The very question, Is ageing good?, is odd in several ways, and we do not usually ask it of other life stages. Nonetheless, raising the question is important because it presents the opportunity to counter ageist assumptions that old age is nothing but a period of loss and decline. I suggest a variety of candidate reasons for saying that ageing is good, for ageing persons themselves. These include renewable pleasures; new activities, relationships, and goals; and features distinctive of old age, such as connections with younger generations, long-lasting relationships, and an enriched outlook on life. I also acknowledge the various factors that may readily detract from the goodness of ageing, including poverty, disability, and the loss of family and friends. Hence, whether ageing is good is partially dependent on material and social circumstances. I conclude with three moral and political reasons for affirming that ageing is or can be good.

Introduction

Of all the issues in medical ethics, probably none is more frequently in the news than reproductive ethics – construed broadly to include such controversial issues as: abortion and selective termination of pregnancy; sale and donation of gametes (sperm and eggs); surrogacy or contract motherhood; ‘therapeutic’ and reproductive cloning; non-consensual use of gametes and embryos; rights for children born as a result of sperm or egg donation to trace their genetic parents; sterilization of young people with learning disability or physical handicaps; enforced caesarean sections; ‘designer babies’ (the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis for social rather than therapeutic purposes, such as sex selection for which there is no clinical need, (e.g. not involving a sex-related genetic condition); egg freezing and other uses of in vitro fertilization (IVF) to allow women to have children after the normal age of child-bearing; the commercial market in private banking of umbilical cord blood for the child's later use; ‘reproductive tourism’, in which people travel to other countries to obtain reproductive tests or services unavailable in their own nations.

In writing a chapter about reproductive ethics, we have thus faced a dilemma about which of the vast range of issues to include, using our criterion of direct clinical relevance to everyday practice. This chapter therefore omits some issues, such as cloning and surrogacy, which at the time of writing were unlikely to be encountered in the course of ordinary practice.

In this chapter I explore the question of whether or not feminism is compatible with theism, or whether being a feminist also requires that one be an atheist. By “atheism ” I shall mean what Michael Martin calls “positive atheism, ” the belief that there is no God (Martin 1990: 463- 64). And by “God ” I shall mean “a personal being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and completely good and who created heaven and earth ” (Martin 1990: 463).

The investigation of the relationship between feminism and atheism requires looking at feminist critiques of religion and of theism. I draw not only on the works of feminist philosophers but also on the works of feminist theologians. Throughout this discussion I am primarily concerned with monotheistic religions in the Jewish/Christian/Islamic tradition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and with feminism as manifested since its “rebirth ” during the 1960s within the Western world. This is not to say that other forms and periods of religion are of no interest in the study of atheism, or that either pre-twentieth-century feminism or non-Western feminism of any age is irrelevant to the issue. However, although some feminist discussions of religion acknowledge the role of native religions, Buddhism, and Hinduism, most focus primarily on the Jewish/Christian/Islamic tradition. And most of the systematic examination of religion and theism has been undertaken by feminists within the last thirty years.

In the recent ethical and social scientific literature on new reproductive technologies (NRTs) and practices there is not much discussion about their impact on children (e.g. Birke, Himmelweit and Vines, 1990; Iglesias, 1990; Marrs, 1993; Robertson, 1994; Hartouni, 1997; Steinberg, 1997). As the final report of the Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies (Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, 1993: p. 42) puts it,

Books and anthologies written from a feminist perspective mostly emphasize the effects of NRTs on women (e.g. Rowland, 1992; Spallone, 1989). None the less, there is a connection, in reproductive issues, between the status of women and the status of children. This connection is explicitly recognized within the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1959), which calls for ‘special care and protection’ both for children and for their mothers, ‘including adequate prenatal and postnatal care’ (Principle 4). Hence, it can plausibly be argued that if NRTs either benefit or harm women, then their children may be comparably affected.