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I try very hard
not to write from anger. With passion, certainly, but I’ve long understood that
untempered rage clouds the reason and turns most people off.
I
have let stories cool before, and me with them, solely to ensure that I’m
running on something more than adrenaline. It risks letting a topic go cold,
but to my thinking the trade is worthwhile.
This August I wrote to condemn a study concluding that legalized abortion
reduces crime by terminating the pregnancies of poor and minority women. This
new tack has the ugly smack of eugenics; I said of abortion that it “only works
if you ignore the baby’s humanity ... even the most extreme supporters haven’t
yet crossed the line to applying such discretion to the born.”
I
was wrong. Barely a month later, the Associated Press reported demonstrations
at Princeton University protesting the granting of an endowed bioethics
professorship to Peter Singer, who teaches that parents should be allowed to
euthanize newborn babies with certain handicaps.
Singer has written that “killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to
killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.” He has not fully defined
the conditions he feels justify active infanticide, reportedly wishing to keep
it broad to give parents wider discretion. He does give as examples spina
bifida, Down syndrome, and hemophilia. The protesters, including about 60 in
wheelchairs, took it personally.
A little
research finds Singer’s beliefs to be more extreme than reported. He is a vocal
supporter of “personhood” for the great apes; his book “Animal Liberation” is
included in a membership package for People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals. Personhood for apes may or may not sound loopy depending on your
views, but it doesn’t stop there.
A
strong supporter of abortion choice, Singer writes “If the fetus does not have
the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not
either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig,
a dog, or a chimpanzee.” He posits that children less than one month old have
no human consciousness and therefore lack the same rights as others. Taken with
his views on infanticide for handicapped children, this is dangerously close to
supporting euthanasia as a matter of individual choice for parents of all
infants, without restriction. Sound familiar?
Criticism by
other bioethicists has been muted at best. I found no direct rebuttals; Paul
Armstrong, who argued successfully for the right to die in the Karen Ann Quinlan
case, could only muster “Peter’s strength is making us rethink our first,
fundamental ideas. His weakness is trying to translate that into public
policy.”
Thank God for that. But when a university of Princeton’s stature puts such a
man in such a position, to so puny an outcry from his peers, it takes scant
imagination to see a day when others will take up the banner.
Though it did
make for a calmer commentary, my cooling off period didn’t risk the story
growing cold as it didn’t heat up much to begin with. It received what
attention it did when presidential candidate Peter Forbes, a Princeton alumnus,
trustee, and major donor, made news by cutting off contributions to protest the
appointment. It was a one day story, and then only if you happened to stumble
across it. I hope it stays that way while I fear it won’t.
Perhaps the
question of legal infanticide is separate from abortion. Peter Singer doesn’t
think so; though I’m taking no moral cues from him, I agree. Either way, the
small but increasing acceptance of eugenics as social policy is immensely
disturbing and calls into question the role of the relatively new field of
bioethics. If the profession breaks its promise to serve as society’s guide
through the ethical maze of advancing science, if it does not discipline its
strays, it will become little more than another fox in the hen house.
© 1997 – 2002 Brent Morrison
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