Confessions of a Genetic Outlaw
EUGENICS BY DEFAULT. This emerging public consensus in favor of eugenics is not the product of any sort of reasoned debate. There has been no referendum, no debate in Congress, no move to amend the Constitution. It’s emerging from the collective force of countless decisions by loving and caring mothers and fathers, in consultation with conscientious medical professionals who are using the truly miraculous and astonishing discoveries of brilliant scientists plunging deeper and deeper into the mysteries of life. These people are not intentionally practicing eugenics in order to create a perfect master race. They are simply trying to alleviate potential suffering and protect the quality of the lives they are bringing into the world.
But it is time for us to acknowledge the collective effect of these private decisions. Do we truly endorse the implicit message we are sending to our disabled brothers and sisters—that our commitment to diversity does not extend to genetic diversity? We need to confront the disconnect between how we see ourselves—as an enlightened, liberal society committed to fully integrating people with disabilities in all sectors of life—and how people living with the disabilities we would identify for extinction must see us.
MAKING CHOICES .Perhaps if we honestly confront this disconnect, we could start providing some more informed support to those loving and caring parents who are making difficult decisions in the offices of those conscientious medical professionals. We might tell them that studies show that people living with disabilities judge the quality of their own lives much higher than others expect. We might share with them stories of the incredible grace, joy, and happiness that many parents of children with disabilities experience. And when we hear about parents driven to despair by the difficulties of caring for a child with a disability, we might start asking ourselves how many of those difficulties stem from the erosion of a societal consensus about our responsibility to care for the most vulnerable segments of our society, rather than from the disability itself.
I would not want scientists to stop delving into the mysteries and wonders of the human genome. I am glad that I knew my son had Down syndrome before he was born. If one of these scientists found a “cure” for my son’s Down syndrome, I almost certainly would give it to him. But I will admit that I would pause beforehand. I would think hard about this real-life conversation between a teenager with Down syndrome and her mother. The daughter asked her mother whether she would still have Down syndrome when the two were together in heaven someday. The mother, taken by surprise, responded that she thought probably not. To which her daughter responded, “But how will you know who I am, then?” And I would also think hard about whether the world would really be a better place without my son’s soft, gentle, deep, almond-shaped eyes.
This is someone who seems to have only passing acquaintance (if that) with specifically disability rights perspectives, but I’ve heard stories like hers before. Again and again. Of parents being shamed, humiliated, and pressured by doctors not to have children that doctors (in their so-called “wisdom,” which has been proven over and over again to be dangerously incorrect when compared to the views of actual disabled people) deem defective or of “low quality of life”.
That clearly and absolutely means children like me. And children like most of us, in the end, because this sort of thing never stops at the first people they target. Once all the most obvious things are screened out, there will be a new, tighter definition of what’s normal and what’s defective. And so on and so forth.
And parents who decide to have children like us anyway, will indeed be “genetic outlaws”, and may in the future even be forced rather than merely bullied and coerced into not having us.
Ballastexistenz 