How Serious Of A Defect Does It Have To Be?

One of the arguments that is sometimes used to justify abortion is that there are fetuses that have such severe defects that abortion is a form of mercy...well, those making the argument don't want to use the word "killing" because that implies that this mass of cells is alive or something. There are some truly gruesome birth defects, such as anencephaly, that are always fatal, either stillborn, or shortly after birth. There are diseases that are consistently fatal after short lives of great misery, such as Tay-Sachs Disease. It is very, very difficult to look at these tragedies and not wonder a bit.

But how far does this principle follow? You may be aware of the joke about the woman who expresses a willingness to do certain tasks for a million dollars--but gets offended when the offer drops to $50. "What do you think I am?" "We've already established what you are, we're just haggling over the price now." Once you have accepted that certain tragic genetic problems might justify abortion, what do you say when you see a news report like this one from the October 21, 2007 Times of London?

MORE than 50 babies with club feet were aborted in just one area of England in a three-year period, according to new statistics.

Thirty-seven babies with cleft lips or palates and 26 with extra or webbed fingers or toes were also aborted.

The data have raised concerns about abortions being carried out for minor disabilities that could be cured by surgery.

Abortions are allowed up to birth in Britain in cases of serious handicap, but the law does not define what conditions should be considered grave enough to allow a termination late in the pregnancy. That is left to the discretion of doctors.

The Commons science and technology committee is carrying out an inquiry into whether the law should be made more specific.

Some parents, doctors and campaign groups are worried by what they see as a tendency to stretch the definition of serious handicap.

In 2003 Joanna Jepson, a Church of England curate, instigated a legal challenge against West Mercia police for failing to prosecute doctors who carried out an abortion on a baby with a cleft palate at 28 weeks’ gestation. The challenge failed but raised public concerns over terminations for minor disabilities.

However, the latest figures — released by the South West Congenital Anomaly Register — show that dozens of abortions are still carried out after the condition is discovered.

The article goes on to quote a doctor as saying that he doubted that these abortions were being carried out for such trivial reasons--that these were proxies for "[other] genetic problems." Maybe. But I find myself wondering how accurate these defects are as proxies.

We're moving rapidly back to the state of classical civilization, when female infanticide was completely at the discretion of the father, and a father could kill newborn boys if they had any obvious defect or weakness. Technology is just making it possible to get the ugliness out of the way before the child is born.

For those who have been drinking deeply at the Social Darwinism Bar, and just don't understand why this is a big deal, consider this: some of these minor defects may be genetically linked to other traits or qualities that are of real value. I mentioned a few weeks ago a several year old article in Science Daily suggesting a connection between the gene for schizophrenia and creativity.

Would it be good to have a cure for schizophrenia? Absolutely. Would I encourage two people who both had schizophrenia in their families to marry? No, I would not. But I would be very reluctant to see a conscious decision made to stamp out the schizophrenia gene. We don't know quite what we might be losing, and we similarly don't know what other parts of the human gene pool we might be losing by arbitrarily deciding that minor genetic defects need to be aborted. Look at some of the genetic defects that come out from excessive human fiddling with dog breeds: hip dysplasia in Dalmatians, for example.

I look at the arrogance of the Nazis with their efforts to chlorinate the gene pool, and I shudder to think of the number of great scientists, engineers, and artists that they didn't just kill, but preventing from reproducing. Those were great losses to individuals, but also great losses to the genetic diversity and capacity of the human race.