If I Say “Yes” to Regulation Today, Will You Still Respect Me in the Morning?

Marsha Garrison1 and Michele Goodwin2 have each written clever, edgy, and insightful articles on the oversight of new reproductive technologies. Both of them frame the issues around the regulation of reproduction, not assisted reproduction. “Assisted reproduction” might mean doctors, clinics, or patients. “Reproduction” clearly means mothers. Both are correct in this recognition: the regulation of assisted reproduction necessarily implicates our approach to motherhood. Garrison starts with the intrinsic conflicts of interest between mothers and children in medical decisionmaking and argues for “the equivalence of future and current children.”3 She observes that parental decisions may be particularly suspect in the context of the treatments elected in pursuit of a much sought-after pregnancy.4 The infertile may ignore risks to “future children,” if the alternative is no children at all.5 Garrison accordingly answers with a resounding “yes” to oversight that would restrict reproductive choice, believing it would reduce the number of children who burden the community with avoidable birth defects.6 Goodwin is more ambivalent. She starts her article not in the pristine surroundings of a fertility lab, but with the first woman to be prosecuted and convicted for giving birth to a stillborn baby.7 She queries whether a “communitarian” approach that regulates reproduction in the name of collective well-being will inevitably sacrifice the interests of poor, African American women to majoritarian