Introduction: Imagining Human Reproduction

"Human Reproduction and Parental Responsibility" brings together leading scholars and early career researchers from a wide range of disciplines: political and moral philosophy, literary and cultural studies, bioethics, legal philosophy, the medical humanities, and gender and sexuality studies. Individual contributions highlight the diversity between disciplines, moral and political orientations, but agree on a shared set of assumptions and concerns. Against the ethical and methodological strictures of naive biological reductivism, we call for attention to philosophical inquiry and cultural narratives. We do not treat human reproduction as a biological given, but argue that a carefully reasoned case for the permissibility and desirability of procreation can and must be made. At the same time, we are averse to coercive policies and mechanisms of population control that violate individual reproductive lives and futures. Finally, and most importantly, we object to what we perceive as a widespread tendency to discuss reproductive rights exclusively in relation to technological possibility, and affirm the importance of cross-disciplinary dialogue. The articles in this special issue wish to foreground the vital contribution that the humanities can make to this dialogue.