Christianity and the New Eugenics

Should We Choose To Have Only Healthy Or Enhanced Children?

Calum MacKellar, CALUM MACKELLAR

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781783599134
• eBook ISBN: 9781783599141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What will it mean for society if science enables us to choose a future child whose health, athletic ability or intelligence is predetermined? This future is becoming ever more likely with the latest developments in human reproduction -- but concerns are growing about the implications. New procedures making possible heritable genetic modifications such as genome editing open the door to 'sanitized' selective eugenics; but these practices have some unnerving similarities to the discredited eugenic programmes of early twentieth-century regimes. A Christian perspective based on Scripture gives us the resources we urgently need to evaluate both current and future selection practices. Calum MacKellar offers an accessible, inter-disciplinary analysis, blending science, history and Christian theology. This book will enable you to become fully informed about the new scientific developments in human reproduction - developments that will affect us all.

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Introduction

Society is on the brink of a biomedical revolution in the development of novel reproductive procedures enabling the selection of certain kinds of children. A new age of reproduction that will have a profound impact on humanity, though most members of society, including Christians, are unaware of this brave new eugenic dawn. Moreover, little extensive Christian study has yet taken place seeking both to understand and to find a way forward in the complex future of reproductive selection. In addition, many Christians do not comprehend why, if given the choice, they should not be able to decide what kind of children they want. Why, they ask, should they not be able to choose to have only healthy children? Why not avoid bringing a child into existence with a serious disorder? Why not prevent the significant suffering a disabled child, and his or her parents, may experience?

Of course, the Bible does not specifically mention whether it is acceptable to select what kinds of children should be brought into existence, but this does not mean that it cannot provide guidance on the topic. As with many modern technologies, it just means that Christians need to examine these new possibilities by digging deeper into the overarching principles of Christianity revealed in the written word of God. In so doing, they must also inform themselves of the latest philosophical and scientific developments while considering what lessons can be learned from history.

It was the Englishman Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) who first coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883 as ‘the science of improving stock’ through ‘all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have’.1 The word ‘eugenics’ derives from two Greek roots, eu (meaning good) and genesis (meaning offspring or bringing into life). It characterizes the practice of producing human life that is good at birth (or a noble heredity) based on the belief that human beings can be improved from a genetic perspective. More specifically, eugenic developments describe selection strategies or decisions aimed at affecting, in manners considered to be positive, the genetic heritage of a child, a community or humanity in general.2 From this perspective, Galton sought to organize and apply new information about the evolution of animals provided by the theory of his cousin Charles Darwin (1809–82) in the latter’s influential book, published in 1859, On the Origin of Species. In so doing, Galton developed his own proposals by applying this theory to humankind in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius,3 in which he argued:

[T]hat a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy . . . to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, . . . so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.4

Thus, it was through the success of the breeding of farm animals, and the suggestion that human beings should not be considered differently from other animals, that modern eugenic ideas were developed. These became relatively popular at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. A number of prominent figures supported eugenic selection, including Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), the wartime prime minister of the UK, who was openly disappointed, on the grounds of civil liberties, when Britain resisted positive eugenic action. In 1910 Churchill wrote to the then prime minister Herbert Asquith (1852–1928) to express his support for a bill that proposed to introduce a compulsory sterilization programme in Britain, indicating:

The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate . . . I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.5

However, despite the many benefits eugenic proposals seemed to promise humanity, they remained on the margins of serious scientific disciplines because a number of subjective elements were believed to be at the centre of many of the policies. These included positions that could lead to a form of discrimination between certain categories of individuals – something that eventually culminated in the atrocities of Nazi Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Because of these crimes, eugenic proposals were then condemned as coercive, restrictive or genocidal after the Second World War, resulting in many societies completely rejecting any resemblance to such policies.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the old eugenic dreams are beginning to resurface, with an increasing number of new selective reproductive procedures being developed. For example, children are already being born who have been selected for good genetic endowments through careful screening programmes of embryos, sperm and eggs. Some scientists have even predicted that in the near future it will become common for parents to select specific characteristics in their offspring. Thus, a new eugenic impetus has begun in society, even though many still believe that past eugenic activities were unacceptable. The Danish ethicist Lene Koch, in 2009, put it well:

Today eugenics is something few would want to see realised, but we should appreciate that it was originally a focus of a widely held hope for a better and healthier population. The definition of ‘better and healthier’ may no longer embrace the elimination of socially, morally, and genetically undesirable elements as defined by the early eugenicists, but the hope for better health still underpins the rationale for genetic applications.6

This is also something that American scientist James Watson, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), developed when he argued in 1995 that:

Our growing ability to unscramble human genetic destinies will increasingly have an impact on how humans view themselves and justify their behaviour toward others. Our children will more be seen not as expressions of God’s will, but as the results of the uncontrollable throw of genetic dice that do not always give us the results we want. At the same time, we will increasingly have the power, through prenatal diagnosis to spot the good throws and to consider discarding through abortion the bad ones.

But to so proceed flies in the face of the long-cherished idea that all human life is sacred and intrinsically worthwhile. So there is bound to be deep conflict between those persons who want to maintain revered values of the past and those individuals who wish to have their moral values reflect the world as now revealed by observations and experiments of modern science. In particular, we are increasingly going to be accused of unwisely ‘playing God’ when we use genetics to improve the quality of either current or future human life.7

In this context Christians need to consider carefully whether such eugenic developments should be welcomed, rejected or considered neutral. For example, they will need to ask whether it would be acceptable, from a Christian perspective, to choose to have only healthy children and, if so, what arguments should be used. They would also have to examine, as a matter of urgency, the potential advantages as well as the risks for society of such choices. In 1922 the English Christian writer and philosopher Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874–1936), who was opposed to eugenic ideology, published his prescient Eugenics and Other Evils, where he indicated:

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late.8

In pondering all the possible arguments in favour of and against eugenic policies, a number of different kinds of procedures may also be examined that reflect the eugenic aims of those who are considering them. Sometimes the goal may be clear but at other times concealed, even to the person making the reproductive decision. These include the following aims.

1 Negative (or preventative) eugenics: strategies or decisions that seek to avoid or reduce what is considered to be an undesired genetic heritage in a child, community or humanity in general, such as:

(a) compulsory sterilizations of undesirable persons capable of reproduction

(b) marriage restrictions of undesirable persons capable of reproduction

(c) selecting-out undesirable embryos or foetuses because they are affected by disorders

(d) immigration controls preventing certain kinds of people from entering a country or

(e) extermination of certain undesirable persons.

2 Positive (or progressive) eugenics: strategies or decisions aimed at promoting what is considered to be a desired genetic heritage in a child, a community or humanity in general, such as:

(a) the selection of desirable sperm in a sperm bank

(b) certain forms of marriage counselling or

(c) promoting increased birth rates in couples who are deemed to be biologically desirable parents.

The distinction, however, between positive or negative eugenics is not clear-cut. For example, some procedures, such as the genetic selection of embryos and certain forms of marriage counselling, allow participants to make a choice based on genetic characteristics widely viewed as either positive and desirable or as negative and undesirable. Similarly, a distinction can usually be made between ‘enhancement’ and ‘healing’, though it may sometimes be difficult to draw a line between the two concepts and is related to the definitions of other terms as well as cultural norms and values.9 In this regard the concept of ‘enhancement’ (or augmentation) usually represents activities (whether biological or not) through which an individual is transformed to exceed what is normal in order to improve his or her natural function.10 The concept reflects the idea of using technology to increase the human functioning of a healthy individual beyond the norm for that person and in the absence of any identified dysfunction.11 However, an enhancement does not generally include the creation of capacities in new living beings that have never previously existed in humanity. The aim is simply to improve on the norm but not to surpass a pre-existing, natural state or capacity in humanity. The concept of ‘healing’, on the other hand, reflects the idea of restoration and may be defined as the removal of certain disorders relative to a recognized standard of an average healthy human being.

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