VATICAN CITY, July 7, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a recent column in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, writer Giulia Galeotti pointed out the link between the eugenics movement and the use of amniocentesis to abort children diagnosed with disabilities – a dangerous “manipulation” that attempts to create a “eugenic utopia.”
“The widespread mentality of today is that amniocentesis constitutes responsible behavior,” writes Galeotti.
But according to Galeotti, Western society has “returned in fact to a eugenic ideology rooted in the 18th century.” Through amniocentesis and therapeutic abortion, modern society “intervenes” through “technical and scientific capability” in human life, all “in the name of progress and of health.”
Only a minority now regard such practices as “manipulation” or believe “contemporary eugenics constitutes a danger,” says Galeotti.
The link between 18th century and modern eugenic ideologies is the notion of “separation,” says the columnist. Eugenics seeks to negate “any type of imperfection” by dividing mankind into classes: “Class A (with the right to be born and live) and Class B (who are denied those rights).”
Ironically, however, in Western countries, measures to support the disabled exist alongside support for therapeutic abortion as “responsible.”
“The majority of Western countries, in fact, have legislation that protects and supports disability in ways previously unknown,” she says. “Accepted and assisted like never before in the public sphere on the normative level, those who are disabled however are refused in varying ways in the private arena.”
“Suffice it to consider that the choice of refusing sick children through abortion was the first objective of the movements born at the end of the 1800s. The root of such neo-Malthusian movements was not the achievement of freedom of individual choice but a eugenic utopia.”
Galeotti concludes that a “common thread” ties 18th century norms, so despicable to modern society, with the modern ideology so often held of “responsible behavior.”
“A close look, in fact, reveals the common thread which ties the choice of families who sold their children as circus freaks and those who shut up people unable to provide for themselves in institutions, the forced sterilization of the unfit and feeble, the decision of many celebrated personalities to hide disability in their family and finally the most definite ‘separation,’ so-called therapeutic abortion.”
Giulia Galeotti’s full column can be found here.