So that’s clear: it is absolutely unacceptable for anyone with eugenicist views to have a position of the slightest influence within British politics.
Last week, a 27-year-old Downing Street adviser, Andrew Sabisky, was forced out when it emerged that six years earlier he had advocated, among other disturbing proposals, various forms of genetic selection based on predicted IQ.
‘Eugenics are about selecting ‘for’ good things. Intelligence is largely inherited and it correlates with better outcomes — income, lower mental illness,’ he wrote.
But the furore was really directed at the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, and not just because Sabisky was one of the ‘geeks and weirdos’ he had sought to bring into the policy-making nexus.
Last week, a 27-year-old Downing Street adviser, Andrew Sabisky (pictured), was forced out when it emerged that six years earlier he had advocated, among other disturbing proposals, various forms of genetic selection based on predicted IQ
Thus, last Thursday, the Guardian ran a front page ‘exclusive’ headlined: ‘Cummings supported selecting embryos for IQ’. The message was clear: if Sabisky was regarded as beyond the pale, so should the man who took him on at No 10, especially as, according to the paper, they have similar views.
Fanatical
Of course, the Guardian (and the Left in general) has the mother of all grudges against Cummings, since he was the ferociously focused strategist behind the Conservatives’ election triumph.
Hidden in plain sight, however, is the most astounding hypocrisy. Eugenics is practised in this country, funded by the taxpayer, and supported — though by no means only so — by those who would regard themselves as being on the Left.
I am referring to the law governing the termination of pregnancy, and the fact it actively discriminates against those unborn children who are likely to have subnormal IQs or physical disabilities.
In so-called ‘healthy’ pregnancies, abortion is legal only up to 24 weeks. But if the unborn child is thought to be at ‘substantial risk of having a disability’, then termination is legal right up to the moment of natural birth at 40 weeks.
And the NHS has a vast screening programme designed to discover such disabilities. It is principally designed to detect those with Down’s syndrome, far and away the commonest form of chromosomal abnormality (and not a disease, however much this is ignorantly repeated).
I take a particular interest in this because my younger daughter Domenica, now 24, has Down’s syndrome. She is (I admit to being biased) a wonderful young woman: kind, thoughtful, incessantly cheerful — and often hilariously funny.
Yet when she was born, we were all but told to write her off.
The furore was really directed at the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings (pictured), and not just because Sabisky was one of the ‘geeks and weirdos’ he had sought to bring into the policy-making nexus
We had chosen not to have ‘the tests’, but when, shortly after her birth, I revealed that, the nation’s favourite ex-nurse, the late agony aunt and broadcaster Claire Rayner, wrote an article attacking ‘The Lawsons’ for behaving ‘selfishly’ because of the ‘cost to society’ of people such as Domenica: ‘People who are not yet parents should ask if they have the right to inflict such burdens on others.’
There you have the classic eugenicist argument, from a greatly admired public figure who was frank enough to blurt out what is normally covered up.
Amazingly, Rayner was a patron of the Down’s Syndrome Association. Even more amazingly, she was surprised when the Association asked her to resign.
Or perhaps it was not so amazing.
Some years later — in 2008 — the Royal Mail produced a 50p stamp honouring Marie Stopes. This was to recognise her role in opening Britain’s first family planning clinic in 1921: the venture bearing her name now calls itself ‘the UK’s leading provider of reproductive health services’.
Yet Stopes — as the Royal Mail must have been aware, assuming they had conducted a modicum of research — was a fanatical, self-proclaimed eugenicist.
She left the bulk of her fortune to the Eugenics Society, a body that campaigned for ‘racial purity’. She attended the Nazi-organised Berlin congress on ‘population science’ in 1935 and subsequently sent a volume of love poems to Adolf Hitler.
Stopes applied her eugenic beliefs to her own family. She cut her son Harry out of her will for marrying a woman, Mary, who was short-sighted.
Stopes wrote: ‘She has an inherited disease of the eyes which not only makes her wear hideous glasses so that it is horrid to look at her, but the awful cost will carry on and I have the horror of our line being so contaminated and little children with the misery of glasses . . . Mary and Harry are quite callous about both the wrong to their children, the wrong to my family and the eugenic crime.’
I take a particular interest in this because my younger daughter Domenica (left), now 24, has Down’s syndrome. She is (I admit to being biased) a wonderful young woman: kind, thoughtful, incessantly cheerful — and often hilariously funny
Callous
It is clear which member of the family was truly callous.
Stopes would have been delighted by the news that the Department of Health is planning to introduce a new form of ‘non-invasive’ pre-natal testing which is thought to be more accurate than previous methods of maternal blood-testing to detect Down’s syndrome.
When this was announced, a respectable newspaper declared enthusiastically that this would lead to ‘the elimination’ of Down’s syndrome.
The Dutch geneticist Hans Galjaard, who has written papers on this new form of screening, was asked: ‘If it were made possible, do you think Down’s syndrome should disappear from society?’
He replied: ‘Yes, that was one of my motivations.’
That this is thought unexceptionable in a political culture that simultaneously declares ‘eugenics’ to be beyond the pale reveals cognitive dissonance on a breath-taking scale.
There are campaigners who are trying to expose this.
Yesterday’s Sunday Times reported that lawyers acting for two families, and backed by the group Don’t Screen Us Out and the actress Sally Phillips (whose son Olly has Down’s), had written to the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, seeking a change in the abortion law, to limit termination at 24 weeks for all non-fatal disabilities.
The report made clear how the medical profession regularly puts pressure on mothers to take advantage of the law to abort unborn babies with Down’s right up to 40 weeks.
The nation’s favourite ex-nurse, the late agony aunt and broadcaster Claire Rayner (pictured), wrote an article attacking ‘The Lawsons’ for behaving ‘selfishly’ because of the ‘cost to society’ of people such as Domenica
Horror
Cheryl Bilsborrow, from Preston, whose two-year-old son Hector has Down’s, told the paper she was ‘pressured’ by a nurse to have an abortion days before she gave birth to Hector. ‘I just said to her: ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’ ‘
And where does the alleged eugenicist at the heart of No 10 stand on this?
Dominic Cummings has on several occasions given donations to a charity set up by my wife and named after my daughter: Team Domenica, which aims to get young adults with conditions such as Down’s and autism into paid employment.
Cheryl Bilsborrow, from Preston, whose two-year-old son Hector has Down’s, told The Sunday Times she was ‘pressured’ by a nurse to have an abortion days before she gave birth to Hector
In fact, Cummings’ mother was for many years a special needs teacher. When I asked his wife, Mary, whether he was influenced by his mother’s work, she replied: ‘No, not necessarily, but they are similar characters: they are compassionate.’
This, I realise, will be hard for the Guardian to believe.
But it’s worth looking at the words the newspaper quoted to justify its headline that Cummings ‘supported selecting embryos for IQ’.
He had written of his concern that if the myriad genes for intelligence could be identified, ‘there is no reason why rich people will not select the egg that has the higher prediction for IQ. If the poor cannot do the same, then the rich could quickly embed advantages and society could become not only more unequal but also based on biological classes.
In 2008 the Royal Mail produced a 50p stamp honouring Marie Stopes (pictured). Yet Stopes — as the Royal Mail must have been aware, assuming they had conducted a modicum of research — was a fanatical, self-proclaimed eugenicist
‘One response is that if this sort of thing does become possible, then a national health system should fund everybody to do this.’
In other words, Cummings’ fear was that the super-rich would use genetics to gain a biological advantage over the poor. His motive — though I think the whole business is borderline bonkers — was actually to prevent the emergence of some sort of eugenic elite.
And I know he shares the view of the Don’t Screen Us Out campaigners: that the discriminatory abortion of allegedly ‘unhealthy’ unborn babies up to the moment of natural birth is not based on a genuine care for those with ‘handicaps’, but the opposite — horror.
I don’t mourn the exit of Andrew Sabisky from Downing Street. But how bizarre that this junior backroom boffin is regarded as a dangerous eugenicist, when Marie Stopes is honoured on our stamps and the NHS has an officially sanctioned policy to accelerate the weeding-out of those deemed biologically unfit.