The New Narcissism

Every time I think we've reached the lower depths of selfish depravity, we find deeper waters yet:

According to a recent survey of fertility clinics, four of the 190 that responded indicated they've helped families have a baby with a disability or deformity; the clinics sift through embryos, created in a lab dish, to ensure that the one to be implanted in the mother's womb carries the desired defect. The survey will be published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, and it should raise eye-brows -- and, I hope, red flags.

I can understand why some parents might be tempted to "design" their child to be better physically or smarter, but why would anyone want to create, purposely, a deformed or disabled child? As the father of three healthy children (thank God), I find myself deeply troubled. It's not that I wouldn't love a child with defects -- at least I hope I'm not that cold-hearted -- I can't imagine wishing such problems upon a child.

But Jeffrey Kahn, a University of Minnesota bioethicist, can. "It's an ethically challenging question and certainly it will trouble people," he told the Associated Press, "but I think there are good, thoughtful reasons why people who are deaf or...dwarves could say, 'I want a child like me.' ...If people in a shared culture all have the common clinical defect, then it's maybe not a defect in the traditional sense."

There seems no practice perverse or disgusting enough that it can't seek sanction, or exemption from scrutiny, by having the word "culture" invoked. No one is disputing that, in the sense of leading lives in a silent world and possessing their own language, the deaf have a culture. But there is no getting around that not being able to hear is a disability, and it's a disability that takes courage and resourcefulness to overcome.

When deaf parents make sure their children will be deaf, however, they aren't preserving a culture. They aren't teaching cultural practices and beliefs that the children, when grown, can continue to accept or reject. They are sentencing other human beings who have no choice in the matter to a disability.

This is where the culture of life as a parent's choice rather than as a child's right takes us.

Hope the liberals like where we're heading---they drove us here, after all.