Prenatal Euthanasia: Genetic Genocide

--Earl E. Appleby, Jr.

"Ignorance of genetics may lead more doctors to court," the American Medical News warns. Knowledge of genetics is leading more babies to their deaths, deaths at the hands of doctors perpetrating prenatal euthanasia. Once again, our tax dollars are bankrolling the wrong side of a life-or-death battle.

Three billion tax dollars finance the Human Genome Project. As all poisoned apples, it's been polished to disguise its deadly core. Its peddlers claim that mapping human genes will pay diagnostic dividends. But is first-strike infanticide the real pay off?AMN staffer Beverly Merz cautions,"it is doubtful that even the most prescient envisaged...the medicolegal issues that would be spawned by the genetics revolution." As many revolutions, this one is bloody and most of its victims are innocent.

"The impact of the genome project on the law may be more profound than on biology and medicine," notes the University of Southern California's Alexander Capron. At the first national conference on legal issues arising from the project, Alan Weisbard, of the University of Wisconsin, advised, "The Human Genome Project may vastly increase occasions for medical malpractice litigation." The fatal focus of such litigation can be summed up in a two-word oxymoron: "wrongful birth."

Two cases, Roe v. Wade (1973) and Park v. Chessin (1978), plowed the judicial killing fields for the sewing of "wrongful birth" suits in the 1980s. Roe v. Wade unleashed the abortion holocaust. Park v. Chessin would make physicians accessories to murder in the womb by forcing them to aid and abet such genetic search-and-destroy missions as amniocentesis.

Merz summarizes their lethal legacy: "During [the '80s], the courts upheld several suits that made physicians legally liable for depriving parents of the opportunity to prevent the birth of an affected child." Birth, of course, is "prevented" by abortion, the birth of sick or handicapped babies by prenatal euthanasia.

In Parents magazine, Arielle Emmett-Arthur reports testing preborn babies can detect some 250 of 4,000 known birth defects. Citing Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs, spina bifida, Huntington's disease, fragile x syndrome, and Duchenne muscular dystrophy as targets of genetic counselors, she comments, "Geneticists have developed prenatal screening tests for these diseases, but unfortunately no cures." Accordingly, parents "must decide between having the baby...and terminating the pregnancy," i.e., between giving life a chance and euthanasia.

Critics charge prenatal counseling, dubbed "reading tea leaves" by Dr. Barbara Rothman, is "stop everything" medicine that "deal(s) with genetic illness...by screening and offering...pregnancy termination." This is the medical ideal of the euthanasia Axis, whose Final Solution to sickness is to exterminate the sick.

"Patients who discover their baby has a genetic disorder...elect to abort," genetic counselor Phyllis Taterka admits. She confirms her colleagues "help patients make arrangements for an abortion and see them through the ordeal." Not their babies.

• A Hunted Baby

Babies like Maria Hunt's? "Having spent eight years...as a Catholic nun, she confesses in McCall's, "I...never let myself admit the possibility of abortion." Not until her geneticist told her, "Maria, your baby seems to be missing part of his eighteenth chromosome. This is potentially... very serious." Especially, for Baby Hunt.

"During those last days," Maria's husband, Bud, revealed "his vision of what life would be like for us with such a deformed child." "He saw me wheeled into the abortion surgery and at the last minute not being able to go through with it. He saw us...having to deal with the ...needs of a handicapped child. Our relationship...would be changed for ever."

Bud needn't have worried. "I decided I must go through with the abortion to preserve my family. I would lie to my relatives; they would think I had a seven-month miscarriage. ...And, if the abortion was murder in the eyes of God, I would accept damnation."

Thanks be to God, tiny Justin Hunt received a death's door pardon when Bud handed Maria the phone. It was her doctor with the results of her second amniocentesis. "We made a mistake on the first tests," he said. "Your baby is fine--a fine, healthy boy."

Not every baby is so blessed. While Maria was asking herself, "Was this...a test from a...God I had... divorced in the name of realism?" she met a mother whose first child was born with spina bifida. When amniocentesis determined her second child had the disease, she aborted her baby. Tests performed on the murdered infant, however, revealed the child had been normal.

And what if the diagnosis had been right? Is a baby's life less sacred because he is sick? Should his "quality of life" outweigh his right to life?

As Pope John Paul II has professed, "It must be reaffirmed that every life is sacred, and that a possible deformity can never justify a death sentence, not even when it is the parents themselves...who request euthanasia." For, as CURE's logo proclaims, "To kill is not to care."

HLI Reports, August 1991