  Davis (2010) and Agar (2004) both use deafness as a case for clarification, as such a case calls attention to the contentious nature of these decisions. They both take hearing to be a core human capacity, or a trait that is necessary for a wide variety of life plans. Hence, they argue, engineering a child to be deaf will limit that child’s future options. This is not, of course, to say that deaf individuals cannot live rewarding lives in which they flourish. Indeed, Agar recognizes that in some circumstances, lacking a capacity like hearing will only lead to a small difference in relative freedom, and if so, then we might not have a “general requirement to replace genetic arrangements linked with deafness” (2004: 105). On his view, prospective parents could engineer a child to be hearing because it would increase her real freedom but could not engineer a child to be deaf. Weighing in on the now widely analyzed case of two Deaf women (the capital “D” marks membership in the linguistic-cultural group of the Deaf; a small “d” only signifies the physical state of the body) who sought out a deaf sperm donor in hopes of having a deaf child (Spriggs 2002; Mundy 2002), Agar argues that they reduced their child’s real freedom by attempting to ensure that the child would be deaf. (Although this case did not involve reprogenetic technologies, one can easily imagine the use of such technologies to ensure the birth of a child who would be deaf.) Davis, too, acknowledges the claims of Deaf culture, and the reasons parents might prefer to have a child more like themselves, but argues that deliberately trying to conceive a child who will have relatively limited options – limited, in her view, not just due to enduring discrimination and social constraints, but also to bodily deficits – is morally impermissible.