'Community should oppose embryo bill'

By Simone Aspis - Tuesday 22nd 2008f April 2008


We were somewhat dismayed to learn that our Jewish Leaders are giving their full support for the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill especially when there is a strong Yiddish traditional of valuing and respecting all human beings equally regardless of personal characteristics.

This Bill will bring back the Nazi’s Eugentics programme as in Clause 14, it will become a legal obligation upon the Fertility Treatment Licence holders to disregard disabled embryos, where non disabled ones exist. This is likely to be followed by mass programmes to remove embryos who are likely to be born disabled from the gene pool. Whilst, the clause 14 is limited to serious disability – would someone like to define it – as Government has left this blank. Doctors and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority have given permission for abortions or embryo selection to avoid babies being born with a cleft pallet and even a squint!

Disability, whether that is serious or not is ‘socially constructed’, meaning that we decide what medical conditions are or are not considered as disabling. It was not long ago where homosexuality was considered as a mental illness which could result in being sectioned and detained under the Mental Health Act. And where many unskilled paid jobs were undertaken by many people with learning difficulties, little medical attention was given to these individuals. But this is now all changing where there is heavy medical intervention and questions being raised about resources and such individuals’ contributions to the economic wellbeing of society. And a day does not go by where a grouping of personal characteristics or genes or DNA coding which diveiates from a some kind of notion of ‘normality’ is given a medical condition label – which can be screened out at a later date. We have become a society where we only tolerate difference if it can be explained as a medical condition which can hopefully be cured or eradicated from society.

The implications for disabled people should never be underestimated. What kind of message are we sending out to disabled people with a medical condition which can be screened out and disregarded – you are better off dead than alive? And that resources should be passed over to medical research to find the golden cure instead of finding ways of supporting such individuals to live their lives with dignity within the community. There will be increasingly pressure on couples to go for embryo screening in order to remove the possibility of bringing up a disabled child as in the case of prenatal testing for Downs Syndrome and spina bifida. The ‘bad’ news is that disability will never be removed, because what differences we could tolerate today, will become the ones which are intolerable tomorrow. Do we want to live in a society where human beings are worth more than others or where we want to give birth to children all with similar personal characteristics or groupings of genes or DNA code?

The Government brought in this awful Eugentics clause to avoid deaf couples from deliberately choosing an embryo which will develop into a deaf baby like it happened in the USA. We do not advocate the deliberate choosing of either embryos which will become disabled or non disabled individuals because we hold the view that all human beings should have both equal rights to life and are afforded equal protection under any domestic or international legislation and treaties.

Simone Aspis is the United Kingdom’s Disabled Peoples Council’s Parliamentary and Campaigns Worker and a member of the Not Dead Yet Campaign. UKDPC is an disabled peoples rights organisation which is run by disabled people, representing over 100 group members. I am disabled by society, in particularly the Jewish one and have a number of genetic conditions which could be relevant to this Bill. Not Dead Yet campaign is a network of disabled people campaigning against any attempt to undermine their equal rights to life by inappropriate and unethical use of medical interventions.

Website address : http://www.uksdpc.org/