"A More Perfect Human"

Here is just a small part of Leon Kass' must read lecture given at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and exploring the dangers in the salvific view of science.

Persons who happen still to be born with [genetic diseases and abnormalities, from Down’s syndrome to dwarfism], having somehow escaped the spreading net of detection and eugenic abortion, are increasingly regarded as “mistakes,” as inferior human beings who should not have been born. Not long ago, 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.” A woman I know with a child who has Down syndrome is asked by total strangers, “Didn’t you have an amnio?” The eugenic mentality is taking root, and we are subtly learning with the help of science to believe that there really are certain lives unworthy of being born.

Not surprisingly, in the face of these practical possibilities, prominent intellectuals are now providing justification for this view of life. The current journals of bioethics, no less, are filled with writings that sweetly sing the song of Binding and Hoche, albeit it without the menacing German accent. But not all are so reticent. Here for example are remarks from the writings of Peter Singer, DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Centerfor Human Values at Princeton, on the question of killing infants with serious, yet manageable, diseases such as hemophilia:

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects for a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of a happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second [even if not yet born]. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, according to the total view, it would be right to kill him.

In a recent magazine interview, Singer was asked, “What about parents conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically to kill him, take his organs, and transplant them into their ill older children?” Singer replied:  “It is difficult to warm to parents who can take such a detached view, [but] they’re not doing something really wrong in itself.”  The interviewer then asked:  “Is there anything wrong with a society in which children are bred for spare parts on a massive scale?”  The Princeton Professor of Bioethics replied, “No.” Do not underestimate what it means for us that such coolly lethal opinions, regarded since 1945 as barbaric, are today again treated with seriousness and honored with a chair at Princeton.

HT:  Robert George