Christianity and the New Eugenics by Calum MacKellar

Author:Calum MacKellar
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783599141
Publisher: IVP
Published: 2020-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Healthier children

One of the strongest perceived advantages of the new eugenics is the possibility for couples or individuals to ensure that their children do not have certain disabilities. For instance, prenatal screening can now enable disorders to be detected, giving parents the option of terminating the pregnancy in order to prevent the child from being born. Such eugenic procedures are sometimes considered to be a form of empathy towards the possible future suffering child. In other words, by making sure certain persons with debilitating conditions are not brought into existence, the new eugenics would aim at reducing suffering.

In many way, this manner of thinking reflects the Golden Rule presented by Jesus Christ in Matthew 7:12, ‘So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you’ (see also Luke 6:31). This means that a person should seek to stop others experiencing what he or she would want to avoid. For example, it suggests that nobody should want to see another person suffer. But on the basis of compassion those supporting the new eugenics may also go beyond the mere alleviation of suffering and take a eugenic step towards desirable characteristics. For instance, it may be possible to argue that since parents have a right to seek the best for their future child by selecting only embryos without genetic disorders, they may also have a right to select embryos with superior biological traits. In other words, parents should always be entitled to pursue the best possible life for their future children. This argument is all the more relevant since, as already noted, it is often difficult to distinguish between paired terms such as ‘healing’ and ‘enhancement’ or ‘ability’ and ‘disability’.187

It is also recognized that many parents are already seeking to improve their children’s capabilities by providing coaching in sport or sending them to the right schools. Those supporting the new eugenics thus emphasize the difficulty of defining a meaningful difference between using such activities to give a child specific abilities and genetically improving a child with the aim of developing the same abilities. This is because most parents seek to have not only healthy children but also highly gifted ones who are able to live successful and fulfilling lives in an extremely competitive world.

The Australian medical ethicist Julian Savulescu uses a principle he calls Procreative Beneficence to argue that ‘couples (or single reproducers) should select the child, of the possible children they could have, who is expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as the others, based on the relevant, available information’.188 Of course, he recognizes that this child may not be perfect, but the aim is optimization not perfection. This argument is all the more relevant because eugenic procedures are already available in developed countries, enabling prospective parents to select future children with the best lives possible. Consequently, parents who do not select for such children may be ignoring their duty. The argument is thus similar to the one for education

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