Last month, a public opinion survey led by Harvard Medical School researchers <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2818674">found</a> that three out of four adults supported pre-implantation “polygenic” screening of human embryos created through in vitro fertilization (<a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-dark-side-to-donald-trumps-precious-babies-and-the-successes-of-ivf/">IVF</a>). The promoters of these in vitro tests claim that they will allow people to estimate a future child’s likelihood of developing certain health conditions influenced by multiple genes – such as diabetes, heart disease and depression. The same survey found that around one in three adults approved of the idea that such tests be used to predict traits unrelated to disease. Nearly all respondents, however, said that they had concerns about potential negative outcomes of screening on individuals and society.
By “screening” is meant, of course, the identification of human embryos with sub-optimal genes and the deliberate destruction of these early human lives. This new form of eugenics has become possible thanks to the advent of IVF, a practice which, like eugenic theory, was pioneered in Britain.
The term eugenics, a neologism derived from Greek meaning “well-born”, was coined by Francis Galton, founder of the behavioural genetics movement, who defined eugenics as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.” Note that latter-day eugenics may be less concerned – at least at the parental level – with future generations and more concerned with securing adequate “quality” of one’s own child, including via destructive means.
The major assumption of the early eugenicists was that mental illness, blindness, deafness and other disabilities were due primarily to hereditary causes. On the basis of that assumption (for that is all it amounted to) these pioneers proposed a range of social measures including family planning, sterilisation and segregation, especially for the “mentally defective” or “feeble-minded”. These ideas spread quickly from Britain to North America, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, including Germany. In the words of researchers Randall Hansen and Desmond King, “many eugenicists believed that those suffering from these illnesses were predisposed to greater procreation, with the result that entire nations and/or continents were biologically inferior”.
Britain also gave the world the new ethical theory of utilitarianism, which aimed to systematise ethical thought by reducing it to basic principles concerning maximising pleasure or well-being. In so doing, utilitarianism aimed to dictate and justify an entire value system and provide a public morality to which private morality could potentially be adjusted.
The search for the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” emphasised public welfare and came with a pronounced de-emphasis of the importance of our intentions and conscience in considering the moral life. Baked into that mindset, so beloved of public servants, is the need for direct or indirect elite control over the private sphere in the name of public welfare. Forms of utilitarianism which attempt to make more room for the “private” possess an inherent instability in the face of overwhelming public welfare concerns.
The combination of that way of thinking with eugenics led the Eugenics Education Society in 1910 to announce their intention to draft a parliamentary bill for the compulsory detention of the “feeble-minded”. This initiative was warmly welcomed by Home Secretary Winston Churchill who announced that there were “at least 120,000 or 130,000 feeble-minded persons at large in our midst. These unhappy beings deserved all that could be done for them by a Christian and scientific civilisation, now that they were in the world. But let it end there, if possible. If, by any arrangement…we are able to segregate these people under proper conditions, that their curse dies with them and is not transmitted to future generations…we shall take upon our shoulders in our own lifetime a work for which those who come after us will owe us a debt of gratitude.”
Churchill was to go further than many at the time in lauding a booklet by Dr H.C. Sharp of the Indiana Reformatory entitled “The Sterilization of Degenerates.” Sharp had been sterilising “degenerates” in Indiana prior to the legalisation in 1907 of involuntary sterilisation of the “mentally deficient”. While the British, unlike officials of various US states, drew the line at forcible sterilisation, Churchill and others were convinced that this would be more humane than detention and segregation.
The 1912 Mental Deficiency Bill aimed to incarcerate those categorised as, among other things, “idiots” and “feeble-minded” – a category including those thought incapable of managing themselves prudently, such as unwed mothers and troublesome teenagers.
Of course, who counted as “feeble-minded” was to be decided by social experts in the name of “science”. As GK Chesterton, a vigorous opponent of the Bill, noted:
“It is not openly said, it is eagerly urged, that the main aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children. Every tramp who is surly, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs…we are already under the Eugenicist State and nothing remains to us but rebellion.”
Chesterton saw that eugenics was remaking what we ordinarily understand as ethics, perversely sacrificing our ordinary human bonds to each other in the name of generations yet unborn.
The Bill was withdrawn at Committee stage despite having a majority of 230 to 38 in the Commons. GK Chesterton’s journalism and the interventions of the independently-minded Liberal (later Labour) MP Josiah Wedgwood were influential but could not prevent the passing of the amended 1913 Mental Deficiency Act – legislation which was to condemn tens of thousands of people to incarceration.
Wedgwood had attempted to filibuster the Bill, famously telling the House that,
“By this Bill a large part of the population of this country is handed over to the specialists without any right of taking action at law against those concerned if they put you in prison without any semblance of justice…It reminds me in a way of the smelling out on the East African coast by the witch doctor.”
He also told the Commons,
“the spirit at the back of the Bill is not the spirit of charity, not the spirit of the love of mankind. It is the spirit of the horrible Eugenic Society which is setting out to breed up the working classes as though they were cattle…I think those people who are anxious to improve the breed of the working classes had better remember that there is such a thing as a soul and that the mere desire to turn people into better money-making machines is merely some horrible nightmare of H.G. Wells.”
The battle in Britain over eugenics and the victims of the 1913 Act are movingly described in Sarah Wise’s recent book <em>The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away a Generation.</em> The book tells the painful and largely forgotten story of those tens of thousands who were incarcerated under the legislation, many of them from childhood and often against the wishes of their families.
Notable in the history of State eugenics is the steadfast opposition of the Catholic Church, even as national churches faltered. That Church was joined by some elements of the Labour Party in opposing an ideology shamefully supported by many members of our political classes from across the spectrum (particularly enthusiastic were the Fabian Socialists).
By 1933 in the encyclical <em>Casti Connubi </em>Pope Pius XI was to state “that pernicious practice must be condemned which closely touches upon the natural right of man to enter matrimony but affects also in a real way the welfare of the offspring. For there are some who over solicitous for the cause of eugenics, not only give salutary counsel for more certainly procuring the strength and health of the future child – which, indeed, is not contrary to right reason – but put eugenics before aims of a higher order, and by public authority wish to prevent from marrying all those whom, even though naturally fit for marriage, they consider, according to the norms and conjectures of their investigations, would, through hereditary transmission, bring forth defective offspring.”
Pope Pius went on to speak of forced sterilisation:
“And more, they wish to legislate to deprive these of that natural faculty by medical action despite their unwillingness; and this they do not propose as an infliction of grave punishment under the authority of the state for a crime committed, not to prevent future crimes by guilty persons, but against every right and good they wish the civil authority to arrogate to itself a power over a faculty which it never had and can never legitimately possess.”
In that same decade, the Nazi Party heralded their belief in race as a quasi-sacred category – a belief that had developed from various strands of materialistic Enlightenment philosophy. That toxic brew of pseudo-science, atheism and animus toward what Christianity demanded of man was to lead to murder or mutilation of hundreds of thousands of lives deemed “unworthy of life” under the sterilisation and then euthanasia programme.
The Catholic Church has always understood that the highest Common Good is not the fantasy of the utilitarians but rather our encountering of God to which all aspects of our good are directed. The human person’s nobility and worth derives from the fact that he is meant to participate in the universal Good of God Himself. Appreciation of the Common Good has nothing to do with a utilitarian calculus and everything to do with understanding that individual human beings are not to be mutilated or incarcerated merely because they do not fit neatly into some eugenic plan. Those who are able to consent to a genuine marriage and to have a family should always be free to do so. As Aquinas pointed out long ago, members of the political community always possess certain rights untouchable by political leaders precisely because they also belong primarily to another community – a more universal and privileged one than Utilitarians can imagine.
While we may have moved on from some of the worst excesses of eugenics, the advent of IVF and legalised abortion – on which there is disturbingly a broad cross-party political consensus – has led people to internalise the commands of yesteryears’ oppressors. Instead of unjust incarceration and the prevention of marriage for those whom social engineers deem “unfit”, we simply destroy early human beings already so classified. And just as with latter-day eugenics, where the profoundly mentally disabled were lumped together with those deemed socially undesirable, so with IVF we now have the spectre of destroying even greater numbers of human beings for an even wider range of “reasons".
The eminent philosopher David Wiggins once wrote eloquently of those who too quickly dismiss worries about us “playing God”:
“If we cannot recognise our own given natures and the natural world as setting any limit at all upon the desires that we contemplate taking seriously; if we will not listen to the anticipations and suspicions of the artefactual conception of human beings that sound in half-forgotten moral denunciations of the impulse to see people or human beings as things, as tools, as bearers of military numerals, as cannon-fodder, or as fungibles; if we are not ready to scrutinise with any hesitation or perplexity at all the conviction (as passionate as it is groundless, surely, for no larger conception is available that could validate it) that everything in the world is in principle ours or there for the taking; then what will befall us? Will a new disquiet assail our desires themselves, in a world no less denuded of meaning by our sense of our own omnipotence than ravaged by our self-righteous insatiability?”
<em>(The team who pioneered in-vitro fertilisation: Cambridge physiologist Dr Robert Edwards holding the world's first test tube baby Louise Joy Brown and (on the right) gynaecologist Mr Patrick Steptoe (1913 - 1988). She was born by Caesarian section at Oldham General Hospital, Lancashire | Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)</em>
