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Religions > Atheism |
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"" |
| Date: |
01 Aug 2005 07:52:52 AM |
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Abortion: The New Eugenics |
The New Eugenics
George Neumayr
EACH YEAR IN AMERICA fewer and fewer disabled infants are born. The
reason is eugenic abortion. Doctors and their patients use prenatal
technology to screen unborn children for disabilities, then they use
that information to abort a high percentage of them. Without much
scrutiny or debate, a eugenics designed to weed out the disabled has
become commonplace.
Not wishing to publicize a practice most doctors prefer to keep secret,
the medical community releases only sketchy information on the
frequency of eugenic abortion against the disabled. But to the extent
that the numbers are known, they indicate that the vast majority of
unborn children prenatally diagnosed as disabled are killed.
Medical researchers estimate that 80 percent or more of babies now
prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. (They estimate
that since 1989 70 percent of Down-syndrome fetuses have been aborted.)
A high percentage of fetuses with cystic fibrosis are aborted, as
evident in Kaiser Permanente's admission to the New York Times that 95
percent of its patients in Northern California choose abortion after
they find out through prenatal screening that their fetus will have the
disease.
The frequent use of eugenic abortion can also be measured in dwindling
populations with certain disabilities. Since the 1960s, the number of
Americans with spina bifida has markedly declined. This dropping trend
line corresponds to the rise of prenatal screening. Owing to prenatal
technology and eugenic abortion, some rare conditions, such as the
genetic disorder Tay-Sachs, are even vanishing in America, according to
doctors.
"There really isn't any entity that is charged with monitoring what has
been happening," says Andrew Imparato, head of the American Association
of People with Disabilities (AAPD), "A lot of people prefer that that
data not be collected. But we're seeing just the tip of the iceberg.
This is a new eugenics, and I don't know where it is going to end."
"I THINK OF IT AS COMMERCIAL EUGENICS," says Andrew Kimbrell, executive
director of the International Center for Technology Assessment.
"Whenever anybody thinks of eugenics, they think of Adolf Hitler. This
is a commercial eugenics. But the result is the same, an intolerance
for those who don't fit the norm. It is less open and more subtle. Try
to get any numbers on reproductive issues. Try to get actual numbers on
sex-selection abortions. They are always difficult to get. If you are
involved in that commerce, do you really want people to go: So you
aborted how many disabled children? That's the last piece of
information people want out there."
Indeed, intellectual arguments in favor of eugenic abortion often
generate great public outcry. Princeton professor Peter Singer drew
fire for saying, "It does not seem quite wise to increase any further
draining of limited resources by increasing the number of children with
impairments." Bob Edwards, the embryologist who created the first
test-tube baby through in vitro fertilization, has also drawn protests
for predicting that "soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child
that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a
world where we have to consider the quality of our children."
But these comments, far from being unthinkable, reflect unspoken
mainstream attitudes and practice. Only through political gaffes (and
occasional news stories) is eugenic abortion ever mentioned, such as
the time in 2003 when a blundering Hillary Clinton objected to a ban on
partial-birth abortion because it didn't contain an exemption for
late-term abortions aimed at the disabled. Women should not be "forced"
to carry a "child with severe abnormalities," she said.
In an interview with TAS, Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania
recalled his 2003 exchange with Hillary Clinton on the Senate floor in
which she endorsed eugenic abortion. "It was pretty revealing. She was
saying there had to be an exemption for disabled children being aborted
as opposed to healthy children being aborted," he says. "When she
realized what she was advocating for, she had to put in the general
niceties. But I don't think you can read her comments and come to any
other conclusion than that the children with disabilities should have
less constitutional protection than children who are healthy."
He added that "the principal reason the Democrats defended the
partial-birth abortion procedure was for pregnancies that have 'gone
awry,' which is not about something bad happening to the life of the
mother but about their finding out the child is not in the condition
that they expected, that it was somehow less than wanted and what they
had hoped for."
What Hillary Clinton blurted out is spoken more softly, though no less
coldly, in the privacy of doctors' offices. Charles Strom, medical
director of Quest Diagnostics, which specializes in prenatal screening,
told the New York Times last year that "People are going to the doctor
and saying, 'I don't want to have a handicapped child, what can you do
for me?'" This attitude is shared by doctors who now view disabled
infants and children as puzzling accidents that somehow slipped through
the system. University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, in his book
Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, writes that "at my own
university, a physician making rounds with medical students stood over
the bed of an intelligent, otherwise normal ten-year-old boy with spina
bifida. 'Were he to have been conceived today,' the physician casually
informed his entourage, 'he would have been aborted.'"
THE IMPULSE BEHIND PRENATAL SCREENING in the 1970s was eugenic. After
the Roe v. Wade decision, which pumped energy into the eugenics
movement, doctors scrambled to advance prenatal technology in response
to consumer demand, mainly from parents who didn't want the burdens of
raising children with Down syndrome. Now prenatal screening can
identify hundreds of conditions. This has made it possible for doctors
to abort children not only with chronic disabilities but common
disabilities and minor ones. Among the aborted are children screened
for deafness, blindness, dwarfism, cleft palates, and defective limbs.
In some cases the aborted children aren't disabled at all but are mere
carriers of a disease or stand a chance of getting one later in life.
Prenatal screening has made it possible to abort children on guesses
and probabilities. A doctor speaking to the New York Times cited a
defect for a eugenic abortion that was at once minor and speculative: a
women suffering from a condition that gave her an extra finger asked
doctors to abort two of her children on the grounds that they had a
50-50 chance of inheriting that condition.
The law and its indulgence of every conceivable form of litigation has
also advanced the new eugenics against the disabled. Working under
"liability alerts" from their companies, doctors feel pressure to
provide extensive prenatal screening for every disability, lest parents
or even disabled children hit them with "wrongful birth" and "wrongful
life" suits. In a wrongful birth suit, parents can sue doctors for not
informing them of their child's disability and seek compensation from
them for all the costs, financial and otherwise, stemming from a life
they would have aborted had they received that prenatal information.
Wrongful life suits are brought by children (through their parents)
against doctors for all the "damages" they've suffered from being born.
(Most states recognize wrongful birth suits, but for many states,
California and New Jersey among the exceptions, wrongful life suits are
still too ridiculous to entertain.)
In 2003, Ob-Gyn Savita Khosla of Hackensack, New Jersey, agreed to pay
$1.2 million to a couple and child after she failed to flag Fragile X
syndrome, a form of mental retardation caused by a defective gene on
the X chromosome. The mother felt entitled to sue Khosla because she
indicated on a questionnaire that her sibling was mentally retarded and
autistic, and hence Khosla should have known to perform prenatal
screening for Fragile X so that she could abort the boy. Khosla
settled, giving $475,000 to the parents and $750,000 to the child they
wished that they had aborted.
Had the case gone to court, Khosla would have probably lost the suit.
New Jersey has been notoriously welcoming to wrongful birth suits ever
since the Roe v. Wade decision, after which New Jersey's Supreme Court
announced that it would not "immunize from liability those in the
medical field providing inadequate guidance to persons who would choose
to exercise their constitutional right to abort fetuses which, if born,
would suffer from genetic defects."
According to the publication Medical Malpractice Law & Strategy, "court
rulings across the country are showing that the increased use of
genetic testing has substantially exposed physicians' liability for
failure to counsel patients about hereditary disorders." The
publication revealed that many wrongful birth cases "are settled
confidentially." And it predicted that doctors who don't give their
patients the information with which to consider the eugenic option
against disabled children will face more lawsuits as prenatal screening
becomes the norm. "The human genome has been completely mapped," it
quotes Stephen Winnick, a lawyer who handled one of the first wrongful
birth cases. "It's almost inevitable that there will be an increase in
these cases."
The combination of doctors seeking to avoid lawsuits and parents
seeking burden-free children means that once prenatal screening
identifies a problem in a child the temptation to eugenic abortion
becomes unstoppable. In an atmosphere of expected eugenics, even
queasy, vaguely pro-life parents gravitate towards aborting a disabled
child. These parents get pressure from doctors who, without even
bothering to ask, automatically provide abortion options to them once
the prenatal screening has diagnosed a disability (one parent, in a
1999 study, complained of a doctor showing her a video depicting the
rigors of raising an afflicted child as a way of convincing her to
choose abortion), and they feel pressure from society at large which
having accepted eugenic abortion looks askance at parents with disabled
children.
The right to abort a disabled child, in other words, is approaching the
status of a duty to abort a disabled child. Parents who abort their
disabled children won't be asked to justify their decision. Rather, it
is the parents with disabled children who must justify themselves to a
society that tacitly asks: Why did you bring into the world a child you
knew was disabled or might become disabled?
Andrew Kimbrell points out that many parents are given the complicated
information prenatal screening yields with little to no guidance from
doctors. "We're leaving parents with complete confusion. Numerous
parents are told by doctors, 'We think there is some fault on the 50th
chromosome of your child.' A number of polls have shown that people
don't understand those odds."
"There is enormous confusion out there and nobody is out there to help
them," he says. "This is a huge tangle. And it leads people to abort
out of confusion: 'I guess I better abort, because I don't know. It
sounds really bad and I don't know what the percentages mean.'"
THE NEW EUGENICS isn't slowing down but speeding up. Not content to
wait to see if a child is fit for life, doctors are exploring the more
proactive eugenics of germline genetic engineering (which tries to
create desirable traits in an embryo) and Preimplantation Genetic
Diagnosis (PGD), which is used to select the most desirable embryos
after extensive genetic testing has been done before they are implanted
in mothers' wombs.
"The next stage is to actually start tinkering genetically with these
embryos to create advantages such as height," says Kimbrell. PGD is a
"gateway technology" that will advance the new eugenics to the point
"where children are literally selected and eventually designed
according to a parent's desires and fears," he says. (Meanwhile,
doctors are simultaneously reporting that children born through in
vitro fertilization are experiencing higher rates of birth defects than
the average population, suggesting that for every problem scientists
try to solve through dubious means they create multiple new ones.)
Many countries have banned PGD. But American fertility clinics are
offering it. Two-thirds of fertility clinics using PGD in the world are
in the U.S., says Kimbrell. "Reproductive technology is an unregulated
Wild West scenario where people can do pretty much anything they want
and how they want it," he says.
Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, coined the term eugenics in
the 1880s. Sparking off his cousin's theory of evolution, he proposed
improving the human race through eugenics, arguing that "what nature
does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly,
and kindly." As eugenics passes through each of its stages -- from
sterilizing the enfeebled at the beginning of the 20th century to
aborting the disabled at the end of it and the beginning of the 21st --
man is indeed playing God but without any of his providence or care.
Andrew Imparato of AAPD wonders how progressives got to this point. The
new eugenics aimed at the disabled unborn tell the disabled who are
alive, "disability is a fate worse than death," he says. "What kind of
message does this send to people living with spina bifida and other
disabilities? It is not a progressive value to think that a disabled
person is better off dead."
George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/NeumayrNewEugenics.php
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: Abortion: The New Eugenics |
01 Aug 2005 07:31:46 PM |
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In episode <1122900772.643310.249350@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
wordsoftruth114 burst into the room and exclaimed:
EACH YEAR IN AMERICA fewer and fewer disabled infants are born. The reason
is eugenic abortion. Doctors and their patients use prenatal technology to
screen unborn children for disabilities, then they use that information to
abort a high percentage of them. Without much scrutiny or debate, a
eugenics designed to weed out the disabled has become commonplace.
<snip>
Wordsofcrap wants lots and lots of handicapped people around so he can
feel *special...
--
Mark K. Bilbo - a.a. #1423
EAC Department of Linguistic Subversion
Alt-atheism website at: http://www.alt-atheism.org
--------------------------------------------------
"Come to think of it, there are already a million
monkeys on a million typewriters, and the Usenet
is NOTHING like Shakespeare!" -- Blair Houghton
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| User: "Phÿltêr" |
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| Title: Re: Abortion: The New Eugenics |
02 Aug 2005 07:17:51 AM |
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[posted and mailed]
"Mark K. Bilbo" <alt-atheism@org.webmaster> astounded us with:
news:45udnbaUDfFvI3PfRVn-3w@megapath.net:
In episode <1122900772.643310.249350@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
wordsoftruth114 burst into the room and exclaimed:
EACH YEAR IN AMERICA fewer and fewer disabled infants are born. The
reason
is eugenic abortion. Doctors and their patients use prenatal technology
to
screen unborn children for disabilities, then they use that information
to
abort a high percentage of them. Without much scrutiny or debate, a
eugenics designed to weed out the disabled has become commonplace.
<snip>
Wordsofcrap wants lots and lots of handicapped people around so he can
feel *special...
Well, he already *is special, he's a retard. He's concerned for his unborn
brothers in arms.
--
Phÿltêr
AA#1938
Denizen of Darkness #44 & AFJC Antipodean Attaché
Remove "s" to respond
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com
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| User: "Steve Knight" |
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| Title: Re: Abortion: The New Eugenics |
01 Aug 2005 09:18:49 PM |
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On 1 Aug 2005 05:52:52 -0700, wrote:
EACH YEAR IN AMERICA fewer and fewer disabled infants are born. The
reason is eugenic abortion. Doctors and their patients use prenatal
technology to screen unborn children for disabilities,
Let's hear it for science!
Yaaaaaaaah! Right fucking on!
Talk about something so fucking cool that we can stop suffering
before it happens is mind blowing.;
But you religers want to force these three toed suffering monsters
to endure a few petty years of extreme pain so they can be 'FUCKING
BELIEVERS' like you. No other reason! If that isn't the sickest *****
I've ever even contemplated in my worst nightmare.............. then
snap my foreskin and call me Shirley.
Sick religious *****'s.
Warlord Steve
BAAWA
www.sonic.net/~wooly
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