To sum my view on how human society views cases of ‘Wrongful Life’ I will address a claim which is not only very common in itself, but is also a leitmotif in other claims, and that is the ‘Sanctity of Life’ argument. This argument is echoed in the judicial statements regarding the impossibility to prove that non-existence can be better off than existence, in the argument regarding the disvaluation of life with disability, and of course in the argument that there is danger that Wrongful Life’ suits may pressure medical advisers to suggest abortions, which I have addressed respectively in the former texts regarding the issue of ‘Wrongful Life’. It also leads to the argument regarding the danger of Eugenics and of Genetic Testing, an issue I’ll mainly focus on here. If you haven’t read the former parts yet, it is recommended (though not necessary) to do so before reading this one.

Just a quick reminder, a ‘Wrongful Life’ case is when a child sues for medical negligence a doctor or hospital for failing to diagnose and/or for not informing the child’s parents about a genetic disorder or foetal impairment when abortion was still an option and would have been chosen by the parents had they been informed. The claim in a wrongful-life suit is not that the negligence of the doctor was the cause of the impairment, but that by failing to inform the parents, the doctor is responsible for the birth of an impaired child who otherwise would not have been born and therefore would not experience the suffering caused by the impairment. The lawsuit is in respect of the damage caused by the impairment, this would generally include pain, suffering, and ‘disability costs’—the extra financial costs attributable to the disability, such as the cost of nursing care.

The ‘Sanctity of Life’ argument is rather self-explanatory, to compensate a child for being born goes against the sanctity of life. It is cheapening the idea of ‘life’, and it is by far the opposite of treating life as sacrosanct.

Generally speaking, I disagree with the use of terms such as sanctity, as I don’t think that any form of saintliness exists, but for the sake of the argument, if anything, it is exactly because of the so to speak ‘sanctity of life’ that each must be treated with extreme caution. And extreme caution is certainly not to create them despite foreseen severe impairments.
To sanctify any life no matter how miserable they are expected to be is to cheapen them. It is the ones who refer to any sentient life with extreme caution, who highly consider sentient life’s vulnerability, who carry the heavy burden of moral responsibility regarding it, that really treat life as if they are sacred. It is not the ones who are trying to avoid any case of misery who are cheapening the idea of life, but rather whom who welcomes any kind of misery with open arms.
It is not whom who considers the theoretical risk of misery as a sufficient reason not to create life who disrespects it, but whom who knows that a miserable life is certain and yet insists on it.

If no person should be compensated no matter how miserable the life forced upon that person is, it means that all life is scared and must never be prevented. According to the ‘sanctity of life’ notion they are never a burden but always a blessing, even when they are experienced as the most unsacred thing imaginable by the actual people who are living it.

Claiming that life must be prevented exactly because of how vulnerable and fragile they are, is, if anything, treating it with more sanctity than forcing any of it, in any case. In a way to claim against ‘wrongful life’ cases, let alone against antinatalism, that it is by far the opposite of treating life as sacrosanct, corresponds with the silly common claim that antinatalists are nihilists despite that the opposite is true. As far as most antinatalists go, everything is morally meaningful and that’s why they want to prevent the creation of life. It is exactly antinatalists who understand more than others that everything in life is meaningful (even though most think that life is absolutely absent of any cosmic meaning, there is no contradiction as cosmic meaning and ethical meaning are different things) and therefore it all must be prevented.
In that sense, antinatalism is actually exactly the opposite of nihilism. According to it everything is morally meaningful, every harm, every frustration, every pain, every moment of loneliness, every moment of boredom, each is meaningful in itself for each subjective individual exactly because there is no cosmic meaning to justify them. They are meaningful because they are meaningful to a subject, and they must be avoided because they have no cosmic meaning or any meaning outside the subject who is forced to experience them and for no other reason but that that subject was forced to exist. There is no reason for anyone to experience any of it. Each and every one of them is experienced without any valid justification or purpose. But that doesn’t nullify them of meaning, but on the contrary, had there been a cosmic or some other external meaning then many negative experiences could have been canceled out in the light of the cosmic meaning, at least to some degree. But the fact that there isn’t one, makes every experience meaningful in itself. When experiences exist for their own sake, they become more meaningful, not less. Every experience matters, as experiences are all that there is and the only thing that counts ethically. There is nothing but experiences that has any ethical meaning. Therefore every moment in life matters, and that is exactly the opposite of Nihilism. Of course there are many kinds of antinatalists who emphasize all kinds of reasons and reasoning, but in my case and I am under the strong impression that this is also the case of most antinatalists, it is the suffering that motives them. As opposed to the ridiculous Nihilism claim and to how pro-natalists prefer to think of us, most are motivated by caring and mercy for others. Not by hating their own lives, or life in general, but by hating suffering. Most antinatalists are not driven by their supposed depression or by their pure logic calculation, but rather by concern and compassion. And so, more relevantly to our point here, is that antinatalists are highly sensitive to everything that happens and can happen in life. And that perspective makes antinatalists way more ‘sanctifiers’ of life than pro-natalists.

Attributing something with sanctity means treating it with the highest level of carefulness, respect and responsibility. In that sense, preventing life which are expected to be miserable is to sanctify it much more than not stopping them, let alone using the excuse of protecting the notion of the sanctity of life despite that notion doesn’t have experiences and can’t be harmed by anything, as opposed to actual living creatures who would be forced to experience extreme misery. Sacrificing people in the name of the insentient idea of the ‘sanctity of life’ is not sanctity, it is cruelty.

One of the most dangerous practical implications of the ‘Sanctity of Life’ notion is the opposition to genetic testing.

With techniques such as genetic screening, chorionic villus sampling, amniocentesis, ultrasonography and karyotype analysis, expectant parents come to learn in advance if their conceived child will be born with a congenital disease, deformity and/or disability. Hence, for example, parents-to-be will know beforehand if they are at risk to transmit sickle cell anaemia, and embryos can be detected in utero for Duchene’s muscular dystrophy, Down’s Syndrome or Tay Sachs disease.
Many people oppose genetic testing such as these, which can detect whether there are any inherited disorders, and moreover can predict if any diseases will develop in the future, because that might cause people to decide to terminate the pregnancy.

As antinatalists obviously we think that no person should be created regardless of any congenital impairments, however, it is still better that people who are created would at least have the least congenital impairments possible. One of the most common and strongest antinatalist arguments is that nothing can ever guarantee that someone’s life won’t be miserable, however, genetic tests can at last provide a better starting point by pre-detecting some possible severe congenital impairments. Yet many oppose even that. Even merely providing people with the option of preventing horrible starting points for their children is being opposed.

These claims explicitly say that the less people know the better. These people are afraid that the more expectant parents would know about the expected future of their children the more likely they are to avoid creating it. And what makes it even crazier is that it is not that the people who would choose to terminate the conception in cases of severe congenital impairments would choose not to create a new person at all, I wish that was the case, but unfortunately it is much more probable that these people would terminate that specific conception and try to have another one soon after. These genetic tests are not expected to cause people to create less people, but less severe congenital impairments, and even that is being opposed.

That is, I think, one of the most important conclusions antinatalists should make of the discussion regarding ‘wrongful life’ cases, that there is not even agreement about pre-genetic testing. This is of course extremely disturbing in itself but also particularly for us antinatalists since it indicates how unbridgeable the gap between us and huge parts of the public is.

It is easy to dismiss the notion of the ‘culture of life’ for that matter as being ancient, outdated and anti-scientific, but for example there are about 1.2 billion Catholics, and the Catholic Church preaches that actions such as abortion go against the sanctity of human life and thus the Church disapproves tests such as pre-natal and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis since these tests involve the rejection of several embryos and in certain cases even abortion. Other religions don’t fare much better for that matter.
So this is another issue among many others, that antinatalists must deal with all the time.

Again, I highly oppose the rhetoric of ‘the sanctity of life’, but if anything, it is pre-genetic testing that treats life with sanctity as it expresses respect to the vulnerability, singularity and significance of each individual way more than not even bothering to pre-examine the chances of condemning the to be born with severe congenital impairments. If anything, it is the more tests the higher the value attributed to life and not the other way around. Not to perform every possible test before creating a life is to disrespect it. It is to disrespect the created person, its parents, and society.

Some of its opposers argue that genetic testing might lead to Eugenics.
But obviously there is a huge gap between choosing desirable characteristics and avoiding severe congenital impairments. The genetic testing don’t scan for traits in general and offer people to pick out from an available selection, they scan for potential defects. The issue is not creating children with supposedly better traits but not creating children with surely worse ones. It is not about avoiding traits which are considered as being socially disadvantageous, but about avoiding diseases and traits which are absolutely physically and mentally disadvantageous.
It is a flawed and manipulative comparison aiming at scaring people of designer babies.

We are not even talking here about John Harris and Julian Savulescu’s Principle of Procreative Beneficence (PPB) which claims that couples who decide to create a person have a significant moral obligation to select the child who, given his or her genetic endowment, can be expected to enjoy the most well-being. The issue here is about people having a moral obligation not to create a person who can be expected to endure what is referred to as a wrongful-life.

Some even go the distance and almost say that suffering is desirable. For example in his book The Worth of a Child, Thomas Murray writes:

“The quest for perfection has been spurred by a desire to escape the limitations and especially the hurts that mark indelibly our existence as finite, embodied, independent beings. The danger in that quest is that we can become so attracted to some superhuman idea or entity that we lose sight of, or even come to have contempt for, the actual flawed and vulnerable human beings with whom we live.” (p. 136)

But preventing suffering should be an aspiration not a danger. Only because it is so obvious that life is full of pain and suffering can it be presented in such a nonchalant, if not favorable manner. Why not prevent as much suffering as possible when we can? What is so good about suffering? If it is because it is very humanlike, so are wars, should we not do everything possible to prevent them? Why perpetuate, let alone almost glorify, impairments? all the more so ones that can easily be avoided?

The fact that there are no perfect babies is not a justification to create ones with severe congenital impairments. In fact it is a justification not to create ones at all. That is because the standard for forcing something on someone should be that there would be no harms at all, in other words that it would be perfect. And perfection is not even theoretically a remotely possible option.

If there is a firm opposition not to eugenics but to genetic testing, despite that it doesn’t aim at prioritizing traits which people find desirable, but at preventing diseases and other congenital horrible conditions that no one finds desirable, then what are the odds of convincing every person that every creation of a new person is wrong?

While we don’t need genetic testing to realize that all life is wrong and that we must avoid all of it, there are many people who think that there is no need for genetic testing because all life is a sacred gift of infinite value so no one must ever avoid any of it. Not even when the children and parents wish that they could, a scenario that causes the life “sanctifiers” not only to find genetic testing unneeded but also very problematic, as according to them no one should have the chance of ending no life.
That’s how deep the gap is. And that’s why we shouldn’t keep trying to fill it but to somehow work around it.

References

Begeal, Brady “Burdened by Life: A Brief Comment on Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life.” Albany Gov’t Law Review Fireplace Blog. 2011. Accessed Jun 1, 2012. http://aglr.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/burdened-by-life-a-brief-comment-on-wrongfulbirth-and-wrongful-life

Benatar D (2006) Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence. Clarendon, Oxford

Botkin Jeffrey R., “Ethical Issues and Practical Problems in Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 26, no. 1 (1998): 17-28.

Ettorre Elizabeth, “Reproductive Genetics, Gender and the Body: ‘Please Doctor, may I have a Normal Baby?’,” Sociology 34 no. 3 (2000): 403-420.

Gardner, M. (2016). Beneficence and procreation. Philosophical Studies; 173(2) 321-336

Giesen Ivo, “Of wrongful birth, wrongful life, comparative law and the politics of tort law systems,” Journal of Contemporary Roman-Dutch Law 72 (2009): 257-273.

Harris John, “The Wrong of Wrongful Life,” Journal of Law and Society 17, no. 1 (1990): 90.

Hensel Wendy F., “The Disabling Impact of Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life Actions,” Harvard Civil RightsCivil Liberties Law Review 40 (2005): 141-195.

Jennifer Ann Rinaldi, “Wrongful Life and Wrongful Birth: The Devaluation of Life With Disability,” Journal of Public Policy, Administration and Law, 1 (2009): 1-7; Liu, “Wrongful life: some of the problems.”

Kumar R (2015) Risking and wronging. Philos Public Aff 43(1):27–51

Liu, Athena N. C. “Wrongful life: some of the problems.” Journal of Medical Ethics 13 (1987): 69-73.

Loth Marc A., Courts in quest for legitimacy; the case of wrongful life (Rotterdam: Erasmus University, 2007).

Mackenzie Robin. From Sanctity To Screening: Genetic Disabilities, Risk And Rhetorical Strategies In Wrongful Birth And Wrongful Conception Cases Feminist Legal Studies 7: 175–191, 1999

Morreim E. Haavi, “The Concept of Harm Reconceived: A Different Look at Wrongful Life,” Law and Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1988): 3-33.

Morris Anne and Saintier Severine, “To Be or Not to Be: Is That The Question? Wrongful Life and Misconceptions,” Medical Law Review 11 (2003): 167-193.

Murtaugh Michael T., “Wrongful Birth: The Courts’ Dilemma in Determining a Remedy for a Blessed Event,” Pace Law Review 27, no. 2 (2007): 243

Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. (Oxford University Press 1986)

Ramos-Ascensão José, “Welcoming the more vulnerable: do parents have a right to selection of a healthy child?” Europeinfos – Christians perspectives on the EU, 2012: 5, accessed Aug 4, 2013, http://www.comece.eu/europeinfos/en/archive/issue153/article/5140.html

Robertson John A., “Extending preimplantation genetic diagnosis: the ethical debate – Ethical issues in new uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis,” Human Reproduction 18, no. 3 (2003): 465-471

Sàndor Judit, “From Assisted to Selective Reproduction: Through the Lens of the Court,” The Faculty of Law – Norway, 2013: 14, accessed Jan 14, 2014, http://www.jus.uio.no/english/research/news-andevents/events/conferences/2014/wccl-cmdc/wccl/papers/ws7/w7-sandor.pdf

Savulescu J. Procreative Beneficence: why we should select the best children. Bioethics 200115413–426

Seana Valentine Shiffrin. Harm And Its Moral Significance. Legal Theory, Available on CJO 2012 doi:10.1017/S1352325212000080

Sheldon Sally and Wilkinson Stephen. Termination of Pregnancy for reason of foetal disability: Are there grounds for a special exception in Law? Medical Law Review, 9 (2) pp 85-109

Steinbock, Bonnie, Life Before Birth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Steinbock Bonnie & McClamrock Bonnie When is Birth Unfair to the Child? University at Albany, SUNY January 1994

Steininger Barbara C., “Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life: Basic Questions,” Journal of European Tort Law 2 (2010): 125-155

Stretton, Dean. “The Birth Torts: Damages for Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life.” Deakin Law Review 10, no. 1 (2005): 319-364

Vesta T. Silva (2011) Lost Choices and Eugenic Dreams: Wrongful Birth Lawsuits in Popular News Narratives, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 8:1, 22-40, DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2010.543985

Webber Jay, “Better Off Dead?” First Things, (2002): 10

Weinberg, Rivka. Existence: who needs it? The non-identity problem and merely possible people
2012 Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702