conduct may not be admirable.

By: Mrs Tilton

Mrs Tilton — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:33:30 +0000

Why don’t the sperm banks hold televised deathmatches on cable TV to raise money, the survivor’s prize being the right to make such anonymous donations? A while back I read of a fertility doctor who had the habit of substuting his own sperm for that of the ostensible donors’. He went to prison and all, but he did manage to sire hundreds of sprogs, so in Darwinian terms he is a raging success. If I recall the doctor’s photo correctly, he was fat and unattractive, so the sociobiologist in me must conclude that his sleight-of-hand with the vials was adaptive. It would probably be falling into the naturalistic fallacy, though, to encourage such behaviour.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 03:25:34 +0000

I agree we don’t have an argument for this in the paper, but I’m not altogether sure we need one, or at least that we need a good one. That is, we don’t need any kind of argument that rests on any relatively deep moral principles. For a lot of people, they have a very strong desire to have children that are biologically related to them. And this is the kind of desire that, if it is satisfied, they will regard as being a central part of what gives their life meaning and value. (These are empirical claims, and I haven’t done any research to check them, but I’m pretty confident they’re true.) I’m inclined to think that’s just enough to give them an interest in having biologically related children. So I don’t care, for instance, why they have this desire, or even whether having different desires (or not satisfying these desires) would make them better off in some respects. They have the desires, they are (especially if satisfied) central to the conception of the kind of life they want to live, and that’s enough. Of course, that’s no argument as to why such a subjectively determined interest should outweigh the interest potential adoptees have in acquiring parents. (Or any other kind of interests that are at play here, such as the interests of people who would otherwise benefit if medical research was differently directed.) I possibly need a stronger argument there, or at least a justification for the kind of subjectivism about welfare that’s implicit in my view.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 03:09:27 +0000

Harry—I’ve been thinking about this all day and am not sure quite where to go with it. I have no data, am not by instinct a statistician or a scientist. So I’m not sure I have any useful input for you. All I can offer is my observation of myself and other fathers in my social milieu, most of whom are gestative parents—my observation is that there is almost no difference in our experiences which is attributable to my daughter’s not being the product of my and my wife’s gametes. Any such difference is dwarfed by other, easily discerned differences in our situations—age of parents, financial security, amount of free time, etc. So take that for what it’s worth…

By: Joshua W. Burton

Joshua W. Burton — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:59:04 +0000

I know a couple of unmarried chaps who have made anonymous donations to sperm banks…. This pinpoints another evolutionary misfire in want of glib sociobiological explanation. Why don’t the sperm banks hold televised deathmatches on cable TV to raise money, the survivor’s prize being the right to make such anonymous donations? If Haldane, famously, would jump into a raging flood to save two siblings (or eight cousins), wouldn’t it follow that your unmarried chums should be auditioning with flamethrowers for the right to reap a hundredfold? Or is this a two-cultures thing, where the ones without girlfriends also can’t do the math?

By: Richard Bellamy

Richard Bellamy — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:50:40 +0000

One would assume that in order to adequately study the issue, you’d need to control for the parents’ inclinations, and study parents like mine. My mother suffered secondary infertility after I was born, and subsequently adopted my little sister. A. On the one hand, my sister has been given at least as much love and attention and resources as I have, and probably more. I am sure that any type of study that studies whatever types of variable would show that there was no statistical indicator that would show which child was biological and which was adopted. But: B. The reason I say “probably more” resources is that my sister is a “special needs” child (now adult), having been diagnosed somewhere between the ages of 6 and 10 as having “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.” By the time all the resources are taken into account, I’m sure that the additional funds spent on her needs will more than make up for the one-shot expense of paying for my college education. Assumedly, a parent who adopts has a much higher risk of adopting a child with that type of problem, since the parent has no control over the entire gestation process. I believe that your answer to “Why don’t people want to adopt” will turn out to be identical to the question “Why dno’t people want to buy a used car when it’s so much cheaper than a new one, and only a little older?” When you buy it new, you know everything that happened to it. When you adopt, you don’t.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 19:47:56 +0000

Ray is on to something here, I think; the biological drive is very much to have children which are biologically one’s own, rather than to necessarily go through the rigamarole of raising them. I know a couple of unmarried chaps who have made anonymous donations to sperm banks for this reason; psychologically, it seems to me that there is a profound desire to maintain some form of investment in the future and the root of the desire is more the fear of death rather than the sex drive, but I might be wrong.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 19:42:55 +0000

Joe: It doesn’t make sense to me to take results from studies of stepchildren and apply them to cases of adopted children. In fact (wanders to bookcase) the Daly-Wilson study actually found that adopted children suffered much lower levels of neglect and abuse than children living with both parents, which is a problem for the whole “genetic investment” thesis that they never really dealt with; it appears that even Hackney Social Services does a better job of protecting children than Darwinian adaptation.

By: Ray Davis

Ray Davis — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 19:36:42 +0000

Naturally, I don’t refer to any present company, but one of the most irritating things about evolutionary smalltalk (and its subsets in science journalism and bestsellers) is the smalltalkers’ typically monocultural context. It reminds me for all the world of sixteenth and seventeenth century assumptions about whose side God was on. I’m not an anthropologist, but even in written history I’ve encountered cultures in which children are normally not raised by their biological parents. (One might even make a case for the last few centuries of upper class Europe as an example.) Would we call such cultures “evolutionarily unfit”? If we want to explain our (unusually?) high valuation of direct blood ties (which would certainly have statistical influence on the behavior of stepparents), we have to do so culturally instead of “purely” biologically.