I am a disabled man and have campaigned against eugenics since the 1990s. I would like to support this campaign. I agree with you that Clause14 should be scrapped. But I am angry about the way you are campaigning. I agree with reproductive freedom when it doesn’t mean the same as ‘designer baby’ consumer eugenics.

I know Deaf people are angry about oppression. But you must think about the effect of what you say and do.

The problem is in the idea of reproductive choice. It looks good. But in the last 50 years “reproductive choice” has been used to stop disabled people being born. That is the real eugenics today.

You must decide: do you support selection of human beings according to their characteristics or not? I don’t, for two reasons:

(1) This makes human beings the same as objects – you can choose what they look like and what they can do. This undermines parent-child relationships. It also undermines human rights.

(2) It allows people to use prejudice to decide who gets born. We see this prejudice in eugenics and also India and China, where many parents choose abortion when the foetus is a girl, because they only want a boy.

Do you really want parents to be able to choose? If so, your campaign is simply saying that it is discriminatory for deaf people not to have the same consumer eugenics rights as everyone else. If that is what you want you deserve all the criticism you get.

If you don’t think selection is OK, your are saying: ‘We don’t like the bad thing you’re doing, but if you’re going to do it, it is discriminatory not to let us do the same thing for our own purposes’. This is not a good argument.

You have got yourselves into this situation, where your campaign against state eugenics is actually encouraging free-market eugenics by simply pursuing your own narrow interests. You should work together with disabled people, who have been campaigning against eugenics for a long time. I suppose you have not done this is because you are so keen to insist that you are not disabled.

If you want to understand more of what I’m saying, and how to get out of this mess, I have written a longer and more detailed version of this post. Please email me at david.king@hgalert.org. It talks about other eugenic aspects of the Bill and what Clause 14 actually means.

David King