Justice and artificial reproduction: A Catholic feminist analysis

Access to highly sophisticated treatment for infertility in the United States is currently determined largely by one's ability to pay for services. Therefore, wide disparity in access exists. This dissertation examines the questions of distributive justice surrounding medically-assisted reproduction in the context of a feminist and theological social ethic. Setting the issue within the broad problem of securing equitable access to health care, it asks whether those who are infertile have a just claim to limited medical resources, and how such a claim should be balanced against other claims to medical and social resources.; Feminists identify procreative autonomy, equality, and interpersonal and social accountability as fundamental ethical values. An adequate feminist ethic for procreative technologies, therefore, will incorporate and integrate these commitments. This study argues that none of the popular feminist positions on the development and use of procreative technologies yet offers such an ethic. Only in a rich account of the common good, where personhood and community are held in reciprocal relationship, can the full range of commitments be honored. By drawing on the modern tradition of Roman Catholic social thought, a feminist and theological ethic is offered here in which justice concerns human flourishing and broad participation in the common life. A bias for those most marginalized within in the social order modifies the scope of personal liberty and defines minimally just social arrangements.; In the context of this account of distributive justice, a case for equitable access to medically-assisted reproduction is advanced. First, infertility is shown to be a crisis of health and well-being of the kind which properly concerns medicine. The warrant for equitable access is found in the role of health care in preserving human dignity and enabling participation. However, claims to services are legitimately modified by social obligations to meet essential needs. Reservations about the character of procreative technology and broad concerns for the quality of care being offered in contemporary reproductive medicine also suggest limits on the range of services to be provided.