Dear Colleague:
When we think of designer children, we think of an effort to breed
supermen. But there is a new and even more disturbing trend: Designer
children designed to be disabled.
Steven W. Mosher
President
PRI Weekly Briefing
30 March 2007
Vol. 9, No. 12
A Note on the Future: Deliberately Disabling Children
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
For a number of years now, a great deal of discussion has taken place
among scientists and in the popular media about the genetic engineering of
children. Will it soon be possible, for prices widely affordable at least
to the upper-middle class, to guarantee that children have a high IQ, or
excellent athletic ability, or be over 6 feet tall, or have blond hair and
blue eyes? Is it right to commodify children in this way, and have
parents choosing options as they do with cars? And wouldn't it be boring
to live in a world someday where almost everyone is extremely intelligent
and beautiful? Variety, or even the politically correct term "diversity,"
is the spice of life.
But not everyone wants what seemed to be the three genetic engineering
options: refrain and let nature take her course, attempt to repair genetic
diseases but otherwise let well enough alone, or select positive qualities
in children. There are parents who are deliberately ensuring that their
children are born with disabilities, from deafness to dwarfism. A fourth
option-inflicting permanent disabling conditions on children-is now being
used.
For some years now, some deaf parents have refused to allow their deaf
children to receive cochlear implants that would enable them to hear. The
devices must often be implanted when children are very young in order to
work, so such parents condemn their children to a lifetime of deafness
when they could have been able to hear.
Some dwarf couples are even using in-vitro fertilization to create embryos
in the lab, then killing the normal ones and implanting the ones with the
dwarfness gene to ensure having a dwarf child.
The standard Marxist-Frankfurt School arguments are used to justify such
acts by Deaf Life magazine and other radical organizations representing
some disabled people. They argue that deaf folks, dwarfs, and others
aren't disabled at all, just different. Deaf Life types complain of an
"oralist" culture that discriminates against deaf people who use sign
language. "Oralism" oppresses the deaf, you see, just as racism, sexism,
heterosexism, and other isms ad nauseam oppress others.
In a Jan. 21, 2007 story, the Associated Press reported that, of American
clinics it surveyed that perform embryo screening, 3% admit to screening
in favor of disabilities. This story contains perhaps the most revealing
statement on the question. It was uttered by a dwarf woman angered that
anyone would dare suggest that deliberating inflicting permanent suffering
on children is bad:
"Cara Reynolds of Collingswood, N.J., who considered embryo screening but
now plans to adopt a dwarf baby, is outraged by the criticism. 'You
cannot tell me that I cannot have a child who's going to look like me,'
Reynolds said. 'It's just unbelievably presumptuous and they're playing
God.'"
Funny to think that it's playing God to say it's wrong to use high-tech
techniques to choose certain qualities in children rather than letting
nature take her course. Isn't intervening to choose a major genetic
quality in your child much more like playing God?
First abortion, then fetal and embryonic tissue experimentation, and on
the anti-child bandwagon goes. Some kill children because they have
disabilities, others choose to inflict suffering that only God could
possibly have a right to allow. What hate there is in the world.
I will let others comment upon the dark spiritual impulses that must be
behind a parent's decision to do such a thing. But I will ask this: How
relativistic can a society become and still be worthy of preserving?
Things must change soon. With such degeneration, and such low birthrates
in this anti-child age, things must change or we shall perish. I am
banking on the former.
Joseph A. D'Agostino is the outgoing Vice President for Communications at
PRI.
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The pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human
rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending
counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of
"overpopulation."