"War on the Weak"

Charles Colson and Anne Morse write in Christianity Today about the renewed respectability of eugenics in our society. Eugenics originated with racists and "progressives," reached its nadir with the Nazis, and is now back. Always justified with humanitarian euphemisms, it comes down to killing people for "their own good" or for the "good of society." Selections from the column:

In brightly lit hospital operating rooms, crowded nursing homes, busy research labs, and doctors' offices, an unannounced, lethal war is being waged against the weakest of the weak: handicapped infants, the elderly, and humans at the embryonic stage of life.

The opening shot in this war was fired when the modern eugenics movement came into fashion some 80 years ago. The first targets were the "feebleminded" and people of the "wrong" race. Leading scientists in the early decades of the 20th century, enamored with Darwin's theories, became eugenics advocates. Historian Richard Weikart, in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, writes that while Darwin wasn't the first to argue that the strong and healthy have higher value than the weak and sick, or that some races are inferior, he provided a scientific foundation for those beliefs....

Even the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in. Among the most enthusiastic proponents of forced sterilization was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote in Buck v. Bell (1927) that "it is better for all the world" if "society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. ... Three generations of imbeciles are enough." ...

This pseudo-science was all the rage in Vienna and Munich, where a young Adolf Hitler proposed his radical ideas for the "master race." ....

Seventy years later, eugenic ideas are surfacing again, masquerading as humanitarian progress - as in research labs where scientists destroy "leftover" human embryos to find cures for diseases, or in sperm banks where women select their baby's father from hundreds of donors on the basis of intelligence or gifts, or in doctors' offices where parents feel subtle pressure to abort imperfect fetuses, or in hospitals when futile-care policies allow doctors to decide who lives and who dies. Today, some ethicists, like Princeton's Peter Singer, brazenly argue that it's permissible to kill disabled children after they're born - children like my autistic grandson, Max - all in the seductive guise of maximizing human happiness. ...

Eugenics, once discredited, has made a lethal comeback. As we celebrate the Incarnation this month, we are reminded that every life at every stage is precious in God's design. ...

Source: War on the Weak Christianity Today