Eugenics Today

Sunday, July 17, 2005

The abortion debate that wasn't
Under the radar, pregnancies increasingly are being terminated when fetuses are prenatally diagnosed with disabilities

By GEORGE NEUMAYR
GUEST COLUMNIST

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. The law and its indulgence of every conceivable form of litigation have 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.)

Better to Have Never Been Born?

Wrongful Life Litigation

The more gut-wrenching form of wrongful life litigation occurs when the parents in question do want a child. They just don't want this child... The wish implicit in the lawsuit... is that the baby in question had never been born.

Sherry F. Colb

Are We A Dying Race?

What will be the condition of civilized nations four or five centuries hence, when society is entirely composed of degenerates, and when the whole lump of humanity is permeated with the leaven of physical, mental, and moral perversion?

J.H. Kellogg, 1897

As promised, a eugenics rant from the left

Herland

"We have bred a race of psychic hybrids," said early 20th century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "and the moral qualities of hybrids are well known." Whatever does she mean? "Marry an Anglo-Saxon to an African or Oriental," she writes elsewhere, "and their child has a dual nature." This, we are led to understand, would be a bad thing. While contemporaries like Looking Backward author Edward Bellamy foresaw a globalized future in which humanity would blend together, economically, politically, and sexually, Gilman deeply feared such a development. She wasn't alone; her era gave birth to hysterical racial fears manifest in discriminatory immigration laws and crackpot forms of eugenics. Her 1915 utopian novel Herland depicts a colony of women "of Aryan stock, once in contact with the best civilization," isolated from the rest of the world but surrounded by the indigenous people of South America. The women reproduce through parthenogenesis, giving birth only to girls.

The result is, of course, a pure and perfect society: "You see," says the castaway male narrator, "they had no wars. They had no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters, and as they grew, they grew together; not by competition, but by united action." See what can be accomplished if you just get rid of the biological group that most offends your sensibilities? A racially and sexually homogeneous society will, according to Gilman, quite naturally, and with apparently very little effort, blossom into utopia. While Euro-American feminist fans of Gilman, whose story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a staple of women's-studies classes, would prefer to separate out Gilman's racism from her brand of feminism, in fact the two are inseparable. Gilman is not so different a figure from Elisabeth Nietzsche-Förster; perhaps in death they both haunt Nueva Germania, united in their ideal of sisterhood.

From an interesting link,

The Ten Stupidest Utopias!

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