There was a case in the Ohio Supreme Court not long ago along similar
lines, where parents sued doctors for not telling them that their
child had spina bifida so they could have aborted it.
I think these cases may pave the road for some interesting legal
developments. It seems we will need some better rules for the legal
interaction between unconceived, unborn and born children and their
parents when reproductive technology spreads and advances.
For example, should parents be allowed to add any "enhancement genes"
to their children? One way of handling this would be to give the
children the ability to sue their parents for compensation if they
find their genes unbearable. In order to protect against this, the
parents would buy insurance while planning the child, and I guess the
insurance premiums would be proportional to the estimated risk of the
modifications. This would create a bias against making obviously bad
or risky choices even without adding much of a legal overhead to the
process. Of course, getting this kind of system off the ground might
be another matter.
Thoughts?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:22 MDT