What Does Queer Family Equality Have to Do with Reproductive Ethics?

Abstract

In this paper, I introduce the idea of a queer epistemic privilege that applies to issues of family and parenthood. I ground this privilege in the specific nature of queer people's marginalization—their displacement from family, which leads them to occupy an “insider-outsider” status. After laying out the case for such a privilege, I take up an application of it by offering a queer critique of two representative examples from the reproductive ethics literature: J. David Velleman's opposition to donor conception and Elizabeth Anderson's objections to commercial surrogacy.