BRITAIN SLIDES DOWN THE SLOPE: eugenics; euthanasia, and chimeras

Three articles in the London TIMES Online published this week illustrate what is happening in Britain. Unmoored from their own ethical and religious tradition, Britons are propelling themselves down a slippery slope.

First, look at this article, which describes how physicians in the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists are seeking to have active euthanasia legalized. They want the right to kill babies they deem too defective to live, and state in a new classic of Orwellian Newspeak, that giving doctors the right to kill babies will be "ways of widening the management options available to the sickest of newborns." [Reliapundit adds: Your baby's death becomes merely a management option of the bureaucracy - at least in a state-financed/nationalized/socialist healthcare system. IOW: The doctors might very well deem your baby's death financially sound - and for the common good.]

The college’s submission was also welcomed by John Harris, a member of the government’s Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University. “We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term but cannot kill a newborn. What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it okay to kill the foetus at one end of the birth canal but not at the other?” he said.

It is significant that it is not the government which is forcing doctors to consider killing their patients, but doctors who are petitioning the government for the right to do so. That's the way it happened in Germany, too, where doctors infatuated with the ideals of the Eugenics movement persuaded the National-Socialist government to grant legal acceptance and tax-money support for a program that killed tens of thousands of German children. From the killing of Germans deemed too defective to live, it was but a short step to the killing of whole peoples who were judged too defective to live.

The second article describes another aspect of the German Eugenics program -- the Lebensborn Program, in which young women deemed sufficiently Aryan were pressured into bearing the illegitimate offspring of selected SS men.

Hitler believed the “Nordic race” was destined to rule the world. But many Lebensborn children ended up emotionally scarred underachievers, craving the warmth of family ties and alienated from their foster parents or mothers, who in many cases refused to speak about the programme, either out of shame or loyalty to the SS oath that they had sworn. The children’s suffering was worst in Norway, where many never recovered from the stigma of having a German father. Some were put in mental asylums.

The third article describes a plan by scientists to create human-cow hybrid embryos. [AKA: chimeras. MORE HERE.]

The team, from the University of Newcastle, would take a cow’s egg and remove the nucleus. They would then replace it with the nucleus of a cell taken from an adult human, such as a skin cell.

That sounds like something from the Island of Dr. Moreau.

“Say the words,” said the Ape-man, repeating, and the figures in the doorway echoed this, with a threat in the tone of their voices.

I realised that I had to repeat this idiotic formula; and then began the insanest ceremony. The voice in the dark began intoning a mad litany, line by line, and I and the rest to repeat it. As they did so, they swayed from side to side in the oddest way, and beat their hands upon their knees; and I followed their example. I could have imagined I was already dead and in another world. That dark hut, these grotesque dim figures, just flecked here and there by a glimmer of light, and all of them swaying in unison and chanting,

“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

And so from the prohibition of these acts of folly, on to the prohibition of what I thought then were the maddest, most impossible, and most indecent things one could well imagine. A kind of rhythmic fervour fell on all of us; we gabbled and swayed faster and faster, repeating this amazing Law. Superficially the contagion of these brutes was upon me, but deep down within me the laughter and disgust struggled together. We ran through a long list of prohibitions, and then the chant swung round to a new formula.

“His is the House of Pain.

“His is the Hand that makes.

“His is the Hand that wounds.

“His is the Hand that heals.”

And so on for another long series, mostly quite incomprehensible gibberish to me about Him, whoever he might be. I could have fancied it was a dream, but never before have I heard chanting in a dream.

“His is the lightning flash,” we sang. “His is the deep, salt sea.”

A horrible fancy came into my head that Moreau, after animalising these men, had infected their dwarfed brains with a kind of deification of himself. However, I was too keenly aware of white teeth and strong claws about me to stop my chanting on that account.

“His are the stars in the sky.”

At last that song ended. I saw the Ape-man's face shining with perspiration; and my eyes being now accustomed to the darkness, I saw more distinctly the figure in the corner from which the voice came. It was the size of a man, but it seemed covered with a dull grey hair almost like a Skye-terrier. What was it? What were they all?

Altogether a very disturbing picture of a deteriorating ethical climate in British medicine.