Beeson & Singer/ prenatal diagnosis

Ian Murray seamus2001 at home.com
Tue Aug 7 20:26:10 PDT 2001



> The key problem is that pre-natal screening, a medical application
of
> biology, was only developed that is socially constructed to predict
> the appearance of Abby Normal then get rid of her. (Remember, Young
> Dr. Frankenstein?).

=========

That would be Abby Non Socially desirable; the planetary ecology is indifferent, provided the 'mutations' don't accumluate and cause global systems to collapse.


>
> In other words, law and medicine have already socially constructed a
> list of biological attributes that make Abby a freak of nature and
> have invented a predictive means to deal with her appearance in
> advance. To wit, extermination. Notice, this is usually the answer
> when law and medicine get together. Can any one think of an instance
> where law and medicine enhance life rather than promote death?
===== Abby is a 'freak' of the social. Dude how can you be missing this? Adoption; I know, I'm adopted.


> Once that the foreknowledge of apparence has been socially
> constructed, it then appears as a biological, physical and objective
> fact. However, it is still a social construction that merely uses
the
> predictive power of biological science to anticipate what it has
> virtually guarrantied in advance---that all Abbys will be freaks of
> nature.
========= A planet that throws up hurricanes, echinoderms, hemmerrhoids, pachyderms and economists has no concept of freaks.


>
> It is a subtle argument and might not actually be logical, but it
> amounts to the idea that disability is always already socially
> constructed, whether through the medium of myth, religion, science,
> medicine, law, or economics. In other words you have to have decided
> in advance, what attribute to look for in genetics in order to find
it
> and then design or discover markers for its predicted appearance.
=========

And the nature/culture schism is......


> At an epistemological level, science faces this same problem all the
> time. Is what we think is a phenomenon, a naturally occurring and
> self-cohering entity or not?
======== Now we're getting somewhere. :-)


>
> Remember the history of science is full of things that only existed
in
> the minds of their investigators.
>
> (gotta go see Jurassasic Park III)
>
> Chuck Grimes
===========

Put lots of butter on the popcorn, constructivists love sclerosis......

Ian



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