Bioethics, children, and the environment

Abstract Queer perspectives have typically emerged from sexual minorities as a way of repudiating flawed views of sexuality, mischaracterized relationships, and objectionable social treatment of people with atypical sexuality or gender expression. In this vein, one commentator offers a queer critique of the conceptualization of children in regard to their value for people's identities and relationships. According to this account, children are morally problematic given the values that make them desirable, their displacement of other beings and things entitled to moral protection, not to mention the damaging environmental effects that follow in the wake of population growth. Objectionable views of children are said even to have colonized the view of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people who – with the enthusiastic endorsement of bioethics – increasingly turn to assisted reproductive treatments to have children. In the face of these outcomes, it is better – according to this account – that people reconsider their interest in children. This account is not, however, ultimately strong enough to override people's interest in having children, relative to the benefits they confer and relative to the benefits conferred on children themselves. It is certainly not strong enough to justify differential treatment of LGBT people in matters of assisted reproductive treatments. Environmental threats in the wake of population growth might be managed in ways other than devaluing children as such. Moreover, this account ultimately damages the interests of LGBT people in matters of access, equity, and children, which outcome is paradoxical, given the origins of queer perspectives as efforts to assert and defend the social interests of sexual and gender minorities.


| I NTR OD U CTI ON
Cristina Richie advocates queering the field of bioethics as a way of improving current understandings of identity and moral responsibilities, not to mention reframing the ambitions of bioethics itself. 1 Among other things, she imagines that queer bioethics will have the effect of reining in sociosexual values that are objectionable in themselves and that have harmful downstream effects on the environment. In the course of these accounts, Richie makes a fairly damning case against the value of children for people in general and for queer people in particular, arguing as she does that queer objectives and theory are incompatible with reproduction. In general, Richie presents children as a kind of social capital that is fundamentally compromised by the liberal framework of values that make them desirable, values that prioritize the future over the present. In particular, Richie argues that LGBT peo- This account of queer bioethics ultimately works to the disadvantage of LGBT people, which is a very paradoxical outcome for perspectives originally having their origins with these sexual minorities. Richie does in this current project what she has done elsewhere: burden sexual minorities with social responsibilities without parallel for others. 2 She also undervalues the nature and meaning of barriers that obstruct LGBT people having children. If social values must be reconfigured for moral reasons bearing on the environment, it is unclear that LGBT people have any more responsibility in this regard than anyone else. That conclusion has all the more force if we decline to accept an interpretation of non-living things as having moral priority over the interests of human beings and other sentient creatures.

| QU EE RI N G B I OETH I CS
Commentators characterize "queer" perspectives in various ways, but almost always as a corrective to certain sociosexual orthodoxies of one kind or another. 3 For her part, Richie characterizes 'queer' asamong other thingsa political stance which challenges liberal values which are said to be: production, conformity, sameness, and homogenization.
Richie deploys "queer" as a critique of normativity, by which she means the reigning "figment of what a person should be/is," in all the metaphysical and moral implications of that identity. More ambitiously expressed, she says that queerness means that "normativity of all kinds is critiqued, rejected, and abandoned." She characterizes "queerness" in contradistinction not only to heternormativity outrightin its domineering views of relationships as structured around a certain kind of opposite-sex relationshipbut also in regard to the heternormativity she says has colonized the self-understanding of LGBT people. As she sees matters, then, queer bioethics is a kind of oppositional defiance, without a priori commitments to any particular normativity and/or social categories. She says, for example, that queer bioethics "is a field that fundamentally opposes categorizations, favoring pastiche to principle". In effect, she represents "queer" as skeptical thought itself, a view from nowhere, as it were, and therefore exempt from certain expectations of consistency.
This characterization of queerness draws deeply from the intellectual playbook of modernism itself, which has always involved deep questioning, irreverent attitudes toward life, deep skepticism toward official structures of society, and unwillingness to pay reflexive homage to authority across the board. 4 Modernism takes very little for granted by way of the alleged nature of things, the socially asserted moral order, presumptive ways of knowing, or even standard accounts of the beautiful. Even when presented as a stand-alone venture, queer bioethics has precedents in metaphysics, morality, epistemology, and aesthetics, all of these precedents sharing skepticism of received orthodoxies.
Richie says variously that queer perspectives are essential to ethical evaluations of children if not bioethics itself, insofar as she sees them functioning as tools for overthrowing the status quo across the board.
She would train their efforts on concepts undergirding identity, medical relationships, systems of authority, not to mention the "distasteful" axes of power involved in capitalism, but above all else: reproductive normativity. She says that this normativity must be rejected "in order to maintain a radical stand that exemplifies Queerness itself." As a way into showing the failings of bioethics in these domains, Richie takes pains to distinguish queer bioethics from its historical forerunner, LGBT bioethics, portraying queer bioethics as a corrective to LGBT bioethics which she characterizes as in thrall to heteronormativity among other failures.
LGBT bioethics is merely reformist, while queer bioethics is characterized as revolutionary. It comes as no surprise, then, that Richie objects to LGBT bioethics assigning central moral significance to children, especially to the extent LGBT people conceptualize children, want them, have them, and rear them just as anyone else would. On Richie's view, any analysis that simply works to extend the right of LGBT people to have children under those terms misses more ultimately important questions about the ethics of having children in the first place.
Some commentators take a more nuanced view of children in relation to LGBT understandings of self and relationships, 5 but as Richie values, with their lives and families contributing to the wrongful devaluation of the environment and its degradation too.
To show how much work remains to be done by queer bioethics, Richie has singled out my work as instructive in the limitations of LGBT bioethics. For example, she describes my work defending access and equity for LGBT people in regard to ARTs as having "an affinity with" the pronatalist work of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The standard meaning of "affinity" is: "a sympathy esp. as marked by a community of interests." 7 I can't explain why Richie attributes to my writing a feeling of closeness to the views of others, when affinities properly belong to people, not texts. For her purposes, "homology" would have been a better term because that means "having the same relative position, value, or structure." 8 That seems to be the point she is making, that my work has homologies with the perspectives of the Catholic bishops, but even then the point is forced, especially since the point of comparison is compressed into sloganeering pathos: "Think of the children".
The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops works on behalf of a church that as a matter of theory and practice works against the status equality of LGBT people. For example, let's recall that Church's 1975 and1986 declarations that homosexual act are "deprived of their essential and indispensable finality," that they are "intrinsically disordered," and that they may in no case be approved of. 9 On the basis of this metaphysical account, the Catholic Church recommends excluding people who engage in this kind of sexuality from various social goods. 10 For example, the Catholic Church objects to same-sex marriage andwhen it comes to having children -ARTs for anyone, the cloning of human beings, and synthetic gametes. These positions generally follow from the view that the conception of children should occur as an effect of sexual intercourse between a man and woman who are married to one another and committed to a certain interpretation of responsible parenthood. The leadership of this church has said, among other things, "Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents' welfare." 11 Am I in bed with Catholic bishops? Not in a way that would make any of us very happy, even speaking only conceptually. When sex between men and sex between women was a crime in most of the United States, I defended the morality integrity of that kind of sex. 12 I have defended the right of same-sex couples to marry as a matter of law, and I have even criticized the Ontario court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in that country for not offering a robust enough defense of that kind of marriage. 13 I have defended access and equity in regard to fertility medicine for gay men and lesbians without regard to any requirement of marriage. 14 I have defended the right of gay and lesbian peopleas single people or couplesto rely on any safe and effective method for cloning human beings that might come along. 15 I have defended the right of people to take steps to have gay and lesbian children if that were possible through certain kinds of prenatal interventions. 16    LGBT people and the work ahead in Bioethics. Bioethics 29, ii-v.  judgment about whether individual gay men, lesbian, bisexual people, or trans people ought to have children or whether they ought to do so as a class, but I have worked to show that there are no meaningful moral obstacles to their doing so in the context of relationships and identities that may differ from social expectations.
All things considered, I have been no friend to the formal teachings of Catholicism. Perhaps the rationale for Riche's claim about my work is the idea that any moral argument that favors the having of children in one way or another amounts to the 'pronatalism' expressed by theorists of Catholicism. If so, the label doesn't' mean very much descriptively and amounts to almost nothing as a critique. At this point, however, let me take up directly the question of whether the interest in having children can survive Richie's critique, especially for LGBT people.

| TH E M E A NI N G O F CH I L DR EN
Central to Richie's analysis is the repudiation of children as fundaments in the value of human life. She declares that they have a warping effect on identities and relationships, deflect attention from the present to the future, and that they undercut an ethic of bionatural ecology. Kraut's analysis also deserves mention another way, in its rejection of any version of the idea that some supravrening good confers value or is the reason by which anything is of value. He argues, for example, that no inherent good is expressed or achieved by there being a particular kind of living thing in existence, or in its continuance for that matter. No inhering good is expressed or achieved by there being a particular kind of non-living thing in existence or in its continuance.
What this view means is, in brief, that living things (flora, fauna) and natural features (waterways) have no moral interest over and above human interest in them. They can still be protected and preserved, should human beings decide to do so, but there is no good per se in them that requires their protection and perpetuation. Although I won't develop the particulars of Kraut's argument here, I will say that an account like this would undercut the bionaturalism that Richie has put forward. On this account, no flower or plant or waterwayor any possible collection of such thingscan by virtue of its existence have a claim to continuing existence or be protected by a rule of noninterference. This is all by way of saying that Richie's account of the value of living and non-living thingsenfolded under the protection of queer bioethicsis more asserted than defended against competing accounts of the ways in which things have normative value and/or moral status.

| THE S TA TU S OF LGB T P E OP LE
Let me say a bit more here about children in relation to LGBT people.

Some
LGBT people have children through conception in opposite-sex relationships, through adoption, through foster care, or through ARTs.
It is an understatement to say that they have done so without endorsement from any major social authority. It is also an understatement to say that they have done so in sometimes inventive ways, compared to cultural expectations. 22 This is not either the place for a full-fledged defense of the right of LGBT people to have children, but I think it is more than fair to say that LGBT people have faced socially chosen obstacles without parallel for others, and -I submitfor no good moral reason. If I may put an only slightly provocatively spin on Richie's account: any obstacles in the way of LGBT people having children have ironically protected them from the parent trap! That is, those obstacles to having children have protected many LGBT people from succumbing to heteronormative reproduction. Seen from this perspective, LGBT people are maybe now worse off than before in relation to heteronormativity, because many more now live in societies giving them more opportunitiesand hence more pressureto have children, whereas they would have in the past been "protected" from this morally compromised opportunity. To be sure, the obstacles to parenthood by LGBT people are diminishing in force in significant swaths of the world, though not all.
For example, prominent medical organizations have defended the entitlement of gay, lesbian, and transmen and women to ARTs. 23 Whether that right is fully observed in practice is a different question, of course, but these professional organizations have asserted the status equality of gay, lesbian, and transpeople in regard to access and equity in such treatments. 24 For her part, Richie is unconcerned about matters of access and equity in regard to children. On the contrary, she objects almost on principle to the place of children in the aspirations of LGBT people, at least insofar as they ought to be the front line of queer interests. Not only does she see LGBT people as colonized by heteronormativity in regard to childrenwhich effect she calls "homonormativity"she has also offered policy recommendations that would obstruct LGBT access to ARTs and other healthcare interventions.
For example, Richie has argued against government and insurance subsidy for ARTs for same-sex couples. 25 She justifies this exclusion by arguing that healthcare ought to confine itself to the treatment of disorders properly speaking, and two men or two women wanting to have a child suffer no pathology that obstructs conception and/or gestation of a child. This kind of argument has intellectual precedents in, for example, Leon Kass's strict interpretation of medicine as focused on "health", but the argument is vulnerable to criticism especially from the countervailing view that healthcare may legitimately aim at "well-being" in an expansive sense and not just "health" in some restrictive sense alone. 26 From this view, ARTs contribute to the well-being of same-sex couples even if they do not involve treating an underlying disease or disorder.
Even apart from this flimsy account of eligibility for fertility interventions, Richie's justification for turning away subsidized ARTs for gay and lesbian people is curiously an adverse preference, something chosen because a better option is not available. 27 She raises it only after dismissing another option, one that would have affected opposite-sex and same-sex couples equally. She says that "while a moratorium on all ARTs would be the most ecologically sound decision . . . it is unlikely that established fertility procedures or treatments would be effectively 'banned' until global CO 2 emissions stablise." 28 In other words, there is a better way to reduce the damaging effects of children: close off all ARTs, but Richie offers exactly no defense of this "most ecologically sound decision". Instead, she shifts the burden for carbon emissions to same-sex couples, on the grounds that withdrawing any tax or insurance subsidy for lesbian and gay people looking for clinical help in having a child would be for some unspecified reason likelier. I suppose it would be likelier if what is meant is that the straight beneficiaries of subsidized ARTs would be unwilling to see that perk taken away; as a political matter that "best option" would be dead on arrival. But apparently Richie foresees sees no comparable political backlash if subsidized ARTS disappeared for LGBT people. In other words, the perceived political powerlessness of LGBT people counts as part of the rationale in favor of her exclusion of LGBT people from tax or insurance subsidy for ARTs! Neither would Richie guarantee body modifications to transpeople wanting them as a means of gender expression, at least in principle.
Keeping the environment in mind, she says "many body projects that demand medical intervention are at odds with Queer environmental bioethics and are ecologically unsustainable." In other words, all healthcare services have a carbon footprint, and the effect of these interventions will have to be evaluated relative to their impact that way.  class must be theorized as 'liberated' from interest in children as part of their environmental responsibilities and why LGBT people should have any more responsibilities toward the environment than anyone else.
Gay 'theorists' such as Lee Edelmanwhom Richie invokesmay interpret children as utterly beside the point of queer life, but that view is itself an interpretation, a normative "figment" of what a person is or ought to be. 29 It's not even clear that the specific proposals put forward by Richie would make much difference in regard to the protection of the environment, namely withdrawing government and insurance subsidy from same-sex couples looking for help having children via ARTS and/or shutting down body modifications for transpeople. In general, it makes sense to put solutions where the problems are, and these proposals don't do that. What is altogether lacking in Richie's analysis is any mechanism for allocating responsibility for environmental threats according to some metric of responsibility and a mechanism for prioritizing one constraint on environmental damage over another.
Without methods for establishing this kind of responsibility and priorities, the choices Richie champions are not only unprincipled, they are almost random, not to mention punitive to LGBT people. To Richie's dismay, bioethics has pretty much only ever worked to enlarge the prospects for adults having children.

| CON CLU S I ON S
LGBT people have benefited from that effort with a degree of success almost without parallel in the field. Robust defenses of LGBT people as parents, their entitlement to existing ARTs, and entitlement to techniques of assisted reproduction looming on the horizon are the rule in bioethics; opinion to the contrary is no more prevalent than it is convincing. 30 Richie wants to intervene against the enthusiasm for ever-expanding options for having children, but this intervention undoes some of the gains most important to men who have sexual interest in men, women who have sexual interest in women, people whose gender expression hits social tripwires, and people whose polyvalent sexual and romantic identities do not map easily onto socially authorized roles. Accordingly, LGBT people become a casuality of Richie's bionaturalism. If we take seriously her principled opposition to normativities "of any kind".
LGBT identities have no special status, any more than do heteronormative "figments" of what it is to be a person, especially in relation to children.
In the face of looming environmental disaster, we are onlyall of usunindividuated entities. People's sexual orientations and gender identities are eclipsed in significance in the shadow of present and looming ecological damage. The integrity and value of LGBT identities are simply casualties of an underlying shift toward bionaturalism, in which no future can be more important than the present, not if getting there involves the self-deceiving and morally objectionable values attached to children or involves present harms tolerated in the name of benefit to future people. Thus is to be understood Richie's commitment to immanence: "Queer bioethics is now." Immured in the present, Richie feels free to overlook the historical and hard-won social gains represented by defending access and equity for LGBT people in having children. That way, she is free to treat questions about access and equity in regard to children as almost entirely beside the point, as so much "banter." Even so, the generations to come remain of moral interest, perhaps not as a matter of moral obligation properly speaking, but certainly as a matter of beneficence toward others yet to live. Richie might have pressed a case for environmentalism without diminishing the value of children per se and without also singling out children as especially problematic for LGBT people. For example, she might have conferred on each and every person some measure of responsibility for the morally relevant global environment. If it really is necessary to lower the total birth rate to preserve the environment, not just for prudential reasons but for moral reasons, Richie could have examined, for example, ways to ration children by some equitable mechanism, and we could have a searching discussion about what form that would take: "Just exactly what number of people is compatible with benchmark environmental goals? Given that the interest in children probably exceeds the total allowable number, how should they be apportioned?" Or, to go another way, Richie might have proposed social incentives for refraining from having children. These approaches shift the responsibility for the welfare of the global environment across all people, perhaps even giving each person some measure of responsibility for deciding how many human beings come into existence. Instead of trying to apportion responsibility for the environment in any equitable way, Richie opts to deconstruct the value of future lives, so much so Emphasis added. Richie, op. cit. note 1, p. 371. Richie counts herself among those who "prefer extinction to a carbon legacy." Just to be clear: her phrase "carbon legacy" stands in for children. Richie is free, of course, to invoke the language she wishes to characterize her choice against having children as her "extinction", but except as a poetical indulgence "extinction" is a poor term to refer to the death of a childless person. I would myself find it very entertaining to read an obituary that said something like this: "Samantha Jones went extinct on June 1, 2016, leaving no carbon legacies behind." As a matter of standard usage, "extinction" refers to the death of a class of beings in kind. Only if she were the last human being alive would anyone's death constitute extinction properly speaking. to all, she opts to defend certain choke points against more people coming into existence: denying government and insurance support for fertility medicine for same-sex couples, leaving synthetic gametes unstudied in the laboratory, and possibly limiting interventions such as uterus transplants that could confer certain procreative powers on transmen and women.
Taken together, these recommendations would do very little to stem the overall tide of population growth, because of the fractional numbers of people involved. Even if the numbers were more significant, it is still not clear why LGBT people should be required to assume any responsibility for the future not equally shared by all other parties.
All things considered, one might make exactly the contrary case: that LGBT people ought to have priority on any list of people entitled to have children, even if there were a diminution in the morally allowable number of children in the future. In view of the cultural, religious, moral, and legal obstacles that impede LGBT people having children one can imagine such an argumenton the grounds of compensatory justicethat LGBT people ought to have some priority over others in having children, should there ever be a general rationing mechanism.
At the very least, this question would have to be answered: Why should people whoas a classhave never faced socially imposed obstacles to having children be presumed entitled to first consideration for children ahead of people whoas a classhave faced socially imposed and morally unjustifiable obstacles to having children?
Richie points to queer bioethics as a way to elevate bioethics to its full potential as an instrument of critique and evaluation. That is, queer bioethics is not just a subdomain of bioethics focused on a particular group of people. Queer bioethics is or ought to be bioethics itself, by exhibiting a thorough-going Cartesian skepticism toward all received knowledge and its instruments. In this exposition of queer bioethics, the interests of LGBT people in having children come under frontal assault on the grounds that they are unnecessary to a good life, that they are desirable only in morally compromised ways, and that they do morally significant environmental damage. This queering of bioethics is of little help to LGBT people because it treats the value of LGBT lives at a deep discount in matters of access and equity. It is, sad to say, in many ways homologous with commentary that intentionally works against status equality for LGBT people.