Although it’s a different case than Sarah’s choice, I remember being nearly bumped off a discussion site devoted to a particular, difficult, disabling, and quite painful genetic illness for saying that it might be best to think hard about saddling not just society but that future individual with a difficult and painful existence.

I was truly blasted – the uniform consensus (lurkers excepted) seemed to be that we all had a right to have all the children we wanted even if we knew in advance of conception that they would suffer a great deal of pain every day. I just shake my head – such an attitude seems very like narcissism to me.

Perhaps we could begin by establishing politically that their is no right to conceive children which, it is known in advance, will be ill all their lives, even if you want to have company “that is so much like you.” Believe it or not, in many circles, such conception is taken to be an inalienable natural right.