OSMS staff member, Associate Professor Mike Legge (Department of Biochemistry), is a co-investigator on a project that recently received $735,000 (over 3 years) from the Marsden Fund.
The other investigators are Ruth Fitzgerald from the Department of Anthropology, Gender and Sociology (University of Otago) and Julie Park from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland.
The project - Troubling ‘choice' - will explore and examine techniques of moral reasoning for people living at the intersection of reproductive technologies, genetics and disability.
Reproductive decisions as to whether to terminate a pregnancy or give birth to a child with genetic anomalies are often made rapidly in real life.
To decide what to do, people have no time to study for a bioethics degree; instead they must rely on the moral toolkit they have at hand.
The ‘right to choose' seems an inappropriate framing of their dilemma since their choices are so few, and rights are based in notions of individualism while decisions about the expression of genetic difference always affect more than one person.
Providing choice for women in these situations is also presented as the moral impetus for their work by scientists who shape, through genetic profiling and genetic testing of embryos, the broader social group ‘the disabled'.
This project both explores and explains what we call the ‘everyday ethics' of people in such situations.
Using ethnographic interviewing, our prior studies, national and international comparison we explain and explore the actual concepts that different publics use to make a series of individual reproductive decisions that can affect the wider society, and which often have the power to override formal ethical governance.