THE END OF THE <~text text="EQUALITY-OF-HUMAN-LIFE ETHIC">

21st Century Eugenics (Jesse Reynolds, 6/26/03, TomPaine.com)

Talk of breeding humans may remind readers of the eugenic practices of the 20th century, which involved forcibly sterilizing thousands of Americans classed as mentally impaired or criminally inclined, in the service of "improving the gene pool." In recent years, three states have issued formal apologies to the victims of these programs. Of course, many people recall Nazi Germany's obsession with eugenics, and later in the century American foreign policy encouraged sterilizations of men and women in the Third World as the best means to deal with population and poverty problems. [...]

One new twist that's particularly disturbing is that advocates of this free-market eugenics are twisting the language of women's rights to push their agenda.

James Hughes, the chair of the Transvision conference planning committee, has argued in a scholarly article that "the right to a custom-made child is merely the natural extension of our current discourse of reproductive rights. I see no virtue in the role of chance in conception, and great virtue is expanding choice.... If women are allowed the 'reproductive right' or 'choice' to choose the father of their child, with his attendant characteristics, then they should be allowed the right to choose the characteristics from a catalog."

But clearly there's a huge difference between being pro-choice and pro-designer babies.

No, actually there isn't. Allowing abortion depends on just one tiny, but massive, shift in our morality: it requires only that we say that some lives are more equal than others. In the case of generic abortion, all we've said is that the mother's life is in all instances more valuable than the child's. That's it. That's all we have to do, just say life A is not equal to life B.

What is the justification for this shift? That the quality of the mother's life may be negatively affected by carrying the child to term, but can be
enhanced by killing the child. Mind you; the argument here is not even that the actual existence of the mother is at stake, only her happiness. And so we've instituted a moral regime where the happiness of one class of humans is more important than the lives of another class. Numerous reasons can be given for the classifications, but in the end they're quite arbitrary, based almost entirely on the political power of the one and political weakness of the other.

Now, Mr. Reynolds and others on the Left, like Bill McKibben, are suddenly waking up to the fact that this re-institution of the idea of inequality (though that's not how they would define their support for abortion) has myriad other ramifications, some of which make them quite uncomfortable. Unfortunately, having accepted that there's a scale of values of human lives in the first instance, there's no coherent basis for denying it later. All you are left with is your desire to have your chosen classifications succeed in the political arena. The question is no longer, "do we need to respect lives simply by virtue of their being human?" We've already answered that in the negative. Instead we are asking, "how are we going to rank the various classes on our scale of value?" And the answer will be a product of the same dynamic that produced the decision to allow abortion--lives will be valued in near-direct proportion to political power.

Eugenecists, bio-engineers, clonophiles, and others borrow the language of "women's rights" advocates because there's so little difference between them all. Each is based on the inequality of human life, the notion that some lives are more valuable than others. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 24, 2003 8:14 AM