Disability Rights
Disability rights advocates have been among the earliest and most vocal critics of emerging human genetic and assisted reproductive technologies. They are acutely aware that technologies enabling the selection of “good” genes and “normal” traits can devalue the bodies and ultimately the lives of people with disabilities. These concerns are grounded in histories of discrimination and abuse, notably the twentieth-century state-sponsored sterilization projects in dozens of U.S. states, and the Nazi campaigns to exterminate hundreds of thousands of disabled people in German medical facilities and concentration camps. Today, disability rights advocates ask whether innovations such as embryo screening and gene editing for reproduction are likely to create a future that respects or devalues difference and disability as a part of the human condition.
This article was cross-posted on Disability Remix, the blog of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San...
From next-generation prenatal tests, to virtual children, to the...
Gene editing technology like CRISPR may have potential to treat diseases, but does editing future generations go too far? In this August 9, 2022 event, we heard renowned bioethicist Françoise Baylis, reproductive justice activist Nourbese Flint, and disability rights scholar and activist Karen Nakamura discuss the serious societal and ethical implications of human gene editing in the context of assisted reproductive technology. This discussion was moderated by Osagie Obasogie, professor of law and bioethics at UC Berkeley.
(For those who participated in the live event, the audio on this version has been fixed, and missing slides have been added.)