Mary and Philip Seeman Health Law, Policy & Ethics Seminar Series

MARY AND PHILIP SEEMAN HEALTH LAW, POLICY & ETHICS SEMINAR

presents:

Josephine Johnston,
Research Scholar, The Hastings Centre

Genetics, Parents and Children: How Novel Technologies Challenge Ideas about Parental Responsibility

Thursday November 22, 2018
12:30pm - 2pm
Solarium (FA2), 84 Queens Park

Advances in genetic technology, including new methods for gene editing, promise to provide parents and prospective parents with more information about and more control over the genetic make-up of their children. Information and control are both highly prized in our culture, and both could offer substantial benefits to parents and children. Yet offers of information and control that promise to benefit children can quickly generate new parental responsibilities, morphing from opportunities to obligations, and raising the question whether refusing to use the technologies—in the case of gene editing, refusing to edit a prospective child’s genes—might one day be considered inconsistent with being a “good parent.” In this presentation, I will explore the idea of the good parent and will argue that our understandings of the “good parent” need to evolve to take parents’ own flourishing into account. Only with this richer understanding of the responsibilities of parenting can we adopt technologies like gene editing in ways that benefit both parents and children.

Josephine Johnston is Director of Research and a Research Scholar at The Hastings Center, an independent research institute in Garrison, New York. A lawyer by training, she works on the ethics and policy of emerging biotechnologies, particularly in human reproduction, psychiatry, and genetics. She is co-editor of Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing (Oxford University Press, 2019). In addition to her scholarly articles in leading medical, science, policy, law and bioethics journals, she has written for Stat News, New Republic, Time, Washington Post, and The Scientist, and is frequently interviewed by journalists, appearing in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Wired, and Vice Media and on ABC’s “Nightline.

Watch the video of the seminar: