What do you call people who are not reproducing because they do not have a sexual partner? Antiquarians may designate them “single,” but the World Health Organization (WHO) knows better. They are, we learn today, “infertile.” Henceforth, the organization intends to classify infertility (previously defined as the inability to get pregnant after twelve months of regular sexual intercourse) as a disability, and therefore to push the idea that having a family is a positive right that entitles “disabled” singles to in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
This approach can have a profound effect on how governments regulate and administer health care. In the U.K., the NHS provides IVF to couples who have cannot have children because of biological handicaps. Will this have to change to accommodate the new definition?
Its prima facie absurdity to one side, this move highlights how quickly negative rights are being substituted for positive rights. Negative rights entail an individual’s right to do as they please without government intervention: By this understanding, reproduction is a right that is only infringed upon by totalitarian acts like Communist China’s two-child policy. WHO wants to turn reproduction into a positive right provided by the government. David Adamson, who helped write the new standards, told the Telegraph, “The definition of infertility is now written in such a way that it includes the rights of all individuals to have a family, and that includes single men, single women, gay men, gay women.” This is progressive redefinition of family, not medical expertise.
Similarly applied, the logic of positive rights would require the government to help everyone write well in order to uphold the First Amendment, or to provide everyone guns to uphold the Second. Thus nearly anything that administrators imagine could become a human right. Such absurd notions will eventually necessitate government without limits.