Op-ed: Unthinking allegiance to science masks war on equality
May 9th, 2008Columnist Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post, argues that liberals who pledge an unswerving support for ’scientific integrity’ are eroding the core American principle that all men are created equal. Gerson joins Yuval Levin, writing in the New Atlantis, pointing to the eugenic practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as evidence of the moral pitfalls of purely scientific reasoning.
Nazism largely discredited the old eugenics. But a new eugenics — the eugenics of genetic screening and abortion, the eugenics of genetic selection in the process of in vitro fertilization — is alive and well.
Its advocates contend that the new eugenics is superior because it is voluntary instead of compulsory, and unrelated to race. But Levin responds: “Surely the most essential problem with the eugenics movement was not coercion or collectivism. . . . The deepest and most significant contention of the progressive eugenicists — the one that made all the others possible — was that science had shown the principle of human equality to be unfounded, a view that then allowed them to use the authority of science to undermine our egalitarianism and our regard for the weakest members of our society.”
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on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, abortion, eugenics, genetics, prenatal diagnosis, public attitudes.
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