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Introduction. This first part of a two-part essay addresses the matters
identified in the title above. Part II will examine the thought of
leading proponents of the “new biology’s” eugenic program.
Historical background
Definition and status during 19th, early 20th, and late 20th centuries
Eugenics is based on the belief that it is possible to improve the
human species by means such as discouraging reproduction by persons
having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesired traits
(negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to
have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics). Among early
advocates of eugenics in the 19th century were Francis Dalton and
Charles Darwin in England, and Margaret Sanger in the United States. A
strong opponent of eugenics in the early 20th century was Gilbert Keith
Chesterton, whose Eugenics and Other Evils unmasked this movement’s
inhuman philosophy. Hitler’s program of eugenics brought the movement
into disrepute in the middle of the 20th century.
But beginning in the 1960s the “new biology” offered new approaches to positive eugenics with its new ARTs (Artificial Reproductive Technologies): in vitro fertilization, its permutations and combinations, and cloning, and new approaches to negative eugenics by identifying “defective” embryos by such means as amniocentesis, chorionic villus sampling, and more recently preimplatation genetic diagnosis (PEG). Completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) has provided information that some bioethicists advocate using in programs of negative and positive eugenics. The HGP was a 13 year project coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health and was completed in 2003. Its declared goals were “to identify all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA, determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, store this information in data bases, improve tools for data analysis, transfer related technologies to the private sector, and address the ethical, legal and social issues that may arise from the project. Though the HGP is finished, analyses of the data will continue for many years.” [1].
Gleitman v. Cosgrove and “wrongful birth” and “wrongful life” torts [2]
But long before the development of PEG and before the possibility of mapping the complete human genoome was known, the ARTs had given rise to the “new biology’s” approach to negative eugenics insofar as amniocentesis could be used as a way of identifying so-called “defective” embryos, giving the parents the power to kill such offspring in the womb and the power also to bring malpractice suits, termed “wrongful birth” torts against obstetricians who refused to use such means to search and destroy unborn human children.
The most famous “wrongful life” tort tried before the infamous Roe v. Wade case of 1973 legalizing abortion throughout the entirety of a woman’s pregnancy as a purely private matter was the 1967 case in the New Jersey Supreme Court of Gleitman v. Cosgrove. The parents of a boy, Jeffrey Gleitman, who was born congenitally defective in sight, hearing and speech because his mother had contracted rubella during pregnancy, brought suit against the gynecologist-obstetrician, Cosgrove, on behalf of the boy on the grounds that he had suffered “wrongful life.” The Court, through Justice Proctor, in declaring against the Gleitmans, eloquently declared:
It is basic to the human condition to seek life and hold onto it, however heavily burdened. If Jeffrey could have been asked as to whether his life should be snuffed out before his full term of gestation could run its course, our felt intuition of human nature tells us that he would almost surely have chosen life with defects against no life at all. ‘For the living there is hope, but for the dead there is none’ (Thucydides)…The right to life is inalienable in our society. A court cannot say what defect should prevent an embryo from being allowed life….A child need not be perfect to have a worthwhile life…. The sanctity of a single human life is the decisive factor in this suit in tort. Eugenic considerations are not controlling. We are not talking here about the breeding of prize cattle. It may have been easier for the mother and less expensive for the father to have terminated the life of their child while he was an embryo, but these alleged detriments cannot stand against the preciousness of a single human life to support a remedy in tort…. We firmly believe the right of the child to live is greater than and precludes their right not to endure emotional and financial distress (emphasis added). [3]
This is a fantastic text, witnessing to the common view prior to the legalization of abortion on the grounds that it is a “private matter” by the US Supreme Court in 1973, six short years later.
Post Gleitman v. Cosgrove Eugenics of the “New Biology”
Commenting on the kind of eugenics made possible by the new biology, E. Christian Brugger has noted: [4] “In the past few years a procedure called ‘PGD’ (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) has been increasingly used by fertility clinics for achieving IVF pregnancies. A few days after fertilization, when a human embryo is approximately at the eight cell stage of development, a technician inserts a tiny needle into the body of the embryo and removes one or two cells, called blastomeres. By performing tests on the cell’s DNA genetic information can be gained. For example, the embryo’s sex…. As one leading U.S. fertility clinic says on its website: ‘Embryos determined to be…of the wrong gender are discarded.’[5]”
An article by Claudia Kalb, Barbie Nadeau, and Sarah Shafer, “Science: Brave New Babies,” in Newsweek for Feb. 2, 2004 noted: “The brave new world is definitely here. After 25 years of staggering advances in reproductive medicine--first test-tube babies, then donor eggs and surrogate mothers--technology is changing baby-making in a whole new way. No longer can science simply help couples have babies; it can help them have the kind of babies they want…. Gender selection is one of many advanced techniques doctors have developed to assist in conception. As the technologies spread, they've fueled a worldwide boom in assisted-reproduction treatments (ART)…PGD, though, is by far the most provocative gender-selection technique. Some clinics offer the procedure as a bonus for couples already going through fertility treatments, but a small number are beginning to provide the option for otherwise healthy couples. Once Steinberg [Jeffrey Steinberg, MD, of Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles] decided to offer PGD gender selection to all comers, he says, ‘word spread like wildfire.’"[6]
I date the inauguration of eugenics and the “new biology” in the late 1960s, when Robert Steptoe and his associate Robert Edwards in England were initiating their efforts to produce children by means of in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer, efforts that culminated in July 1978 when Louise Brown was the first baby conceived in vitro to survive until birth—hundreds of babies so conceived had perished either in the laboratory or after attempted implantation into a woman’s womb. The arrival of the “new biology” along with its eugenic possibilities was popularized in such books as Gordon Rattray Taylor’s The Biological Time Bomb in 1968.
I begin by articulating the major theses underlying the “new biology’s” eugenic program and then examine the thought of three of the more prominent advocates of the new eugenics from Joseph Fletcher and Peter Singer, whose views predominated from 1960-2000, and Ronald Green, a more recent proponent of making babies by design with the aid of the human genome information.
Two major theses underlying the “New Biology’s” eugenic program
The first major thesis underlying this eugenic program is the claim that “membership in the human species is not of itself of moral significance and that those who think that it is are guilty of ‘specieisism,’ which is like racism or sexism.” According to this thesis, made popular by Peter Singer (whose own form of eugenics will be taken up below) in his 1975 book Animal Liberation, and by others (e.g. Michael Tooley[7]), a living member of the human species is not a person. These and other proponents of the new eugenics distinguish between being a living human being and being a “person.” For them “persons” are conscious subjects aware of themselves as selves and capable of relating to other conscious subjects; their bodies are subpersonal parts of the world of nature over which they, “persons,” have dominion. This dualistic view is at the heart of the “culture of death,” and has been completely demolished by many great scholars. [8]
The second major thesis of the “new biology’s eugenic program” is rooted in the distinction between genital sex that is “baby-making” and genital sex that is “love-making.” This distinction was made possible by contraception, in particular the pill, and was expanded enormously by the development of the “new reproductive technologies” noted already. Joseph Fletcher (d. 1991), whose work will be examined in some depth below, accurately expressed this thesis in his 1971 article “The Ethics of Genetic Control,” published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
In it Fletcher declared: “Coital reproduction is less human than laboratory reproduction; more fun, to be sure, but with our separation of baby making from love making, both become more human because they are matters of choice, and not chance. This is, of course, essentially the case for planned parenthood. I cannot see how either humanity or morality is served by genetic roulette. To be men we must be in control. That is the first and the last ethical word. For when there is no choice, there is no possibility of ethical action” (emphasis added). [9]
Conclusion
To me the most remarkable change in attitudes toward the personhood and rights of unborn children occurred between 1967 and 1973. In 1967, as we have seen, Gleitman v. Cosgrove eloquently articulated the truth that the unborn child is in fact an innocent person with an inalienable right to life. This truth was at that time commonly held and proclaimed clearly in popular literature on child care, including Dr. Benjamin Spock’s widely hailed The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care which sold over 25 million copies from 1946-1970. But with Roe v. Wade’s capitulation to radical feminism with its creed that the unborn may be members of the human species but cannot be regarded as “persons,” the anti-life nature of negative eugenics, championed by Fletcher, as we shall see in Part II, for over 2 decades, became the “common wisdom” of the elite of our society and of academia. What a tragedy.
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[1] See http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml
[2] In the strict sense “wrongful life” means that the child sues the mother or other people for being born, whereas “wrongful birth” means the mother sues other people for being burdened with a disabled child, something she could have avoided. In essence wrongful birth suits are genetic or prenatal malpractice suits tort cases. See http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Wrongful+Birth
[3] 49 NJ 22, 227 A.2d 689 (1967) 693.
[4] See Brugger’s essay, “Designer Kids & ‘Savior Siblings’: Gosh, Kids Are Useful” Culture-of-Life.org.(see http://culture-of-life.org//content/view/573/1/).
[5] See http://genderselectioncenter.com/pgd.html.
[6] See http://www.newsweek.com/id/52936/
[7] See his 1972 essay “Abortion and Infanticide,” in Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2.1. 1972, and his 1983 book Abortion and Infanticide.
[8] See in particular Patrick Lee and Robert George, Mind-Body Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics, (New York: Double Day, 2007).
[9] See his The Ethics of Genetic Control, published in 1971 with the subtitle “Ending Reproductive Roulette.” In 2007 this was reissued with a Foreword by James Childress and a new subtitle: “Ending Reproductive Roulette: Artificial Inseminaion, Surrogate Pregnancy, Non-sexual reproduction, Genetic Control.”
(c) 2009 Culture of Life Foundation. Reproduction granted with attribution required.
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