Partly because I am much more skeptical than Samuel McCracken (p. 45) about the desirability of a stabilized population, I am, if possible, even more horrified than he is by the idea of empowering the state to decide how many children shall be born. For in addition to the considerations Mr. McCracken raises in analyzing the implications of yielding such power to the state, there is the further question of whether the population controllers would be satisfied even with that. After all, the intellectual leaders of this movement are not, as Mr. McCracken notes, “pure population controllers,” concerned only with numbers and “willing to let a stabilized or reduced population do what it wanted with the space which had been secured for it.” They tend to hold strong views on the nature of the good life and most of them by their own admission would be singularly unhesitant about imposing these views on others if they were ever given the chance. This by itself is bad enough, but there is also reason to suspect that some leaders of the movement, and probably more than some, are ultimately interested in controlling the quality of life on this earth in another and deeper and more dangerous sense as well.

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Several months ago, I participated in a conference in Washington called to explore the question of whether mongoloid infants should be permitted to live. Of course the organizers of the conference phrased the problem in considerably less brutal terms than I have just done, but that was essentially what we had come together—geneticists, biologists, medical men, writers, philosophers, and theologians—to discuss. Setting out for Washington, I had expected that there would be very little disagreement on the main point. To my amazement, however, I discovered that a substantial body of sentiment—substantial less in numbers than in the eminence of those, especially from the scientific community, who constituted it—was by no means willing to grant mongoloids an undisputed right to live. Such creatures, they argued, are an intolerable burden to their parents, to society, and to themselves. What then should be done about them? Although no one went quite so far as to advocate in public that they simply be put to death, there was a good deal of quiet support at the conference for what is called “negative euthanasia”—that is, refraining from the medical or surgical procedures which might be necessary to keep a mongoloid infant alive and allowing it to die instead. (Negative euthanasia is nowadays also widely proposed, and no doubt practiced, for the very old and for the incurably ill. Where such cases are concerned, the support for negative euthanasia, far from being somewhat embarrassed as it is in the case of genetically defective babies, has become very vocal, and it increases in intensity with the development of more and more effective technologies for keeping people alive while they nevertheless remain totally incapacitated.)

But if “positive” euthanasia had no public partisans at the conference, it did have a few private defenders. One very distinguished scientist, for example, told me he saw no reason why anyone who accepted abortion should balk at infanticide, particularly when the infant in question was known to be defective whereas the fetus to be aborted might be normal and sound. Hearing this, I was reminded of the old Catholic argument of the “slippery slope,” according to which the legitimation of abortion would set off just such a downward moral momentum as was implicit in the distinguished scientist’s position. But that is not what I said to him. To him I replied that in my judgment anyone who sees no difference between a fetus and a newborn baby ought to be condemning abortion as murder and not applauding infanticide as enlightened. Certainly, I said, mongoloids are defective, but so are many other kinds of people. Some are blind, some are deaf, some are halt, some are lame, and some have missing limbs; some are given to madness and some are the prey of disease. If mongoloids can be put to death, why not these, and if these, why not anyone who fails of absolute perfection? Not overly bothered by any of this, he shrugged—and went on to tell me about a colleague of his, a molecular biologist of the greatest renown, who believes that no newborn infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment; if it fails these tests, it forfeits the right to live.

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That the ethos out of which ideas like these emerge has infected the population-control movement is clear from Mr. McCracken’s description of the writings of Martha K. Willing, who speaks of diabetics and dwarfs in exactly the spirit of that ethos. It is this which leads me to suspect that we may be dealing here not merely with an effort to control the size of the population but with an effort to control its character; not merely with an effort to control the quality of life but with an effort to control the quality of the human “stock” itself.

The last time such an effort was made, of course, was by the Nazis, and so horrible were the consequences that many people assumed it would never be tried again. Evidently, however, it has taken only twenty-five years for the eugenic dream to return—and now that it is back, it is back in force, purged of its crackpot racism, bolstered by an infinitely greater store of knowledge than was ever available to the Nazi scientists in those primitive days before the discovery of DNA and RNA and the “cracking” of the genetic code, and armed in the righteousness of a promise to eliminate all hereditary disorders and to save the world at last from human; imperfection itself.

If this is truly what we are faced with in the ideology of population control, we all have reason to tremble. “Use every man after his desert,” said Hamlet, “and who should ’scape whipping?” A fortiori, then: Let only the perfect live, and who should ’scape killing? Who, that is, but the framers of the definition of what “perfection” means? And even they in the end would devour themselves, so full of murderous hatred is the fantasy of human perfection for the reality of human life and for the imperfections to which the flesh must always be heir no matter what the geneticists or anyone else may ever contrive to do.

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