Concern at ‘racial decay’ was one reason eugenics became popular with Western scientists and intellectuals, notes Melbourne Bioethicist Dr Nicholas Tonti-Filippini
THE Australian Catholic Bishops Conference requested that the 2011 seventh Annual Bioethics Colloquium be held on the theme “Eugenics in Contemporary Bioethics”.
In planning the colloquium, the Australian Association of Catholic Bioethicists noted that eugenics is widespread practice in Australia.
Approximately 90 per cent of children who are diagnosed with disabilities in utero are aborted. There is also a practice of sedation and demanding feeding, in other words, starvation, for those who survive to be born with a disability and whose parents do not wish them to survive.
The colloquium will also consider eugenics at the end of life in relation to the advocacy for euthanasia to be available for people who are in pain or experiencing “existential suffering” which is word for loneliness and depression.
This year the first of the baby boomers turned 65 and in the next twenty years the demand for aged care facilities is likely to double.
The issue of aged care and euthanasia are unlikely to be separable as the baby boomers seek euthanasia as an alternative to living in aged care.
There is to be a public forum at the colloquium at which the Hon Greg Donnelly MLC, Government Whip in the Parliament of New South Wales, will speak on the topic New Developments in the Euthanasia Campaign.
The forum will be held in the Christ Lecture Theatre at the Australian Catholic University on Sunday, 23 January at 7pm.
There is also to be a Colloquium Dinner on 25 January for which there is to be an open invitation to be addressed by Kristen Deane, Victorian State President of the Down Syndrome Association and executive director of the National Disability and Carers’ Alliance, on the topic Downs Syndrome in the Brave New World.
In the 1920s there was a strong eugenics movement in Western countries.
The major area of concern was ‘racial decay’, which predicted an inevitable decline in the ‘national stock’ because of the lesser fertility of the more successful and worthy sections of society by comparison with those regarded as being feckless and of lesser capacity.
This fear led to legislation in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom to compulsorily sterilise people who had developmental disabilities.
Such legislation was advocated by the then Home Secretary Sir Winston Churchill who in a letter to Prime Minister Asquith, 1910 wrote:
“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded classes, coupled with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitute a race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the sources from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.”
Attitudes to people with disabilities were very negative. The Willowbrook State School in New York City conducted a research programme where children who were developmentally disabled were deliberately infected with hepatitis. Parents agreed in exchange for admission.
In California, forcible sterilisation of over 20,000 mentally disabled men and women took place between 1909 and 1970.
The UK 1913 Mental Deficiency Act required the compulsory sterilisation of those in mental asylums.
In the US there were numerous reports of the inmates of asylums being used for experiments such as being given X-ray therapy as an experimental treatment for head-lice.
When we speak of eugenics, we tend to think of the horrors of Nazi Germany. We forget that the eugenic movement was widespread and was endorsed by most Western Governments.
What is also forgotten is that the worst excesses of Nazi medicine actually began in relation to people with developmental disabilities and mental illness and the establishment of a facility for the purpose at Hadamar.
On 13 January, 1941, the first transport of mentally sick and disabled persons arrived from the psychiatric hospital Eichberg at the newly established killing centre Hadamar near Limburg.
After a few hours, the patients were killed by gas, their remains were burnt in the crematorium. Until August of the same year, more than 10.000 people were killed in the gas chamber of Hadamar.
Two decades ago, philosopher Jonathon Glover asked the question “What sort of people should there be?” He referred to the “genetic supermarket” and envisaged that the development of gene therapies would result in parents being able to choose the genetics of their children.
The expectation that gene therapies would rapidly develop has not been the reality. It is still the case that no gene therapies have become established therapy. What has developed as a spin-off of the techniques developed for use in the Human Genone Project is a rapidly increasing capacity to identify genetic difference or abnormality and to correlate this with disease states or propensity for disease.
Much has been written about the possibility of the use of this information in discriminatory ways in relation to employment, financial institutions, personal insurance, superannuation and pension entitlements. But there is an area of discrimination that has already become well-established, that is the area which the National Health and Medical Research Council calls “reproductive discrimination”.
Reproductive discrimination may happen though pressure or influence for the purpose of preventing conception or birth of a child with a particular genetic trait:
– Pre-nuptially – by screening individuals who have decided to have a child,
– Pre-fertilisation – by screening or altering gametes, or somatic cell nuclear transfer,
– Pre-transfer – by embryo biopsy and selection,
– Pre-birth – by pre-natal diagnosis and selective abortion,
– Peri-natal – by infanticide.
Some would argue that reproductive discrimination is not discrimination at all but simply a matter of respecting the individual choice of the woman and her partner.
However, to say that an act of discrimination is an act of individual choice does not make that choice any less discriminatory.
Discrimination is almost always a matter of individual choice.
What matters is when that discrimination forms something of a pattern so that a group or category of individuals suffers as a result of those choices, and when respect for human life is contingent.
Tickets to the colloquium are available by contacting Toby Hunter, John Paul II Institute, phone 9412 3386 or email thunter@jp2institute.org.
Dr Tonti-Filippini is an Independent Consultant Ethicist, an Associate Professor at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Studies, an Honorary Fellow at the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute and chairman of the Research Committee for Matercare International.