In the 1920 book Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (“Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life”), jurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Höche coined the phrase Lebensunwertes Leben or “life unworthy of life.” The book was a pseudoscientific argument for the systematic elimination from society of those who were deemed to be unfit, disabled, mentally defective, and racially suspect. It was not an unusual work for the times, nor was it outside the mainstream of thinking in the worldwide eugenics movement that began in earnest with the writings of Francis Galton in the late 1800s. Binding and Höche’s book did serve, however, as a mainstay resource for Nazi racial science over the following two decades.
Binding and Höche begin their treatise by asserting the moral acceptability of suicide and assisted suicide. They then move to a defense of killing those whose physical conditions or intractable infirmities render them unfit in the struggle for life, a drain on its precious and limited resources—resources that would be better spent in the service of those more fit specimens who have, as such, more promising futures. The book ends with a scientistic prophecy about the onset of a new, more enlightened age in which traditional sensibilities and values will give way to a “higher morality.”
There was a time, now considered barbaric, in which eliminating those who were born unfit for life, or who later became so, was taken for granted. Then came the phase, continuing into the present, in which… preserving every existence, no matter how worthless, stood as the highest moral value. A new age will arrive—operating with a higher morality and with great sacrifice—which will actually give up the requirements of an exaggerated humanism and overvaluation of mere existence.”
It seems rather than the dawn of a new age, Binding and Höche were actually anticipating a return to a more ancient era, a time before Christianity and its attendant moral worldview made a muddle of things by suggesting all human life was beloved by God and, therefore, sacred. Upon even casual historical reflection, it is hard to argue the world the Third Reich ushered in—and the resultant worldwide conflagration it sparked—did not reflect the return of an earlier and more brutally terrifying time. Many would like to believe after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust the eugenics movement—and the utopic urges at its roots—would be universally acknowledged as a thing of the past, a sort of cancerous moral tumor which serious people would have by now resolutely and surgically cut away.
Unfortunately, such does not appear to be the case. I have spent the past decade of my professional career studying the history of the eugenics movement, both pre- and post-World War II, and writing scholarly articles expressing my concerns about the role the psychology and related social sciences have played (and, I believe, continue to play) in fostering a cultural and intellectual atmosphere conducive to nihilism and, thereby, congenial to Eugenics. The terrifying prospects of the rebirth of a program of eugenics—whether formally through state-sponsorship or more informally through everyday individual choices—trouble me deeply. Indeed, I believe it to be something that should trouble everyone, or, at least, anyone whose conscience has not become utterly numbed to the evil attendant to our growing culture of death.
Recently, Ruth Marcus, a famous and influential editorial writer at the Washington Post, penned an argument for the right to selective abortion, particularly in cases where the unborn child has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. There is no time in a short note such as this to adequately address all of the conceptual problems and moral hazards running throughout her piece, so I will limit myself to commenting on only one particular quote.
Marcus writes: “Certainly, to be a parent is to take the risks that accompany parenting; you love your child for who she is, not what you want her to be. Accepting that essential truth is different from compelling a woman to give birth to a child whose intellectual capacity will be impaired, whose life choices will be limited, whose health may be compromised. Most children with Down syndrome have mild to moderate cognitive impairment, meaning an IQ between 55 and 70 (mild) or between 35 and 55 (moderate). This means limited capacity for independent living and financial security; Down syndrome is life-altering for the entire family. I’m going to be blunt here: That was not the child I wanted. That was not the choice I would have made.”
Here we have the ethos of “life unworthy of life” illustrated quite openly, albeit without the bother of the full implications of such reasoning being carried out or made explicit. You see, the ethos of “life unworthy of life” does not stop at assessing (in utilitarian fashion) the probable worth of an unborn child’s future existence, but rather continues onward to offer such assessments at any point in life generally. That is, were a child born healthy unimpaired but to sustain, say around the age of 12, a serious brain injury resulting in cognitive impairment on a par with moderate Down syndrome, there is no reason (given the premises of the basic argument and its denial of the intrinsic worth and dignity of human life) not to declare the child’s existence and future to be “life unworthy of life” and thereby sanction its extinction. After all, if a child yet unborn is facing a life sentence of lower cognitive capacity by virtue of a medical condition and is thus worthy of destruction, then the same necessarily holds true for anyone who, at any time, is subject to a similarly impairing medical condition. The logic is both merciless and inexorable.
Once we deny the inherent dignity of an unborn human being—rejecting the sanctity of unborn life solely on the basis of our own desire not to have or be responsible for that human being once born—we can’t legitimately close the barn door after the child is toddling around among us and retroactively imbue it with inherent dignity that must be respected from that point on. The dignity of that person, and their worthiness of our deepest respect and care, either has been there all along or it is something entirely contingent that rests solely on our individual whim to bestow or revoke as we happen to choose.
Our assessment of the worth of another human being, no matter how fragile the body or how impaired the mind might prove to be, simply must not rest on the slippery slope suppositions intrinsic to any means-ends mentality bent relentlessly to calculating the costs and benefits another human being’s existence might entail relative to our own lives and desires. Indeed, the intellectual mistake that fuels the moral muddle of eugenicism is perhaps most clearly evident in its pervasive, scientistic assumption that the most serious matters surrounding the “qualities” of life are sufficiently addressed simply by counting up certain of its “quantities” (e.g., IQ scores, range of life choices, health care costs, etc.) and comparing against some sliding scale of individual desire.
What an awesome power it is we take upon ourselves in advocating for abortion-on-demand, whether because of a desire to minimize personal inconveniences or out of a fear of imperfections. In so doing, not only do we make far-reaching decisions about what sort of human beings we will countenance as human beings, but we do so by appropriating to ourselves the awesome power to decide who gets to be human and who doesn’t—though with little regard for the responsibility intrinsic to the exercise of such power. What an awesome power it is, this power to confer human status and the moral worth attendant on whomever we wish and to deny it whenever we wish, for whatever reason we wish. What deep self-deception must lie behind the benevolent but self-serving language we use to justify our denial of the humanity of those most vulnerable, whose existence we fear will prove inconvenient to our own.
The tainted terminology of Nazi eugenics and racial science, Lebensunwertes Leben, has been replaced in our day with the less threatening, more benevolent-sounding “low quality of life.” I suspect we have done so in order to further delude ourselves that our choice to abort an unwanted child—particularly one deemed defective and unfit and thus doomed to a low quality life—is actually an act of courage undertaken on their behalf, an act meant to save them in some fundamental way from having to be the sort of imperfect beings we know they wouldn’t have wanted to be anyway. One cannot help but wonder, though, exactly whose quality of life is of paramount importance in the ruthless calculus of the abortionist eugenicist. But, then again, one needn’t wonder too long given the obviousness of the answer.
Roughly one month ago on March 9, 2018, noted Washington Post editorialist Ruth Marcus published a brief essay arguing against state legislation that would prohibit the selective abortion of unborn babies who had been diagnosed with Down syndrome. The editorial sparked considerable outrage from a variety of quarters. A great deal of it came from parents of Down syndrome-afflicted children, who found Marcus’s assertion that mothers of such children have a right to abort them for whatever reason they wish to be abhorrent and offensive. Critics seem to have been especially bothered by Marcus’s claim that afflicted children are necessarily a burden on parents and society, as well as condemned to a low quality of life because of the varied cognitive and physical constraints resulting from their medical condition. "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wouldve-aborted-a-fetus-with-down-syndrome-women-need-that-right/2018/03/09/3aaac364-23d6-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html?utm_term=.f84b36d82432"
One week later, Marcus doubled-down on her earlier editorial, offering readers brief excerpts from a number of women who had written her in support of her position and sharing with the world their positive feelings about their own choices to abort their own children who had been diagnosed with Down syndrome. I, too, penned a short essay in ("https://wheatley.byu.edu/abortion-down-syndrome-and- eugenics/"), to which this additional short essay is a companion, pointing out Marcus’s argument reflected the fundamental ethos of eugenics—that is, there is some life that is “unworthy of life.”
However, the eugenics impulse to eradicate Lebensunwertes Leben in the utopic quest for a better world populated by smarter, stronger, and more beautiful specimens of the species is only one source undergirding the utilitarian reasoning of abortion-on-demand advocates like Marcus. In fact, it may well be the least influential source of their arguments and the one most likely to be repudiated by them. Far more persuasive to abortion advocates—and therefore far more important to their arguments—are the assumptions inherent in the worldview of hyper-individualism.
Perhaps the most astute analysis of individualism and modern American society is Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life written by sociologist Robert N. Bellah and his colleagues. Originally published in 1985, Habits of the Heart traces out two distinct types of individualism present in contemporary American culture: utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism. Each of these forms of individualism are foundational to the thinking of advocates for abortion-on-demand, despite the fact in most cases these ideas operate as hidden or unacknowledged assumptions, which abortion advocates themselves would be hard-pressed to identify or even fully justify in any formal manner.
Regardless of any inability to formally articulate or defend these subtle yet pervasive ideological assumptions, they nonetheless play a profound role both in shaping the contours of contemporary debate and in supplying abortion advocates with what they often take to be the self-evident moral grounds for their advocacy. Bellah, et al. rightly observe the utilitarian strain of individualism has been a dominant feature of American life since at least the nation’s founding. As Wilkens and Sanford succinctly note, “This version of individualism focuses on personal achievement and material success, and believes that the social good automatically follows from the individual pursuit of one’s own interests.”
As such, utilitarian individualism tends to be calculative in nature. The utilitarian individualist approaches the world and relationships with other people in terms of means-ends calculations of the potential personal pay-off that might result from pursuing a given course of action. In important ways, such people live lives of continuous risk management, carefully weighing opportunity costs and hazards against potential benefits to self as they go about navigating the unsure waters of everyday living. Though fundamentally self-focused, such people are not necessarily aggressive hedonists, submitting to every passing whim that comes along in an endless quest to get whatever they happen to want the moment they happen to want it. After all, such an approach is quite likely to irritate others and make unnecessary enemies—enemies who might then work to thwart the attaining of one’s own desires.
On the contrary, utilitarian individualism cautions against such short-sighted behavior, urging instead a more measured, socially-sensitive, and carefully ordered approach to achieving one’s own interests and maximizing one’s personal benefit—one guided by reason and science and universal secular values rather than simple emotion or irrational impulse. In contrast to utilitarian individualism, though only in terms of techniques rather than ends sought, is the second form of individualism Bellah, et al. identified: expressive individualism.
Unlike its utilitarian sibling, expressive individualism “worships the freedom to express our uniqueness against constraints and conventions.” Expressive individualism makes a supreme idol of personal autonomy and free choice, unfettered by any and all moral or social or authoritative constraints. Individual liberation and self-fulfillment are the central themes of expressive individualism. As Treat recently noted, “In a culture of [expressive] individualism . . . fulfillment is found not in relationships but through unhindered personal choice.” Likewise, Wilkens and Sanford observe, “Freedom becomes the rationale for reducing any responsibilities perceived as limitations to my personal autonomy or fulfillment, whether those responsibilities are social, moral, religious, or family duties.”
In the metaphysics of expressive individualism, then, the individual self is the foundational bedrock of the universe and as complete a realization of personal autonomy as possible is the essence of the good life. While expressive individualism grants little room in which obligation or responsibility to others or to a superordinate moral order might operate, it does acknowledge one small role for responsibility to play in the ethos of autonomous authenticity. That is, it does grant one is always responsible to oneself to make one’s own choices, follow one’s own heart, and be true to oneself by seeking out and becoming one’s most authentic (unique) self. Indeed, to do anything less than fully embrace the freedom to be and to do as one pleases is ultimately construed as an act of bad faith, a sorrowful symptom of the false consciousness oppressive social and moral systems necessarily impose on the huddled masses yearning only to be free of constraint.
As the philosopher Charles Taylor noted, according to the doctrines of expressive individualism, “each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside.” “To thine own self be true,” the modern individualist trumpets, echoing the suspect sentiments of Polonius—conveniently forgetting, it would seem, the character was in fact an inveterate liar and bootlicker whose advice was not to be trusted.
Personal choice, in the vision of modern hyper-individualism, is a sort of all-encompassing moral slogan. “‘Choice,’ that is bare choice as a prime value, irrespective of what it is a choice between, or in what domain,” Taylor points out, and as such, it has become “an all-trumping argument in weighty contexts.” Indeed, Taylor goes on to admit while he is willing to entertain the possibility there might be viable reasons against laws forbidding abortions, in particular, those in the first-trimester, “being in favor of choice as such has nothing to do with it.”
Indeed, he argues invoking personal choice as the primary rationale in such matters fundamentally trivializes the issues at hand because: “It trades on the favorable resonances of a word with is also invoked in other contexts: for instance, in advertising where it serves to invoke the sense that there are no barriers to my desires, the child-in the-candy-store feeling of hovering alongside a limitless field of pleasurable options. It is a word which occludes almost everything important: the sacrificed alternatives in a dilemmatic situation, and the real moral weight of the situation.” Extending the analysis further, Taylor continues: “And yet we find these words surfacing again and again, slogan terms like ‘freedom,’ ‘rights,’ ‘respect,’ ‘non-discrimination,’ and so on. Of course, none of these is empty in the way ‘choice’ is; but they too are often deployed as argument-stopping universals, without any consideration of the where and how of their application to the case at hand. This has something to do with the dynamic of our political process in many Western democracies (I’m not taking a stand one way or another on whether it’s better elsewhere); the way in which advocacy groups, media, political parties both generate and feed off a dumbed down political culture. . . .These favored terms acquire a Procrustean force.
Shallowness and dominance are two sides of the same coin.” The ethos of hyper-individualism, in both its utilitarian and expressivist versions, is on full display in both Marcus’s original column of March 9 and in her response to critics the following week. In her original essay, after noting some of the life-altering challenges that can come with bringing a child afflicted with Down syndrome into the world, Marcus boldly states that a Down syndrome child “was not the child I wanted. That was not the choice I would have made.” In her follow-up, Marcus acknowledges the sincerity of the moral convictions of one of her many critics, Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who welcomed a child with Down syndrome into her family. However, even here Marcus is only able to approach the issue of selective abortion on demand in terms of personal autonomy. While appreciating the depth of love Congresswoman McMorris Rodgers clearly feels for her Down syndrome son, Cole, such appreciation only stems from Marcus’s acknowledgement that the congresswoman’s decision to give birth to such a child was only “the right one for her and her family,” and, as such, “would not have been the right one for me and mine.”
Where McMorris Rodgers and her family saw an inescapable moral obligation not to kill unborn life or diminish the inherent human dignity of the child in the womb—no matter how constrained or physically imperfect—Marcus sees only the private calculation of individual utilitarian ends and the reduction of all moral matters to moments of individual choice and preference. Perhaps in the hope consensus can establish truth, Marcus spends much of her second column sharing with her readers the—for lack of a better word—testimonies of several women who support the stand she took regarding the necessity of a woman’s right to abort her child based solely on considerations of personal convenience and physical defect. Throughout these shared stories, the individualist ethic of unfettered choice and its attendant calculus of means and ends, of personal costs and benefits, resound and shape the narrative.
For example: “I have a 14-year-old son who is the light of my life.... After he was born, I tried again As the youngest in a large family, I hoped that my son would grow up with a sibling with whom to share experiences. But the pregnancy was a Down’s pregnancy. Without hesitation, I chose to terminate. Of course, I was sad. I mourned the loss of the possibility that pregnancy had held.... I look at my son’s life now—his joy, his freedom to stretch and try new things, his kindness and curiosity—and I look at my own life—the satisfaction I get from long walks with him and from challenging days at work—and I am sure that, for us, I made the right choice.”
The right choice—that is, given the personal satisfaction she now finds in a life unburdened by the inconveniences of caring for a physically or mentally defective child, a child less capable of stretching and trying the sorts of new things her 14-year-old son does, or even of taking long, satisfying walks with her. Ultimately, in the moral calculus of expressive and utilitarian individualism, a healthy son and the possibilities of personal growth and satisfaction dramatically outweighs the many inconveniences and obstacles to personal fulfillment attendant on parenting a child with Down syndrome. Thus, the choice is clear—at least for the one to whom individual choice is all there is.
There is, however, an irascible irony at the heart of hyper-individualism and the personal autonomy it venerates. For, in adducing our fundamental humanity exists in our capacity for making choices and in deciding for ourselves who and what we will be and how and for what we will live, hyper-individualism entails a willingness to deny the weakest and most vulnerable of us—the unborn—the right to make such choices. Or, even more importantly, the opportunity to see in reality there is far, far more to being fully human and being genuinely fulfilled than simply being free to choose whatsoever we wish. One cannot exalt oneself in the name of human dignity and respect while, at the same time, denying dignity and respect to other human beings simply because they are imperfect in some way, not quite what you had hoped they would be, or just don’t seem to fit very well into your previously made plans. Choice, absent a transcendent moral framework whose roots lie in more than just choice itself, ends only in nihilism—and nihilism is really only another name for a culture of death.
Roughly one month ago on March 9, 2018, noted Washington Post editorialist Ruth Marcus published a brief essay arguing against state legislation that would prohibit the selective abortion of unborn babies who had been diagnosed with Down syndrome. The editorial sparked considerable outrage from a variety of quarters. A great deal of it came from parents of Down syndrome-afflicted children, who found Marcus’s assertion that mothers of such children have a right to abort them for whatever reason they wish to be abhorrent and offensive. Critics seem to have been especially bothered by Marcus’s claim that afflicted children are necessarily a burden on parents and society, as well as condemned to a low quality of life because of the varied cognitive and physical constraints resulting from their medical condition. "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wouldve-aborted-a-fetus-with-down-syndrome-women-need-that-right/2018/03/09/3aaac364-23d6-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html?utm_term=.f84b36d82432"
One week later, Marcus doubled-down on her earlier editorial, offering readers brief excerpts from a number of women who had written her in support of her position and sharing with the world their positive feelings about their own choices to abort their own children who had been diagnosed with Down syndrome. I, too, penned a short essay in ("https://wheatley.byu.edu/abortion-down-syndrome-and- eugenics/"), to which this additional short essay is a companion, pointing out Marcus’s argument reflected the fundamental ethos of eugenics—that is, there is some life that is “unworthy of life.”
However, the eugenics impulse to eradicate Lebensunwertes Leben in the utopic quest for a better world populated by smarter, stronger, and more beautiful specimens of the species is only one source undergirding the utilitarian reasoning of abortion-on-demand advocates like Marcus. In fact, it may well be the least influential source of their arguments and the one most likely to be repudiated by them. Far more persuasive to abortion advocates—and therefore far more important to their arguments—are the assumptions inherent in the worldview of hyper-individualism.
Perhaps the most astute analysis of individualism and modern American society is Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life written by sociologist Robert N. Bellah and his colleagues. Originally published in 1985, Habits of the Heart traces out two distinct types of individualism present in contemporary American culture: utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism. Each of these forms of individualism are foundational to the thinking of advocates for abortion-on-demand, despite the fact in most cases these ideas operate as hidden or unacknowledged assumptions, which abortion advocates themselves would be hard-pressed to identify or even fully justify in any formal manner.
Regardless of any inability to formally articulate or defend these subtle yet pervasive ideological assumptions, they nonetheless play a profound role both in shaping the contours of contemporary debate and in supplying abortion advocates with what they often take to be the self-evident moral grounds for their advocacy. Bellah, et al. rightly observe the utilitarian strain of individualism has been a dominant feature of American life since at least the nation’s founding. As Wilkens and Sanford succinctly note, “This version of individualism focuses on personal achievement and material success, and believes that the social good automatically follows from the individual pursuit of one’s own interests.”
As such, utilitarian individualism tends to be calculative in nature. The utilitarian individualist approaches the world and relationships with other people in terms of means-ends calculations of the potential personal pay-off that might result from pursuing a given course of action. In important ways, such people live lives of continuous risk management, carefully weighing opportunity costs and hazards against potential benefits to self as they go about navigating the unsure waters of everyday living. Though fundamentally self-focused, such people are not necessarily aggressive hedonists, submitting to every passing whim that comes along in an endless quest to get whatever they happen to want the moment they happen to want it. After all, such an approach is quite likely to irritate others and make unnecessary enemies—enemies who might then work to thwart the attaining of one’s own desires.
On the contrary, utilitarian individualism cautions against such short-sighted behavior, urging instead a more measured, socially-sensitive, and carefully ordered approach to achieving one’s own interests and maximizing one’s personal benefit—one guided by reason and science and universal secular values rather than simple emotion or irrational impulse. In contrast to utilitarian individualism, though only in terms of techniques rather than ends sought, is the second form of individualism Bellah, et al. identified: expressive individualism.
Unlike its utilitarian sibling, expressive individualism “worships the freedom to express our uniqueness against constraints and conventions.” Expressive individualism makes a supreme idol of personal autonomy and free choice, unfettered by any and all moral or social or authoritative constraints. Individual liberation and self-fulfillment are the central themes of expressive individualism. As Treat recently noted, “In a culture of [expressive] individualism . . . fulfillment is found not in relationships but through unhindered personal choice.” Likewise, Wilkens and Sanford observe, “Freedom becomes the rationale for reducing any responsibilities perceived as limitations to my personal autonomy or fulfillment, whether those responsibilities are social, moral, religious, or family duties.”
In the metaphysics of expressive individualism, then, the individual self is the foundational bedrock of the universe and as complete a realization of personal autonomy as possible is the essence of the good life. While expressive individualism grants little room in which obligation or responsibility to others or to a superordinate moral order might operate, it does acknowledge one small role for responsibility to play in the ethos of autonomous authenticity. That is, it does grant one is always responsible to oneself to make one’s own choices, follow one’s own heart, and be true to oneself by seeking out and becoming one’s most authentic (unique) self. Indeed, to do anything less than fully embrace the freedom to be and to do as one pleases is ultimately construed as an act of bad faith, a sorrowful symptom of the false consciousness oppressive social and moral systems necessarily impose on the huddled masses yearning only to be free of constraint.
As the philosopher Charles Taylor noted, according to the doctrines of expressive individualism, “each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside.” “To thine own self be true,” the modern individualist trumpets, echoing the suspect sentiments of Polonius—conveniently forgetting, it would seem, the character was in fact an inveterate liar and bootlicker whose advice was not to be trusted.
Personal choice, in the vision of modern hyper-individualism, is a sort of all-encompassing moral slogan. “‘Choice,’ that is bare choice as a prime value, irrespective of what it is a choice between, or in what domain,” Taylor points out, and as such, it has become “an all-trumping argument in weighty contexts.” Indeed, Taylor goes on to admit while he is willing to entertain the possibility there might be viable reasons against laws forbidding abortions, in particular, those in the first-trimester, “being in favor of choice as such has nothing to do with it.”
Indeed, he argues invoking personal choice as the primary rationale in such matters fundamentally trivializes the issues at hand because: “It trades on the favorable resonances of a word with is also invoked in other contexts: for instance, in advertising where it serves to invoke the sense that there are no barriers to my desires, the child-in the-candy-store feeling of hovering alongside a limitless field of pleasurable options. It is a word which occludes almost everything important: the sacrificed alternatives in a dilemmatic situation, and the real moral weight of the situation.” Extending the analysis further, Taylor continues: “And yet we find these words surfacing again and again, slogan terms like ‘freedom,’ ‘rights,’ ‘respect,’ ‘non-discrimination,’ and so on. Of course, none of these is empty in the way ‘choice’ is; but they too are often deployed as argument-stopping universals, without any consideration of the where and how of their application to the case at hand. This has something to do with the dynamic of our political process in many Western democracies (I’m not taking a stand one way or another on whether it’s better elsewhere); the way in which advocacy groups, media, political parties both generate and feed off a dumbed down political culture. . . .These favored terms acquire a Procrustean force.
Shallowness and dominance are two sides of the same coin.” The ethos of hyper-individualism, in both its utilitarian and expressivist versions, is on full display in both Marcus’s original column of March 9 and in her response to critics the following week. In her original essay, after noting some of the life-altering challenges that can come with bringing a child afflicted with Down syndrome into the world, Marcus boldly states that a Down syndrome child “was not the child I wanted. That was not the choice I would have made.” In her follow-up, Marcus acknowledges the sincerity of the moral convictions of one of her many critics, Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who welcomed a child with Down syndrome into her family. However, even here Marcus is only able to approach the issue of selective abortion on demand in terms of personal autonomy. While appreciating the depth of love Congresswoman McMorris Rodgers clearly feels for her Down syndrome son, Cole, such appreciation only stems from Marcus’s acknowledgement that the congresswoman’s decision to give birth to such a child was only “the right one for her and her family,” and, as such, “would not have been the right one for me and mine.”
Where McMorris Rodgers and her family saw an inescapable moral obligation not to kill unborn life or diminish the inherent human dignity of the child in the womb—no matter how constrained or physically imperfect—Marcus sees only the private calculation of individual utilitarian ends and the reduction of all moral matters to moments of individual choice and preference. Perhaps in the hope consensus can establish truth, Marcus spends much of her second column sharing with her readers the—for lack of a better word—testimonies of several women who support the stand she took regarding the necessity of a woman’s right to abort her child based solely on considerations of personal convenience and physical defect. Throughout these shared stories, the individualist ethic of unfettered choice and its attendant calculus of means and ends, of personal costs and benefits, resound and shape the narrative.
For example: “I have a 14-year-old son who is the light of my life.... After he was born, I tried again As the youngest in a large family, I hoped that my son would grow up with a sibling with whom to share experiences. But the pregnancy was a Down’s pregnancy. Without hesitation, I chose to terminate. Of course, I was sad. I mourned the loss of the possibility that pregnancy had held.... I look at my son’s life now—his joy, his freedom to stretch and try new things, his kindness and curiosity—and I look at my own life—the satisfaction I get from long walks with him and from challenging days at work—and I am sure that, for us, I made the right choice.”
The right choice—that is, given the personal satisfaction she now finds in a life unburdened by the inconveniences of caring for a physically or mentally defective child, a child less capable of stretching and trying the sorts of new things her 14-year-old son does, or even of taking long, satisfying walks with her. Ultimately, in the moral calculus of expressive and utilitarian individualism, a healthy son and the possibilities of personal growth and satisfaction dramatically outweighs the many inconveniences and obstacles to personal fulfillment attendant on parenting a child with Down syndrome. Thus, the choice is clear—at least for the one to whom individual choice is all there is.
There is, however, an irascible irony at the heart of hyper-individualism and the personal autonomy it venerates. For, in adducing our fundamental humanity exists in our capacity for making choices and in deciding for ourselves who and what we will be and how and for what we will live, hyper-individualism entails a willingness to deny the weakest and most vulnerable of us—the unborn—the right to make such choices. Or, even more importantly, the opportunity to see in reality there is far, far more to being fully human and being genuinely fulfilled than simply being free to choose whatsoever we wish. One cannot exalt oneself in the name of human dignity and respect while, at the same time, denying dignity and respect to other human beings simply because they are imperfect in some way, not quite what you had hoped they would be, or just don’t seem to fit very well into your previously made plans. Choice, absent a transcendent moral framework whose roots lie in more than just choice itself, ends only in nihilism—and nihilism is really only another name for a culture of death.