Dr Anantharaman Muralidharan1
1Center For Biomedical Ethics, National University Of Singapore, , Singapore
Biography:
Anantharaman Muralidharan is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. He has written on Vaccine allocation, epistemic permissivism, political liberalism, AI ethics, trust, and IRB legitimacy.
Abstract:
Should we prohibit solo reproduction? Solo reproduction can be achieved by using in-vitro gametogenesis to derive both sperm and eggs from the same person. If the sperm fertilizes the egg and gestates till birth, one parent can be both the biological father and mother to the child. While existing legal arrangements may not necessarily forbid this procedure, it is possible that governments may attempt to ban such procedures in the future due to ethical concerns. This paper canvases the various reasons to think solo reproduction is unethical and argues that those reasons are not decisive. We argue that even if weird and often done for somewhat unsavoury reasons, there are some reasonable views on which solo-reproduction is permissible. Hence, given a public justification requirement on what we might prohibit (but no such requirement on what we might permit), solo reproduction should be permitted.