It is so sad as however not matter they believe they are wanting to help humanity, they cannot realized or admit is a mistake.
They do not have the right for this.. In the time of Hitler no law stopped this sort of human experiments and now they are trying to make this legal!.

How far they want to go?.. at the end of the day… WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE anyway.. That is the only certain true. And playing the game of scientist does not take them far.

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

One question that a halfway decent journalist could have asked is what happens if ALL of a couple’s fertilised embryo’s are deaf? (Or indeed disabled/having a health condition.) In such an instance, does this mean that all the embryos are destroyed and the prospective parents denied IVF? Surely they would be given the choice of continuing with the process, just as a pregnant woman who discovers that her unborn child has a particular condition can choose whether to terminate or continue?

And if they retain the right to choose the outcome in an all-embryo’s-the-same scenario, why not in every situation?

I can see that the law-makers might have a genuine concern about the motives of someone who deliberately chose to implant a severely disabled embryo. But, quite apart from whether deafness falls into the category of ‘disabled’ (and no, I don’t believe it does), let alone ’severely disabled’, immediate and automatic removal of the prospective parents’ rights is not the only possible response.

Nobody who finds themselves in the situation of needing IVF is going to take any aspect of parenthood or of the process of achieving it lightly. It seems bizarre and cruel to subject IVF parents to a different and more restrictive set of rules from those that any other citizen faces.

I am not deaf, but I certainly believe being deaf is not a disability to the deaf and if this bill passes as written, this is the start of the end of civilization.

However, for “abnormality” selection comes unto its own, and screening out is allowed. However selection is one way: can screen for hearing embryos, and they are allowed to survive. Deaf embryos must be destroyed.

This has not come from deaf people, but a case of “Hearing demand right to designer hearing children … Deaf people forced to respond”.

I do not have problems about selection! Selection is a trait of evolution. An animal that select the most attractive mate is also mating with their genes. Genes is just another way to describe looks, hair and skin colour, height, muscle tone, and ability to have children. This process is to ensure survival of the fittest, or not.

Deaf adults do select other Deaf adults as preferred mates today. It is not necessary for IVF to support couples to select a specific genes, these genes are already chosen more favourably. Also how do you separate some genes from others such as height from dwarfism, myopia from blindness , inability to sing from deafness, or athleticism from paraplegia.

What is essential is the issue of choice? I have a choice as to who wants to mate with me (as long as the partner wants to mate with me too!). What is the difference between intentionally selecting a Deaf partner and selecting a gamete with the gene for deafness? In my eyes, none.

Our Government wishes to interfere with this choice and remove the parent’s option of selecting a child that they wish to bring up if IVF treatment was their only option. They are interfering with the process of natural selection. We are returning to the days of Sparta when children were selected to favour certain characteristics above others.

In reality, every individual practice some form of personal choice in favouring a certain mate, but when that choice becomes institutionalised; it is eugenics. Our institution is delving into an arena they are not qualified to delve into - this is not the arena of medics but of philosophy, ethics, human rights and civil liberties. The new Bill says more about the state of our society than it does about deaf people themselves. My question to all of those supporters of eugenics: how dare you judge us? who qualifies you to be our judge, jury and executioner?

In short, these choice of gamete is not the business of anyone except those who reproduce. The choice of one way or another does not further disable or qualify society; children are just born. Delving into genetics to influence the choice of offspring should not be in the hands of a medical professional (or paraprofessionals); all life has a right to exist and contribute to society in their own ways.

Or perhaps the representatives of society, and their popular critics, are too egocentric to realise this.
John