Culture of Death. Wesley J. Smith

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Culture of Death - Wesley J. Smith

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than our forbears faced: cloning, genetic medicine, the societal and individual consequences of increased life expectancies, the impact of permitting wide latitude in individual medical choices, and the difficulties imposed by limited resources.

      But this doesn’t mean that ethical analyses need to be as complex as bioethicists make them, nor that contemporary bioethics ideology has the best answers to these emerging moral problems. In a question that evokes the case of the emperor’s new clothes, Anne Maclean cogently asks, “Why should we attach more weight to the pronouncements of philosophers on moral issues than to those of other people?”118

       CHAPTER 2

       LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE

      “Three generations of idiots is enough,” United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in authorizing the involuntary sterilization of Carrie Buck, age twenty-one, in Virginia.1

      What had Carrie done to deserve this cruel fate? She was born poor and powerless, the daughter of a prostitute. In 1924, at the age of seventeen, she became pregnant out of wedlock, apparently after being raped by a relative of her foster father. To cover up this heinous act, Carrie’s foster family had her declared morally and mentally deficient, after which she was institutionalized involuntarily in an asylum.

      Adding to Carrie’s woes, in 1924, the state of Virginia enacted a law permitting “mental defectives” to be involuntarily sterilized to better the welfare of society. Asylum doctors, believers in the pernicious theories of eugenics, decided that Carrie was a splendid candidate for sterilization. She was, after all, “a human defective.” Her mother was institutionalized and Carrie’s baby, aged seven months, did not look “quite normal” either.2 Best for society that Carrie’s genes be removed from the human race.

      Carrie’s guardian tried to stop the involuntary surgery in court—although he may have been in collusion with those who wanted her sterilized. In any event, the trial judge ordered the sterilization to proceed, relying on “experts” who testified that Carrie had unfit genes. The case was eventually accepted for decision by the United States Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Holmes and seven of his colleagues sealed Carrie’s reproductive fate with but one lonely dissent, after which she was quickly sterilized and released. (Carrie’s daughter died in the second grade of an intestinal ailment. Her teachers considered her very bright.3 During her life, Carrie married twice, sang in the church choir, and took care of elderly people. She always mourned her inability to have more children. She died in 1983.4)

      Carrie Buck’s fate—and that of approximately 60,000 other “defective” people involuntarily but legally sterilized in the United States between 1907 and 19605—was sealed by advocates of a pseudoscience in the scientific, artistic, and progressive political communities known as eugenics. The history of eugenics, its fundamental precepts, the manner in which it was imposed on society and in law, and the horror that flowed from its popular acceptance, are highly relevant to our exploration of modern bioethics. First, its history shows the inhuman consequences that invariably follow when the equality/sanctity of human life is disregarded in science, medicine, law, and greater society. Second, striking and disturbing parallels exist between the manner in which eugenic theories were developed and put into practice and the way in which bioethics ideology is coming to dominate the ethics of medicine and the laws of health. Third, modern bioethics, like eugenics before it, creates hierarchies of human worth intended to justify medical discrimination. Now, after decades of quiescence, eugenics itself is making something of a comeback as a result of the development of new genetic technologies and futuristic ideologies such as “transhumanism.”6 (We will look more closely at this movement later in the book.)

      Eugenics originated with the English mathematician and statistician Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton believed that heredity “governed talent and character” just as it does eye color and facial features.7 Profoundly influenced by Darwin’s theories of natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s pioneering genetic experiments, Galton proposed, in 1865, that humans assume responsibility for their own evolution by using selective breeding techniques to improve society’s physical, mental, cultural, and social health. In 1883, Galton coined the term “eugenics” to apply to his theories, a word he derived from the Greek meaning “good in birth.”8

      Eugenics took the same path to acceptability as bioethics would nearly one hundred years later. It first became the rage in the academy and then spread rapidly in the early years of the twentieth century among the cultural elite and the intelligentsia of the United States, Canada, England, and Germany. By 1910, “eugenics was one of the most frequently referenced topics” in the Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature.9 In its boom years of the 1920s, eugenics, like bioethics today, became a serious and influential social and political movement. Courses in eugenics were taught in more than 350 American universities and colleges, leading to the widespread popular acceptance of its tenets.10 At one time, eugenics was endorsed in more than 90 percent of high school biology textbooks.11 As would happen later with bioethics, eugenicist societies formed for the promulgation and discussion of theories; academic eugenics journals sprouted; and philanthropic foundations, such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, embraced the movement, financing eugenics research and policy initiatives. Many of the political, cultural, and arts notables of the time supported eugenics, including Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Margaret Sanger, leading to further expansion of the movement’s popular support.

      The parallels of eugenics with contemporary bioethics extend into the realm of ideology. Both movements reject equal human moral worth. Both are utilitarian based, seeking to improve overall human happiness and reduce human suffering—sometimes at the expense of individual human rights. Like today’s bioethics theories, eugenics was taught in some of the world’s most prestigious universities, quickly becoming an integral part of professional training. And, again mirroring modern bioethics organizations, most eugenics societies “were dominated by professionals such as professors, social workers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and ministers.”12

      To be fair, there are important differences between the eugenics of yesterday and bioethics today. Eugenics equated human fitness and morality with overall intelligence,13 a concept that is not accepted generally in bioethics, although the depersonalization of infants and people disabled by significant cognitive injury or illness seems a disturbing echo of the past. Moreover, absolutely unlike contemporary bioethics, the eugenics movement was overtly racist, proclaiming the white race superior to blacks and Asians. (One eugenicist pronounced perniciously that the average black person in the United States had the average mental age of a ten-year-old.14) Eugenicists were profoundly self-satisfied, promoting the racial and personal characteristics they possessed as the highest human ideal. At the same time, they degraded the characteristics they associated with the lower economic classes and “inferior” races as those to be “bred” out of the human condition through eugenic practices. (Among the many “negative” human characteristics and/or behaviors eugenicists believed were genetically caused and which they wished to eradicate were feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, alcoholism, and pauperism.15)

      There were two general approaches to effectuating the eugenics theory. Proponents of “positive eugenics” sought to persuade young people who possessed worthy traits to marry among each other and procreate liberally toward the end of strengthening these characteristics within the human gene pool. Worried that the “proper” people were not procreating in sufficient numbers, eugenicists filled the popular culture with notions of the ideal family, urging the “betters” among the population

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