Steve Perry wrote:
> Max, in his response to the above, makes an unpalatable--but
> incontrovertible--point, though he doesn't state it very directly:
> Given that the means of testing a fetus for all sorts of characteristics
> are becoming more readily available all the time, and given that
> there is no way to assess and distinguish a woman's "real" motives
> for desiring an abortion, it's inevitable that the procedure will
> come to be used by some as a kind of Home Eugenics Kit. And
> there's *nothing* to be done about it in a preventative sense, as
> Marta would desire. It doesn't deter my support for abortion rights,
> but it does make me shudder. Ah, the strange bedfellows wrought
> by science and technology...
I am over my post limit and just lost my former response via error, so for now this is my response. I'll try to get to some other posts in the next couple of days.
The eugenic kit is a realistic concerns. The implications of the Human Genome Project will be even broader than just linking a gene to a condition. Historian Daniel J. Kevles in “Out of Eugenics: The Historical Politics of the Human Genome,” cautions that the genome project grew out of the eugenics movement. One organizer of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Franz Kallman, for instance, was a part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity (funded by the Rockefellers) and created the American Society of Human Genetics. The American Eugenics Society's changed its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology. The Social Biologists carry on the old eugenists discourse regarding the “problem” defined as disabliity.
It was only in the last 20 years that Sweden and Japan stopped sterilizing womene they THOUGHT might carry a disabled fetus - mainly women on welfare. Now that eugenics is politically incorrect there seems to be a propaganda war for control of middle class parents minds over what fetus have value.
For instance, Nobel Prize-winner James Watson, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, a founder of the Human Genone Project and current president of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Maryland delivered a keynote speech in 1998 to the German Congress of Molecular Medicine in which he stated, “ The truly relevant question for most families is whether an obvious good to them will come from having a child with a major handicap. Is it more likely for such children to fall behind in society or will they develop the strengths of character and fortitude that lead...to the head of their packs?” Watson’s conclusion: “we perhaps most realistically should see [a handicap] as the major origin of asocial behavior that has among its many bad consequences the breeding of criminal violence.”
This was in 1998 and people take this stuff seriously.
Kelves is correct to warn, "In its ongoing fascination with questions of behavior, human genetics will undoubtedly yield information that may be wrong, or socially volatile, or, if the history of eugenic science is any guide, both."
My concern is not just about the fact that disabled people as a class of persons are devalued and the objects of abortion, euthanasia and infanticide because it is easy to convince people that disabled are nonpersons or unequal to themselves. I am also aware of how disabled people's non conforming bodies do not fit within the capitalist or some socialist modes of production - we don't always make good workers. And I know that the political economy subtley and otherwise influences the decisions to be parents make.
Steve, you seem to suggest nothing can be done about people's choices. I know that some people will never choose to have a disabled child but some will not be pressured by any of these concerns and will. Disabled people's input is so important because we say we can have a good quality of life. It is not easy, but its not easy for poor people of color either (back to societial/institutional/economic structures). That people with disabilities can have a decent life flies in the face of most people's conditioning and why I focus on the educational aspect, not the control aspect.
I will try to get to more of your direct points within a few days.
Marta Russell