Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Eugenics

There are many things wrong with abortion, not least of which is the tendency to eliminate classes of inconvenient people. The Nazis gassed the handicapped and mentally ill. We kill them before they are born. The New York Times today:
About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.
As genetic testing becomes more sophisticated, what other classes of people will be attacked? Dean Barnett's experience is instructive:
As most of the readers of this site know, I have the genetic lung disease Cystic Fibrosis. When I was born in 1967, the life expectancy for a bouncing baby boy with CF was eight years. Thanks to much better medical treatment, the average life expectancy for a baby born with CF today is in the mid-30’s. Nevertheless, CF remains a killer, and at best a terrible and painful burden for the parents of a CF patient.

When I was a teenager, the people running the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation came up with a “cure” for CF that could have only risen from the moral muck of the 1960’s and 70’s. They would breed the disease out of existence. Some time around 1980, the Foundation funded the search for and the eventual discovery of a pre-natal test for the disease. The plan was that parents who had a baby/fetus with CF would of course choose an abortion. Since children with CF would no longer be born, the disease would no longer exist. It would be “cured.” Sort of.

I knew most of the people who were then on the CF board; one of them was my father who I of course love dearly. He, too, thought this was a good idea. At some point my older brother pressed him if this meant he and my mother would have aborted me had they known I would have CF. My father reassured him that it wouldn’t have been a big deal, since I would have been reincarnated in the next baby they conceived. Except I would be better. I wouldn’t have that damn disease anymore.

I didn’t buy this logic. (Neither did my brother.) Even as a teenager, I didn’t like the idea that the next me would be aborted. With more skin in the game than the typical adolescent, I became one of the youngest and most ardent pro-life advocates in a liberal town that was lost in the moral confusion of the era. .... (more)
Prenatal Test Puts Down Syndrome in Hard Focus - New York Times, Hugh Hewett: Pro Life in a Brave New World

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