George Will on Desire to Wipe People With Down Syndrome Off the Face of the Earth
A little while back, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists urged that every pregnant woman be tested to see if her fetus has Down syndrome. I did not comment on it at the time, having written quite a bit recently about the ongoing anti-Down pogrom. But George Will now has. And he has a personal stake in the issue, which we must all remember, is, according to many pundits, the essential factor that gives one moral authority to opine.
Will's son Jon has Down, and he begins with a piquant question: "What did Jon Will and the more than 350,000 American citizens like him do to tick off the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists?" He later answers his rhetorical query: The policy seems intended to "have the effect of increasing abortions in the service of an especially repulsive manifestation of today's entitlement mentality—every parent's 'right' to a perfect baby." I would say that is just the surface issue. Beneath it, lurks the emergence of a new eugenics that judges the moral worth of people based on their lives' perceived quality.
And it won't end there, of course. Will points out that "as more is learned about genetic components of other abnormalities, search-and-destroy missions will multiply."
Read Will's entire column. He humanizes Jon, which is precisely what is needed in this time when the intrinsic value of human life is under accelerating assault.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 4:35 PM
24 Comments
24 Comments:
If I remember correctly, Will was the author of a history-making piece about Baby Doe who was starved to death something like twenty years ago now because he had Downs and his parents therefore (and it was clearly "therefore") wouldn't authorize minor surgery to connect his esophagus to his stomach. I seem to recall George Will's having talked about his son in that piece as well.
The Baby Doe case led to the Baby Doe regulations. Added to the mix, was that people were CLAMORING to adopt the infant. But the parents and courts wanted him dead, instead. A true travesty. Nat Hentoff did good work on that as well.
I recall one Will column about baseball that ended with a tribute to Jon's profound joy of baseball. It brought tears to my eyes. I only met Will once, and very briefly, but I made a point of telling him.
Yeah, that was the one. About baseball. I think it was about the Baby Doe case. My prof at Bible College walked into class and passed out copies to all of us. Totally unrelated to the topic of the class. Then he started in teaching the regular subject. I remember huffing self-righteously to myself that he shouldn't have passed out the unrelated article in the first place. Boy, was I wrong.
Still going to pretend that you don't have an anti-choice agenda going on here, Wesley?
Personally I find your use of the term "pogrom" doubly offensive, since I have ancestors who were subject to real pogroms; and as I've mentioned here before I've had to face the difficult decision about what to do when faced with the diagnosis of a prenatal genetic defect (not Down's, but the principle is the same). Your rhetoric is not substantially different from Operation Rescue and others who attempt to equate abortion with murder.
I would say I have some moral authority on this subject, and it says you are wrong. And aligned with the most reactionary elements of the political landscape, whatever your liberal credentials may be.
Maybe it's just me, but when I visit a blog and find that I am offended, I stop visiting it. There's a million blogs out there.
I would like for the people who "urge" pregnant women to test their babies for Down to be faced with Will's question and be expected to answer it. Preferably, answer directly to Jon unless it would upset him too much.
mtraven: Please come back when you have an actual point. Thanks.
I, for one, will not stand back and let eugenics take its course. And I'm glad Wesley doesn't do so either.
Sorry, mtraven: The desire to destroy all Down children by convincing parents not to allow them to be born is not an abuse of the term. Add in the Baby Doe type cases, which still occur, and the call for infanticide, and I think pogrom is an apt, if polemic, term. A pogrom is an organized, often officially encouraged campaign to persecute or kill a minority group, which Will points out is precisely the point of the call for universal testing. Using the word "choice," isn't an argument, it is an advocacy term, and it doesn't cover up the eugenic agenda here.
Sticks and stones, pal. Please do keep coming and posting here at Secondhand Smoke.
Thanks, cygnus.
Psst...I think mtraven is on to us.
But he underestimates our resolve to replace choice with enforced complusion...muwhahahahaha!!!
First we eliminate choice to kill children, but as soon as we've done that, brothers and sisters, we will ensure no one ever tastes trans-fat fried donuts ever again. I can almost not taste it! And then, as the pièce de résistance, we make sure that everyone will drive Trabants and wear modest clothes, and total conformity and uniformity will be achieved at last! We just have to figure out how to keep mtraven in the dark as to our plans...
In Will's article, or perhaps elsewhere, is the statistic that 90% of prenatally-diagnosed Down's babies are aborted, which I finally realized is not as disturbing as it sounds, as an amnio is so invasive that most parents would turn down the procedure if they knew they wouldn't have an abortion anyway. So the real question is, in the environment in which over-35's are offered amnio, what percent accept and what percent turn down the test in the first place?
Of course, the new testing regime produces at first an odds calculation, which will be more difficult for parents to understand and know what to do with, and they're now promoting amnio as more safe than thought, so there would likely be a bigger push toward it.
Let's not forget false positives. Most of these tests have some false positive rate. What is particularly appalling is the fact that it's so important to scientists to make sure that all the Downs' children are "caught" that they are willing to take the chance that a mother will abort a healthy child. Of course, usually if you get a positive on one of these tests further tests are recommended to provide mutual support. But still...
I have refused blood screening during pregnancy for two out of three pregnancies and would certainly refuse an amnio. I imagine that, knowing the risk of causing a miscarriage, many other pro-life women would also refuse an amnio. Of course, if they're starting to downplay the risk (and I'm very suspicious of how much science is motivating that evaluation and how much ideology), that might change people's minds.
mtraven: "Still going to pretend that you don't have an anti-choice agenda going on here, Wesley?"
You should well know that one can be against abuses of abortion rights without having an 'anti-choice agenda'. Or does agreeing that abortion should remain legal require us to applaud and affirm every application of it, no matter what?
Since nobody is presuming to force people to get prenatal diagnosis or abortions, choice is the only issue on the table. What is the point of using terms like "pogrom" and "persecute" and "kill" unless you intend to equate abortion with murder and outlaw it?
Choice is also the factor that separates out evil eugenics (state-mandated and coerced) from perfectly acceptable forms of eugenics (practiced by individuals and voluntary).
There's not much point rehashing these issues, since I doubt any minds will be changed. But I just thought of an area where we might actually agree. This is tangential but possibly interesting.
Let's say we wish to avoid forcing a woman or couple to decide one way or the other about carrying a baby with a genetic defect to term. We don't want to force them to have the baby, and we don't want to force them to have an abortion.
If there is any pressure in the system in the latter direction, it's going to come from the private insurance industry. Children with genetic problems can cost an enormous amount of money. If you were an insurance company you would be under severe market pressure to try to get people to abort fetuses with such problems.
So, I would think that a government-run single-payer system would be less prone to generate this type of pressure, and if your goal is to reduce the number of eugenic abortions, you should support switching to a system like that from our present one.
Either you consider abortion to be murder, or not. If you don't, and that is the current legal and social consensus, then it is incorrect and misleading to describe an abortion as "killing an individual human being". If you do consider abortion to be murder then I don't see why doing it for genetic reasons is any worse than doing it for some other reason.
I don't think you understood my point about health insurance. Single-payer won't eliminate eugenics, but it could eliminate some of the financial pressures that might induce people to practice eugenics who would rather not. In other words, if a couple is faced with a prenatal diagnosis of Down's and doesn't have a clear idea what they should do, this would make it easier for them to make a decision to continue the pregnancy.
That's good, isn't it?
mtraven, lemme see if i have this straight:
Because it would cost a lot under the current health care system to bring a Down's baby into the world, the insurance companies would be the ones who would want such a baby to be aborted. But, under single payer, it wouldn't cost so much?
Part of the problem is that with the current system, no one has any idea what anything really costs. And you really think that will be alleviated by single-payer?
Beyond that, we don't really have any common ground for discussion, for some of us don't see people solely in terms of financial burden. Call it whatever you want; it's still eugenics.
"Single payer" means the government provides everyone's health insurance, right? And everyone would be covered? Sounds good to me. I agree it would allow us to ensure more humane and caring policies, but I don't think it would increase people's choices. If anything, it would allow us to stop having to pay for amnios and abortions altogether, which I assume my premiums on my plan supported (and I didn't have much choice about what plan to choose, or what it subsidized.) I'm sure a huge portion of my premiums paid for presecription drugs, which means I was subsidizing research at all the drug companies. With the government paying, we'd have more incentive to slow down this research, perhaps stop it completely in some areas.
And I don't think the legal consensus is that abortion is not murder, it is just that it is private. A murder that no one knows about cannot be a crime, is the reasoning. That was the reasoning for the trimester system, during the first trimester, no one else knows about the pregnancy, after that, it starts to be public knowledge, although it would still be a private matter if a miscarriage occurs.
Cygnus said: Beyond that, we don't really have any common ground for discussion, for some of us don't see people solely in terms of financial burden. Call it whatever you want; it's still eugenics.
Well -- I for one am willing to call it eugenics as you may have noticed. To me, that is not a scare word unless it is accompanied by coercion.
And nobody has said that they see people solely in terms of financial burden. Babies of any sort are both wonderful little love-bundles from God and a big financial obligation, which can be a burden depending on circumstances.
Single-payer might reduce financial pressure on families. Most other industrialized countries have single-payer, I wonder how it works out there? Sounds like something Wesley might be well-informed about.
mtraven: A fetus *is* a human being, or if that term is too provocative, it is a human orgnanism. That is biology. It's state of existence is not determined, scientifically, based on the narrative of what someone may wish to do with it. That is to bring postmodernism to science, which is to say, to corrupt science.
Scientifically, abortion kills a developing human being. That isn't even seriously debatable. The consensus certainly exists that this isn't murder--which is defined as the UNLAWFUL killing of a human being with malice aforethought. But this consensus does not change the biological nature of what is destroyed. Abortion does not excise a tumor, after all. It does not merely put an end to a bunch of cells. It destroys a living, human organism. That is science, and anyone contemplating abortion should face that truth straight forwardly when making their "choice."
One problem I have with our current moral discourse in America is that we depend on the law to tell us right from wrong. If something is legal, it is right. And if it is illegal, it is wrong. But that is to put more on the shoulders of the law than it can carry. There are many wrong things which are not illegal. In living our lives, we need to look past the law in determining our behavior.
At least as I have written on the issue of eugenic abortion, I consider that it is wrong. This has nothing to do with legality. It is certainly wrong in my view for genetic counselors to push parents of Down babies to destroy their unborn children because they will be disabled. Doing so denies the intrinsic human worth of developmentally disabled people and to countenance life's destruction as the solution to the difficulties associated with human life considered less than "optimal." And it may deprive people of great joy, as evidence by the articles over the years by George Will and the one in the London Times I posted a month or so ago.
Wesley, I thought you wanted to avoid rehashing tired abortion debates. I'm with you there. Attempts to win the argument by definition are tired -- you can call it a "developing human being" or a "blastula" depending on which side you are on, it doesn't change what is really going on at the biological level.
To me, it's obvious that biology is one thing but personhood is another. We don't treat blastulas as persons, as evidenced by the fact that thousands of them get flushed down the toilet every day, unnamed, unremarked, and without social security numbers. They may have 46 chromosomes but they aren't people yet.
But I'd rather not rehash that debate. I'd be more interested in hearing your thoughts about health insurance reform as a way to help more Down's syndrome children get born, if that is your goal. It's not a goal of mine, but since I am actually pro-choice, I support efforts that let people make the choices that are right for them.
More broadly, if you are pro-life (or pro-reproduction-no-matter-what, perhaps that's a better name), you should support the socialization of all costs related to raising children. We already do this with public education, and there are proposals for universal health care for children. All these have the effect of spreading out the costs of child-rearing over the whole society, making it easier for families to choose to have children, Down's children more so than others.
And BTW, I do not consider legality and morality to be synonymous, so that is a red herring.
John said: And I don't think the legal consensus is that abortion is not murder, it is just that it is private. A murder that no one knows about cannot be a crime, is the reasoning. That was the reasoning for the trimester system, during the first trimester, no one else knows about the pregnancy
This is not an accurate depiction of the argument behind Roe v Wade (obviously, because murder of an adult is a crime even if nobody knows about it). The argument rests on the mother's right to control her own body, part of the right to privacy as interpreted by the court. The trimesters (which were an attempt to split the difference between the two sides) are determined by fetal viability, not whether the mother is "showing".
That is interesting, thanks for posting it.
However:
- correlation is not causation. There could very well be an underlying variable that causes both lower fertility rates and higher social security payments (ie, both could be a function of increasing prosperity).
- high fertility correlates with extreme economic backwardness. Do we really want to use Mali or Niger as a model for how to live?
- even if there was a causal connection between SS payments and lower fertility, that would say nothing about socialized health care, which is what we were really talking about. The economic issues are completely different.
- The assumption of that article is that people have children primarily to help support them in their old age. That is an awfully reductionist picture of what children are for, especially for this crowd.
- Even if you buy all of the assumptions of that article, THEN IT IS AN ARGUMENT FOR MORE EUGENICS. A Down's child may be a wonderful person, but generally is not going to be much help supporting his parents in their old age (for one thing, they tend to have short lifespans). If you are having children to help you through retirement, it's much better if you can be assured that they are healthy.
On the other hand, if you have a nice guaranteed government pension, then you wouldn't have to worry so much about your children providing from you and would have greater freedom to raise a Down's child.
old thread, but still:
Universal, single-payer health care won't change matters any. There are still costs, and there are still beaurocrats trying to control costs -- the only difference is that they're government beaurocrats, not ins. company beaurocrats. Might make matters worse, depending on who's in power at the time, because you can get centralized decrees on priorities and waiting lists (amnio: no wait, heart surgery for Down's kids: long wait), rather than ad hoc decisions.
Besides which, it's people outside the insurance company -- genetic counselors who present grim forecasts of life with a Downs child, national policy-setting organzations, etc., who are driving this. And I suspect that most of the "costs" of Downs children are bourne by taxpayers/charities/society in general, through schools, therapy, supported-living charities.
As far as abortion goes, there are plenty of motivators for someone being pro-choice, and many people are pro-choice because they don't want women to face hardships on account of unplanned pregnancy/motherhood. But I read a comment from a woman on another blog once: "I'm prochoice and if my birth control failed, I would be at the abortion clinic pronto. But it's wrong for a woman who intentionally gets pregnant to get an abortion because testing shows that the baby is not perfect."
So, yes, if you think that the unborn child is a blob of tissue until birth, with no moral standing, then anything to the contrary is impermmissably pro-life. But most people who are pro-choice (I'm not one of them, but I can read) find things much more complicated than that, and speak a lot of weighing the conflicting rights.
Betsy,
Re: abortion, I agree with you. The political controversy around abortion forces people into simplistic thinking: the fetus is a full-blown person, or the fetus is a mere blob of tissue. Neither of those views captures the more complex reality: a fetus is a potential person, something that might be a person someday. We have a hard time thinking about something like that. The grammar of language is inadequate, since we have to decide whether to call such an entity by a pronoun, and neither "it" or "him/her" is accurate. A fetus is something/one in the process of transforming from a what to a who.
The pro-choice position is simply that it is the parents, not the state, that get to make the decision about whether that potential is realized or not.
Abortion was legalized because of the dangers and savagery to women of illegal abortion. This is the aspect that always seems to get lost in these discussions. The medical profession, which played a role in the gradual criminalization of abortion in the decades right after the Civil War, was playing a different tune a hundred years later. Doctors became sickened and frustrated over the number of women showing up in emergency rooms with hemorrhage, punctured uteri and toxic septicemia, beyond saving because they'd waited too long to get help, out of fear and because they'd done something illegal and "immoral." The testimonials and activism of such doctors had everything to do with the eventual legalization of abortion. When abortion is illegal, it does not go away. It goes underground, and women follow, and they have illegal abortions. This is simply a fact, whatever our opinion of it. Saying you are "against" abortion is like saying you're "against" thunderstorms. They are going to happen whether you are against them or not. If you are in favor of making abortion illegal again, then you are in favor of sending women back to the illegal abortionist, because that's where they WILL go. Please read THE WORST OF TIMES by Patricia G. Miller.
Would someone please tell mtraven that single payer systems exist in this world, and guess what, they kill even more Down babies then should could imagine evil private payers are capable of. Yes, I said babies. That includes, feti (thank goodness, thought he was insinuating nuanced, refined societeis would kill infants) and infants (say it isn't so!). Please check out the Groningen protocols much published in the great liberal journals of our time, the New England Journal of Medicine (great medicine mixed with horrible politics) and the New York Times.
Welcome to liberalism gone wild mtraven. This is the utopia you dreamed of in a single payer system. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the government surely would support a eugenics progrom. See Nazi Germany. And no offense to anyone, but 5,000 or so dead Down babies a year is programmed slaughter. The latest twist for the great Swiss single payer system is allowing those suffering chronic mental illness to choose assisted suicide. Headlines this week. Not clear to me as a physician how that one can be sold, in the name of humanity no doubt.
Neodoc
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