Genocide, Gendercide, and Other Dirty Secrets
by Joseph Pearce, The Imaginative Conservative:
On January 26, 1959, the French Academy of Sciences published the findings of a young scientist, Jérôme Lejeune, which proved, for the first time, a link between mental disability and chromosomal abnormality. Lejeune’s discovery that Down syndrome was caused by the presence of an additional chromosome was nothing short of revolutionary. Twenty-four years later, on January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ran roughshod over the laws of all fifty states by mandating the legalization of abortion. Today, ninety per cent of all children with Down syndrome are killed in the womb.
Genocide is a dirty word. (It is an even dirtier thing.) Yet it is the only adequate word to describe the systematic policy of deploying genetic testing to exterminate the disabled. It is a deplorable fact that we live in a society that considers children with Down syndrome and other disabilities to be subhuman or, to employ the more ominous-sounding German word, merely untermenschen.
At this juncture, and in the interests of full disclosure, I should confess that I have the proverbial axe to grind. My wife and I are the parents of a thirteen-year-old son with Down syndrome. He is the happiest member of our family and has enriched the quality of our lives in ways too deep and numerous to mention. I cannot imagine how impoverished our lives would be without him. He is our most valued teacher from whom we have learned the most priceless lessons about love and life. It breaks my heart to think that others like him are killed or culled for the “crime” of imperfection.
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