Genetic Screening Encouraging More Abortions, Social Worker Warns
by Fred Jackson and Jenni Parker
March 17, 2004
(AgapePress) - In Canada, a University of Victoria professor says her country's health care system is sliding toward something resembling Nazi-style eugenics.In a recent speech, Tanis Doe, a professor of social work, told her audience that the widespread practice of pre-screening pregnant women and their offspring for genetic diseases has turned into a system for purging society of the disabled not unlike eugenics programs of the past.
Eugenics has been defined as the science of the hereditary improvement of the human race through systematic and controlled selective breeding. In the late 1800s Darwinists held to the belief that eugenics would guarantee the prevalence of "more suitable races." Such ideas have been incorporated into several supremacist ideologies, including the Nazi concepts of the so-called "superman" and the "master race."
Such programs have inevitably led to exploitation in the past, as when it was used to discourage reproduction among those with "undesirable" traits, or with mental or physical disabilities. Even in America, eugenics-based thinking led to the forced sterilization of "defectives," which became law in many states in the early 20th century, and as a result, 15,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized in the U.S. before the laws permitting such barbarism were repealed.
But Doe is making a comparison between the genocidal spirit of Nazi eugenics and genetic screening -- something that some public health advocates are calling an aspect of the new eugenics movement.
Doe told the Globe and Mail newspaper that women obtaining genetic screening are often expected -- and pressured -- to abort their pregnancies when a fetal abnormality or disability is diagnosed. And the professor says there is widespread acceptance in the western world for the idea that the disabled unborn should not be brought to full term.
She noted that in the case of diagnoses for Down Syndrome, "about 89 percent [of parents] in Canada and 90 percent in the U.S. opt to terminate the pregnancy."
The Globe and Mail quotes Doe as saying even while the rate of prenatal diagnoses of disabilities does not appear to be rising, she is convinced that the scientific search for genetic markers for disabilities will expand the range of prenatal screening and, as a result, the number of babies that are aborted will increase.
Dick Sobsey, the director of the University of Alberta's Developmental Disability Centre is quoted as saying that Doe's comparison between modern genetic pre-screening and the Nazi eugenics program, though likely to be considered controversial, is historically sound. However, since the Nazi eugenics movement fell into disrepute when their horrors were made public, Sobsey believes, "there was a move to a less direct form of eugenics."
According to the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, the "new negative eugenics" encourages -- and in many U.S. states, mandates -- prenatal screening to "identify genetic defects or other malformations in unborn children." Doctors may face legal liability if they fail to offer prospective parents genetic counseling, presenting them with the option of aborting a child with Down's syndrome and an ever lengthening list of other conditions.
The organization's position literature notes that in interactions between would-be parents and the medical community, and sometimes even in the law, there is a presumed "right" to reproduce and have a normal child, and that right is understood by many to trump any ethical concerns.
