Quote of the Week - C.P. Blacker

Psychologist C. P. Blacker called for a strategy of "crypto-eugenics," saying "you seek to fulfill the aims of eugenics without disclosing what you are really aiming at and without mentioning the word."

Blacker was appointed by Margaret Sanger to be first director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Related reading:  Eugenics Catechism

UK entering designer baby market?

The UK government has decided that it will allow the creation of three-parent embryos to prevent the births of children with mitochondrial diseases. The announcement came after an extensive consultation carried out by the fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, last year which found that most Britons were not opposed to the procedure.

The UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, said: “Scientists have developed ground-breaking new procedures which could stop these diseases being passed on, bringing hope to many families seeking to prevent their future children inheriting them. It’s only right that we look to introduce this life-saving treatment as soon as we can.”

While the news was reported as a breakthrough and a world first by the media, there were voices of dissent. Dr David King, of the lobby group Human Genetics Alert, was bitterly critical.

"These techniques are unnecessary and unsafe and were in fact rejected by the majority of consultation responses. It is a disaster that the decision to cross the line that will eventually lead to a eugenic designer baby market should be taken on the basis of an utterly biased and inadequate consultation."

Read it all here.

Is Civilization Making Us Dumber?

Professor Crabtree thinks so, as did Rousseau.


Michael Cook, the editor of BioEdge.org has this to say:

The nightmare of genetic degeneracy has been a recurring theme ever since Darwinian evolution took hold of the popular imagination. Eugenics, discredited nowadays, was public policy less than a hundred years ago. The disabled, the retarded, or the racially impure should not be allowed to breed. In 1927 one of the most influential justices ever to sit on the US Supreme Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote the majority opinion in an 8-1 decision legitimating compulsory sterilization. However shocking they seem now, his words, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" expressed the conventional wisdom.

After the atrocities of the Nazi era, though, eugenics fell upon hard times. But the Nazi era ended more than 60 years ago and once again fear of genetic decline is on the rise.

Just few days ago, in the journal Trends in Genetics (here and here), Professor Gerald Crabtree, a developmental biologist at Stanford University, warned that civilization is slowly making us dumber.

“We, as a species, are surprisingly intellectually fragile and perhaps reached a peak 2000–6000 years ago,” he claims. “A hunter–gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his/her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate. Clearly, extreme selection is a thing of the past.”

Crabtree bases his pessimistic analysis on a study of the accumulation of mutations in the genome which are no longer eliminated by competitive pressure for survival. Life in society allowed a degenerating gene pool to thrive. We no longer needed to be brainy because we lived in high-density, supportive societies “that made up for lapses of judgment or failures of comprehension”.

Not even Crabtree himself wants to give up flush toilets and video games for the genetically vigorous life of a spear-brandishing mammoth-killer. But our cushy lives, he thinks, are inexorably turning us into Eloi. The process will take thousands of years, but a day will come when the world’s population will be “docilely watching reruns on televisions they can no longer build”.

Crabtree’s analysis has been ridiculed by science journalists. But its appearance in a leading journal suggests that something is afoot. What will the new eugenics look like? In the last century, the fashion was to eliminate “degenerates” through sterilization or murder. In the 21st century, eugenicists may call for physical and intellectual genetic enhancement. Those who cannot afford it will drop behind, doomed to become mere drones. For a peek into the year 2144, take a look at the genetically-engineered fabricants in the new film, “Cloud Atlas” (see below). It’s terrifying. 

From here.

Are all Bioethicists Crazy?

The next crazy idea from bioethicists involves children.  They want to genetically engineer our children so they will be environmentally friendly.  This obvious lack of common sense characterizes the transhuman and utilitarian ideology that is so common among bioethicists these days.

As Michael Cook, the editor of MercatorNet, explains: "A utilitarian bioethicist is always going to be a loose cannon, rolling wildly around the deck in ethical storms, splintering and smashing the fragile public image of his or her profession. If other bioethicists want to repair their dented prestige, shunning utilitarian colleagues would be a good place to start."

Consider Oxford bioethicist Rebecca Roache, who told the Guardian that most great ideas seem preposterous at first.

“Human engineering may seem bizarre and unrealistic, but this does not mean it could not turn out to be feasible and promising: telephones, ‘test tube babies’, and personal computers are all important aspects of modern life that were once regarded as bizarre and unrealistic.”

Foetal Reduction Crosses the Boundary

Foetal reduction is the dark side of the moon of fertility treatment. All too often women who become pregnant have twins or triplets. Since this involves medical and social risks, one or more of the foetuses are "reduced", ie, aborted. It is a procedure which few outside the industry are aware of. Freelance journalist Ruth Padawer has just written a feature in the New York Times Magazine shedding light on its bioethical dilemmas.

About 5-20% of pregnancies from fertility drugs are twins or higher, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and half of babies conceived using through IVF are part of a multiple pregnancy.

 

"For all its successes," writes Padawer, "reproductive medicine has produced a paradox: in creating life where none seemed possible, doctors often generate more fetuses than they intend. In the mid-1980s, they devised an escape hatch to deal with these mega-pregnancies, terminating all but two or three fetuses to lower the risks to women and the babies they took home."

But now foetal reduction is being offered for social reasons -- as an option for women who could not stand the stress of having twins.

 

Columnist Ross Douthat complained that the growing acceptance of "foetal reduction", or the abortion of one or more foetuses in a multiple birth, illustrated the failure of "liberal" thinkers to say No to anything. The column has been whizzing around the blogosphere, creating much comment.

Douthat points out that the leading advocate of foetal reduction, Dr Mark Evans, changed his mind between 1988 and 2004. At first he declared that most reductions below twins was unethical. Doctors should not be "technicians to our patients' desires." But 20 years later, Evans endorsed the abortion of a twin because older women find twin too difficult.

Douthat concludes:

From embryo experimentation to selective reduction to the eugenic uses of abortion, liberals always promise to draw lines and then never actually manage to draw them. Like Dr. Evans, they find reasons to embrace each new technological leap while promising to resist the next one -- and then time passes, science marches on, and they find reasons why the next moral compromise, too, must be accepted for the greater good, or at least tolerated in the name of privacy and choice. You can always count on them to worry, often perceptively, about hypothetical evils, potential slips down the bioethical slope. But they're either ineffectual or accommodating once an evil actually arrives. Tomorrow, they always say -- tomorrow, we'll draw the line. But tomorrow never comes.

 

 

Related reading: The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy; The Failure of Liberal Ethics

Eugenics Wearing a New Face

Ten years ago, in February 2001, to great fanfare, the draft human genome sequence was published. US President Bill Clinton had celebrated the completion of the project the year before as if man had just landed on Mars: “Genome science will have a real impact on all our lives — and even more, on the lives of our children. It will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.”

That was the hype. The reality is impressive, but hardly revolutionary. As Nature commented in its editorial for the occasion, “the complexity of post-genome biology has dashed early hopes that this trickle of therapies would rapidly become a flood.”

Scientists are acutely aware of the gap between promise and performance. The battle against common diseases still has not advanced much, because so many genes are involved. But somehow their battle-weary scepticism has failed to filter down to the science-dazzled public.

Biopolitical Times, an excellent blog based in California, has taken to running a brief feature called “gene of the week”. These are based on press releases from scientists (normally social scientists) proposing correlations between genes and personality types.

There is the “slut gene” which disposes people to one-night stands, a gene for being in a gang, an early-loss-of-virginity gene. There’s a "ruthless dictator gene”; there are two genes which predispose you to vote; there are genes which dispose you to vote Democrat. There are genes for victimhood, shyness and being a picky eater.

However absurd these sound, they send a serious message. They demonstrate that there is a hunger to believe that we are genetically determined. And wherever there is a hunger to believe, there are people ready to feed that belief.

It comes as no surprise that a Singapore company is marketing a genetic test to anxious parents which promises to test for 68 genes ranging from “Propensity for Teenage Romance Gene” to an “Explosive Power Gene”? (US$$8,871 worth of tests for a one-time-only price of $1,397!)

It’s impossible to know how many people were gullible enough to take the bait for this product. But I suspect that some people have a gene for belief in genetic determinism whose effects are magnified by higher education.

Take this incredible case from New York. A Federal District Court judge in Albany sentenced a man based on an as-yet-undiscovered gene. He spurned reports that a man convicted of possessing child pornography was “at a low to moderate risk to reoffend”. The man clearly had a child-porn-viewing gene which no scientist had ever heard of.

The judge told the defendant, “It is a gene you were born with. And it’s not a gene you can get rid of”. Nor did Judge Sharpe need evidence -- because he was sure that it would be discovered within 50 years. “You are what you’re born with. And that’s the only explanation for what I see here,” the judge said. (The sentence was successfully appealed.)

This speaks volumes about the magical power of genetics to subvert common sense. The belief that all behaviour is genetically determined has obviously sunk deeply into the public consciousness. Using the word “eugenics” has become taboo; believing in eugenics is widespread.

And even amongst bioethicists.

Julian Savulescu, an Australian who is currently a professor of practical ethics at Oxford, recently declared that parents are morally obliged to genetically engineer their children so that they will have higher IQs. "There are other ethical principles which should govern reproduction, such as the public interest," he said. This policy would reduce welfare dependency, crowding in jails, school dropout rates and poverty. "Cheaper, efficient whole genome analysis makes it a real possibility in the near future."

Anyone who thinks that eugenics is dead and buried with the Nazi regime is deluding himself. Eugenics has clawed its way out of the grave and is being rehabilitated.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

Odious Notion of Wrongful Life

By Wesley J Smith, First Things

Belgium’s euthanasia law permits people to be killed by doctors because they are disabled. In such a discriminatory setting, is it any wonder that a Belgian court has now approved the odious notion of a wrongful life. From the story (may have to hit translation button):

The Court of Appeal in Brussels responds positively to this extremely sensitive issue. After noting that “certainly, the misdiagnosis did not cause the child’s disability, which existed before the error and which could not be remedied,” the Court considers that, “however, the injury must be compensated is not the disability itself, but the fact of being born with such disabilities. “ Thus, the child, the voice of his parents, may claim compensation for physicians who, through their fault, some were injured and legitimate interest to be a therapeutic abortion, as granted that his mother would have been appeal if it had been duly informed of the condition during pregnancy. In the opinion of the Court, by entering in the Penal Code article 350, paragraph 2, 4, authorizing therapeutic abortion, “the legislature must have intended to help avoid giving birth to children with abnormalities serious, having regard not only to the interests of the mother but also to that of the unborn child itself. ”

This is the first time in Belgium that an appellate court receives such a wrongful life action (wrongful life). Previously, a trial court of first instance of Brussels, released April 21, 2004, had adopted a similar solution, about a child with Down syndrome.

Read it all here.

A Closer Look at Martin Heidegger

It’s not often that metaphysics makes the news. Metaphysics is about “being” – not “being there”, or “being here”, or “being John Malkovich”. Just being; pure being, no preservatives, no additives, no artificial colouring. Being. Boring.

So it was rather surprising to read in the New York Times that the artillery of political correctness is busy lobbing verbal cannonballs ("oafish", "vulgar", "vicious") upon one of the greatest metaphysicians of the 20th century. Critic Carlin Romano wrote this scathing attack in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance."
You have to have a deep and capacious brain to do metaphysics, and in the 20th century, few have been more influential than Martin Heidegger. The late American post-modernist philosopher Richard Rorty wrote that: “You cannot read most of the important philosophers of recent times without taking Heidegger’s thought into account.” Heidegger’s work is as dense as a Blackforest gateau and just as rich. His theories on world building, background coping and the timeliness of philosophy have helped shape post-modernist interpretations of today’s post-Plato, proto-Nietzschean society.

By no means am I a disciple of Heidegger. But you can learn a lot even from great minds. To me, a great mind asks fundamental questions, like, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Nowadays philosophers get distracted by peripheral issues or obsessed with minutiae.

Heidegger’s great achievement was to remind contemporary philosophers that their vocation is to remind the rest of us that the Big Questions are the ones that matter. Whether they answer them properly is another matter.

Metaphysicians are like musicians. Much as I like the Beatles for some of their piercingly beautiful songs, I have to acknowledge that they had pretty freaky ideas and lifestyles.

The freaky ideas and lifestyle of Martin Heidegger are upsetting the literati quoted by the New York Times. Heidegger had a great intellect but he was a very flawed man.

He grew up as a Catholic, but drifted away from the Church. After he became a well-known philosopher, he was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933. It was shortly after Hitler came to power and Heidegger quickly joined the Nazi Party. It is undeniable that he admired some elements in the Nazi philosophy, with its emphasis on the decadence of Western culture. It is said that he sometimes showed up at lectures in a brown shirt and saluted students with a "Heil Hitler!" He is often quoted as speaking of the "inner truth and greatness of this movement" -- referring to National Socialism. Heidegger could be a mean-spirited and nasty man.

How thoroughgoing a Nazi he was, however, is the subject of fierce debate. One critic contends that Heidegger was not so much interested in Nazism as being führer to the Führer, a guide to the leader of the German people. But this was as naive and fated to fail as were Plato’s trips to Syracuse to educate the local tyrant. One point in his favour seems to be that Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher who analysed “the banality of evil” in Nazism was his lover and later defended him as naïve in making a “personal error”.

But Victor Farias’s book Heidegger and Nazism (1991) has argued that Heidegger’s intellectual insights are thoroughly intertwined with National Socialism. Now a new work from France by Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, reaffirms Farias’s view by drawing on Heidegger’s vast unpublished writings.

In the light of this research, a New York Times feature by Patricia Cohen asks whether a Nazi really deserves a place among philosophers. Drawing on Faye’s soon-to-be translated work, Ms Cohen warns us that without an understanding of the soil in which Heidegger’s philosophy is rooted, people may not realize that his ideas can grow in troubling directions. “Heidegger’s dictum to be authentic and free oneself from conventional restraints, for example, can lead to a rejection of morality.” In fact, Faye concludes that:

"an author who has espoused the foundations of Nazism cannot be considered a philosopher… If his writings continue to proliferate without our being able to stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?"

In other words, the long-dead Heidegger is not just an abominable Nazi, but a clear and present danger to youth, even to Western civilisation, whose books should be quarantined -- or perhaps burned. Cohen writes that in Faye’s view “teaching Heidegger’s ideas without disclosing his deep Nazi sympathies is like showing a child a brilliant fireworks display without warning that an ignited rocket can also blow up in someone’s face.” Romano has a better idea: treat him as a joke:

“His influence will end only when they, and the broader world of intellectuals, recognize that ... [he is] a buffoon produced by German philosophy's mystical tradition. He should be the butt of jokes, not the subject of dissertations.”

Steady on. Are these politically-correct writers serious? Do they really believe that German and English skinheads will stop tattooing their noggins with swastikas because they can’t read Heidegger? The likelihood of a youth who reads Heidegger joining a neo-Nazi outfit is near zero. If Heidegger was a Nazi, he is a defanged Nazi. Ideas do have consequences, admittedly. But the real question -- which the New York Times fears to ask -- is this: whose ideas should we fear nowadays? Which philosopher’s ideas justify destruction, violence and murder in our own society? Well, actually, there are lots of them. Where do you want me to start?

If we are going to burn books or purge libraries, why not begin with Peter Singer, who has a professorial chair at Princeton, one of America’s most prestigious universities, and writes in the New York Times occasionally. Youths who read his books on animal liberation have become murderous terrorists. Doctors who read them justify abortion and euthanasia.

How about Julian Savulescu, who holds a chair at Oxford, and advocates abortion and do-it-yourself eugenics? How about James Lovelock, who extols nature and calls for more plants and fewer people?

These are all dangerous ideas – and yet the New York Times is happy enough to lionise such people. No matter how bad Heidegger was as a man, his metaphysics will always hold great value. To my mind Heidegger’s admiration of Nazism should serve as a warning that great intellects can go dangerously astray. Trashing Heidegger’s reputation won’t make us more moral. What will, is a return to a firm foundation for what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful. Heidegger rejected this and ended up in Nazism. Contemporary philosophers reject this and end up in the scariest kind of nihilism. That’s what we have to be afraid of.

Richard Umbers teaches philosophy in Sydney, Australia. This is reproduced with permission from here.

Quote of the Week - C.S. Lewis

"If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendents what it pleases, all men who live after it are patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger..." - C. S. Lewis

Say Goodbye to Grandma!

Dear Grandma,

I am writing you this email from my blackberry. I have been standing online here at the Department of Health and Human Services appeals office for the last 3 hours. My feet are killing me. I can't believe I am missing the Hanson reunion tour just so I can try for the fifth time to get the government to pay for your pain medication. It didn't work the first four times and it isn't going to work this time.

You know how I know this is pointless? There is a guy on line with me who has a tumor the size of a grapefruit on his knee. He said it was only the size of a tennis ball the first time he applied to have it removed but since it is benign it is deemed elective / cosmetic surgery and so he was denied. The guy in front of him pulled out seven teeth with his own pliers because there are no dentists left in Pennsylvania, they all moved to the Republic of Texas where you can still make money as a dentist.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I mean I appreciate you giving birth to my Mom and all and for taking me in when she died of small pox, but that was then and this is now. There is a very nice lady here handing out pamphlets about a place called the Sebelius Home for the Soon to be Dying. It looks very nice. I know you are not technically dying since the pain medication is only for arthritis but let's face it, its only downhill from here and as the lady reminded me that can get very expensive.

Anyway, this nice lady said that when you arrive at Sebelius that they treat you with great dignity. Dignity is good, right? She said they give you a nice meal, some nice medicine to relax you (apparently they can get all the medicine they need!), and then they take you to a nice room where you can get cleaned up.

The reason I am writing all this on my blackberry is that I signed you up for the program. Right now there are some men in a van on the way over to pick you up. It is amazing how efficient the government can be sometimes, huh? Anyway, they should be there soon. Don't worry, the lady assured me that transportation to Sebelius is absolutely free. They didn't mention anything about the ride back but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. Oh, and they said you don't need to pack anything.

Anyway, have a great time and thanks for everything. I am going to try and see if I can still make the Hanson concert at Biden Hall in Scranton. I hope you feel better.

Later,
Johnny

H/T Creative Minority blog

Judge Ginsburg Self-Clarifies on Eugenics

From what surely must vie for the title of "Dingiest Gorge in Hell", the perdition bound soul of Margaret Sanger, posthumous Queen of the radical feminist movement, was unbeknownst summoned -- and just as quickly retired to the infernal pit where it likely makes its eternal home -- by a very artless and candid response from Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, during a recent, hardly publicized, New York Times Magazine interview.

Billed as a serious enquiry into the psyche of the esteemed judge, the interchange consisted primarily of a whole lot of tedious bewailing the female gene's perennial struggle against the oppressive, sexist culture that ostensibly permeates even moderately influential power structures in this country. At times, exposing this presumed, deep-seated, patriarchal impulse of the male species appeared to be the sole objective of the interview.

And then, suddenly, and most unexpectedly, Mrs. Ginsburg yielded a rather frank assessment of the Pro-choice movement's little known history of eugenics.

As civilized people who stumble upon an embarrassing truth and then try to regain their stoic composure, both the Judge and the unsuspecting enquirer continued undaunted on their merry way to discuss matters of more practical relevance, without even offering Justice Ginsburg's revealing observation nearly a parting glance.

If for no other reason than to avoid being charged with having unfairly wrenched Mrs. Ginsburg's poorly "calibrated" remarks from their original context, I now present you with the extract, from what was declared by the publisher as an already condensed and edited version of the interview:

Read it all here.

Scott B. Rae's Moral Choices

I recommend Dr. Scott B. Rae's Moral Choices: An Introduction to Ethics. It is a fine text for college ethics classes, providing students with a sound basis for making ethical decisions in today's postmodern culture. This book presents the theory of ethics and its application to social issues and uses cases studies to address current ethical issues.

Professor Rae outlines the distinctive elements of Christian ethics such as the concept of a fixed order of creation (the basis for Intelligent Design). He introduces students to ethical systems of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant.

Rae's seven-step procedure for tackling ethical dilemmas provides students with a template for ethical reasoning.

Now in its second edition, Moral Choices is expanded and revised to provide the most current insights on:

• Abortion
• Reproductive Technologies
• Euthanasia
• Capital Punishment
• Sexual Ethics
• The Morality of War
• The Legislation of Morality
• Genetic Technologies and Human Cloning

Moral Choices: An Introduction to Ethics
By Scott B. Rae
Edition: 2
Published by Zondervan, 2000
ISBN 0310230152, 9780310230151
288 pages

Good Site to Learn about Eugenics

What follows is from the Home page of EugenicsArchive.Org, a good resource for learning about the Eugenics Movement in America.

Eugenicists effectively lobbied for social legislation to keep racial and ethnic groups separate, to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and to sterilize people considered "genetically unfit." Elements of the American eugenics movement were models for the Nazis, whose radical adaptation of eugenics culminated in the Holocaust.

We now invite you to experience the unfiltered story of American eugenics – primarily through materials from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the center of American eugenics research from 1910-1940. In the Archive you will see numerous reports, articles, charts, and pedigrees that were considered scientific "facts" in their day. It is important to remind yourself that the vast majority of eugenics work has been completely discredited. In the final analysis, the eugenic description of human life reflected political and social prejudices, rather than scientific facts.

You may find some of the language and images in this Archive offensive. Even supposedly "scientific" terms used by eugenicists were often pervaded with prejudice against racial, ethnic, and disabled groups. Some terms have no scientific meaning today. For example, "feeblemindedness" was used as a catch-all for a number of real and supposed mental disabilities, and was a common "diagnosis" used to make members of ethnic and racial minority groups appear inferior. However, we have made no attempt to censor this documentary record – to do so would distort the past and diminish the significance of the lessons to be learned from this material.

During a two-year review process, involving a 14-member Advisory Panel, this site has developed an editorial policy to protect personal privacy and confidentiality. For this reason, names and places have been deleted from pedigrees, medical documents, and personal photographs.

You can access the palm version of the site here.

Sterilizations at Texas Catholic Hospitals

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The bishop of Tyler, Texas, has concluded that Catholic hospitals in his diocese have violated ethical directives by performing sterilizations.

"As a bishop, I am deeply saddened and upset by this news," said Bishop Alvaro Corrada, in a Nov. 21 statement published in the Catholic East Texas, newspaper of the Diocese of Tyler. "As bishop of the Diocese of Tyler, I have to admit my failure to provide adequate oversight of the Catholic hospitals as regards their protection of the sacred dignity of each human person."

Bishop Corrada's statement follows an investigation by his diocese after a national Catholic newspaper reported claims last July that thousands of sterilizations, and possibly some abortions, took place in 23 Texas Catholic hospitals from 2000 to 2003.

Initially, officials from Trinity Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler and Christus St. Michael's Health System in Texarkana told the diocese they were in compliance with the U.S. Catholic Church's "Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services," he said in the statement. "Sadly, subsequent investigation reveals that there had been a serious misinterpretation of the ERDs and that in fact many direct sterilizations had been done and continued to be done at the time of the article," Bishop Corrada said.

Read it here.

Against a Culture of Death

Amos Yong’s Theology and Down Syndrome

Thomas Reynolds’ Vulnerable Communion

Hans Reinders’ Receiving the Gift of Friendship

Each of these books considers theological questions surrounding physical and mental disability. All address what it means to be human and to anticipate a fully redeemed, restored, and perfected humanity. These writers stand against eugenic abortion of Downs Syndrome and abortion for convenience (murder).

If this election is about picking an issue, we should vote against the culture of death. Abortion, which Obama wants to further liberalize, takes thousands more lives in a year than have been lost in the Iraq war.

Columnist George F. Will reports: In Britain, more babies with Down syndrome are aborted than are allowed to be born. In America, more than 80 percent of the babies diagnosed prenatally with Down syndrome are aborted. This is dismaying to, among others, the American Association of People with Disabilities, whose premise is that "disability is a natural part of the human experience."The AAPD worries that increasingly sophisticated prenatal genetic testing technologies will mean that parents who are told their expected babies are less than perfect "will experience pressures to terminate their pregnancies from medical professionals and insurers."

Will is right. Eugenic abortions undermine human dignity and the sanctity of life.

Wanting a Deaf Child

We have discussed the issue of a deaf couple wanting to use embryo selection to choose a deaf child before, and now the issue is again being discussed in connection with the UK’s hopeless mess of a bill that seeks to regulate all human reproduction. The issue is important on several levels and I think worth revisiting. From the story:

'Like any other three-year-old child, Molly has brought joy to her parents. Bright-eyed and cheerful, Molly is also deaf - and that is an issue which vexes her parents, though not for the obvious reasons. Paula Garfield, a theatre director, and her partner, Tomato Lichy, an artist and designer, are also deaf and had hoped to have a child who could not hear.
‘We celebrated when we found out about Molly’s deafness,’ says Lichy. ‘Being deaf is not about being disabled, or medically incomplete–it’s about being part of a linguistic minority. We’re proud, not of the medical aspect of deafness, but of the language we use and the community we live in.'

Now the couple are hoping to have a second child, one they also wish to be deaf –and that desire has brought them into a sharp confrontation with Parliament. The government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) bill, scheduled to go through the Commons this spring, will block any attempt by couples like Garfield and Lichy to use modern medical techniques to ensure their children are deaf.

And here is the crux of the issue:

‘Paula is now in her early 40s,’ says Lichy. ‘Our first daughter was born naturally, but due to Paula’s age, we may need IVF for the second.’ The trouble is that, according to clause 14/4/9 of the bill, the selection of a hearing child through IVF is permitted, but embryos found to have deafness genes will be automatically discarded. ‘This sends out a clear and direct message that the government thinks deaf people are better off not being born,’ says Steve Emery, a sign-language expert at Heriot-Watt University.

This point is backed by Lichy. ‘It is a cornerstone of modern society and law that deaf and hearing people have equal rights. If hearing people were to have the right to throw away a deaf embryo, then we as deaf people should also have the right to throw away a hearing embryo.’

Her logic is impeccable. The evil act is automatically discarding certain categories of embryos because they aren’t deemed good enough. This is eugenics, pure and simple, and it is evil in that, as the woman said, it presumes some lives have greater value than others. And in an age of radical individualism, if eugenics is good from one angle it is just as good from another.

Read it all here.

British Stamp to Commemorate Marie Stopes

LONDON, September 2, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com ) - Marie Stopes, the notorious early 20th century contraception campaigner, eugenicist and anti-Semite, did for Britain what Margaret Sanger did for the US: preached the doctrines of eugenics and promoted contraception and sterilisation to achieve "racial hygiene." So successful was she at altering British society in favour of her eugenics doctrines, the British government has chosen her to be included in a "Women of Distinction" line of stamps.

The Royal Mail announced this weekend that the face of Marie Stopes, who advocated the sterilisation of poor women to promote the "welfare of the race", will feature on the 50p stamp. The stamps will be available beginning 14 October 2008.

Columnist Gerald Warner wrote on his weblog at the Daily Telegraph, "Considering the hysteria nowadays attaching to issues of race, at first sight it seems extraordinary that Stopes should have earned commemoration on a stamp."

"To the [politically correct] establishment, however, even racist peccadilloes can be ignored to honour a pioneer who helped promote the anti-life culture and relieve women of the intolerable trauma of giving birth to a child with a cleft palate."

Marie Stopes was a major figure in normalising eugenics doctrines in Britain and abroad one result of which has been that, under current British legislation, a child deemed by a doctor to have a "serious" defect may be legally killed by abortion up to the end of the natural gestation period.

Read it all here.

India, Iran and Medical Ethics

It was for a second opinion that pregnant Niketa and husband Haresh Mehta landed up at gynaecologist Nikhil Datar's clinic in suburban Mumbai last month. They didn't want to continue with the pregnancy after discovering that the foetus had a heart problem, but Indian laws don't allow abortion beyond 20 weeks. Their gynaecologist felt that Dr Datar, who also has a degree in law, would be able to guide them better. What followed had the nation transfixed for over a week.

Medical dilemmas have a way of gripping attention. The entire world watched for five days as 41-year-old Terri Schiavo lay dying after the US courts permitted her husband to perform euthanasia using starvation and dehydration. The plight of Baby Manjhi, the daughter of a Japanese couple born to an Indian surrogate mother, is also being observed across the globe.

It is not just the smell of antiseptic that is common to all medical corridors. Dilemmas over medical ethics, too, are all familiar here. Ask Dr Samiran Nundy, Delhi-based transplant surgeon who drafted India's first law on transplant of organs in the early nineties, and he recalls how during his days in the AIIMS there always was a shortage of respirators as compared to the number of patients needing the contraption. "How can you decide which patient needs the respirator more than the other? It is such a dilemma," he says.

The questions are many. Should a husband tell his wife about his HIV infection before marriage? Should a doctor first operate on a patient who has Rs 18 lakh for a liver transplant or hanker after another liver failure patient who has no money? Should India, like Iran, legalize sale of kidneys in order to put the illegal kidney bazaar out of business? The answers are, however, far from easy.

Read it all here.

Eugenic Catechism

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
NEW YORK, NY, July 10, 2008

A book recently published by Harvard University Press explains how eugenics united some of the richest and most powerful elites of the twentieth century into a movement "to remake humanity by controlling the population of the world," answering to no one and bringing untold misery upon the world's poor.

The book, "Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population," was written by Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly and shows why today's reproductive rights advocates are "faithfully reciting a eugenic catechism without the faintest idea where it comes from or where it can lead."

In 1952, at a secret, invitation-only gathering in Colonial Williamsburg, John D. Rockefeller III brought together what would become the modern population control establishment. Setting the agenda for the following decades were the heads of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, National Academy of Sciences, and top scientists "from embryology to economics," including past and present Nobel Prize winners.

From verbatim transcripts of the "Conference on Population Problems," just one of the countless number of such meetings the book exposes, Connelly found that what drove them were the questions of how many people the world could hold along with "whether 'industrial development should be withheld' from poor, agrarian countries like India." By decreasing mortality and encouraging "breeding," development would increase inferior populations and further degrade "the genetic quality of the human race." They decided radical measures to reduce birthrates were justified in order to save "Western Civilization" from being dragged down by the growing humanitarian demands of Third World countries.

Thus was born the Population Council, which would in turn become the nexus of the entire population control movement, going on to coordinate the work of the United Nations, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) - founded three weeks later - as well as major pharmaceutical firms.

The founder of IPPF, Margaret Sanger, selected for its first director general the psychologist C. P. Blacker, who called for a strategy of "crypto-eugenics," saying "you seek to fulfill the aims of eugenics without disclosing what you are really aiming at and without mentioning the word."

When Nehru presented India's first population-limitation policy in December 1952, the population establishment found a willing government that would allow them to start experimenting on its people to find a cheap contraceptive "to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles and among the most ignorant people," as Margaret Sanger put it. Years later, Planned Parenthood would import the experiments back into poor neighborhoods in the United States. Sanger said, "I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them."

According to Connelly, it wasn't until President Lyndon Johnson, prodded by a few highly influential advisors, that American funding soared, turning Sanger's vision of forcing birth control on the world's poor into reality in India and beyond. As the initiatives gained unstoppable momentum, the brutal consequences shocked even the most enthusiastic population controllers.

Source: LifeSiteNews.com

Methodist Repent Support of Eugenics

In their closing statement, the United Methodist Church has adopted by a vote of 836 for and 28 against, for their book of resolutions, their statement titled Repentance for Support of Eugenics. The resolution passed at their General Conference on April 30,2008. this makes the United Methodist Church the first denominational church in the U.S. to openly repent of their support of or involvement in the early eugenic movement in the U.S.

Here’s how they wrapped up their 9 page resolution:

"Repentance for Support of EugenicsThe United Methodist General Conference formally apologizes for Methodist leaders and Methodist bodies who in the past supported eugenics as sound science and sound theology. We lament the ways eugenics was used to justify the sterilization of persons deemed less worthy. We lament that Methodist support of eugenics policies was used to keep persons of different races from marrying and forming legally recognized families. We are especially grieved that the politics of eugenics led to the extermination of millions of people by the Nazi government and continues today as 'ethnic cleansing' around the world.”

Source: Bioethics.com