So I’m in the hotel room, watching a little thingy about little people. One of the dwarf women was asked whether she would consider having a child now that the technology exists to screen out the fetuses that have inherited the disabilities of the parent.
And what did she say? “At what point do we decide that a fetus has too many imperfections? If we screened out lives because they weren’t perfect, nobody would be alive.”
A very good point. Big wisdom from a little person. There is something I’ve been hearing lately that really disturbs me: this whole ‘quality of life’ thing. I’ll describe it to you as I know it: If a life is not worth living, it shouldn’t be lived. And its advocates will never leave it at that. No, they’ll tell you the worst story of a particular old fellow, wasting away, draining resources, wanting to die, because this particular obscures the flawed universal with which their argument began. But a particular cannot be considered without reference to a universal. It’s not that this shouldn’t be done, but that it can’t be done. If anybody figures out how, tell me and I’ll have a senior thesis.
Anyone want to help my brother out with his senior thesis? And in case you're wondering about the title of this entry, here's my brother's definition:
to seminarian-alize: to take something and comform it to the life of a seminarian;
to seminarian-aliz-ify: to take something and comform it to the life of a seminarian and make it much more complicated than it needs to be.
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