Chapter 4: The Better Babies Story
I was thirty-nine years old, lying on my gynecologist’s table and watching my biological clock tick away. Dr. Fox, an infertility specialist, was trying his best to help my husband and me become pregnant. This would be Ken’s and my third checkup to see if any of our quick-get-the-thermometer-stand-on-your-head gymnastics paid off with the longed-for words from my doctor, “Joni, you’re pregnant!”
It wasn’t to be.
On the way home from the doctor’s office, I broke down. Never had such gut-wrenching, heart-twisting sobs flooded from my soul. I felt devastated. For a brief few hours, I panicked. There must be a way. I have to become pregnant. Surely there must be an option, a new treatment, something Ken and I haven’t tried!
Now, years later, I realize I had been consumed by my passion to have a child. When a natural instinct becomes that strong and overwhelming, it has become an obsession. In today’s cultural climate (a climate that can offer a childless couple an amazing smorgasbord of reproductive options), it can become an idol. The creative authority of God gets shoved aside, replaced by the idol of reproductive technology. Isaiah 2:8 – 9 describes our society well: “Their land is full of idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their fingers have made. So man will be brought low and mankind humbled.”
It’s been almost two decades since my visit to Dr. Fox. The urgent desire for children has dissipated, supplanted by the many happy relationships Ken and I enjoy with boys and girls of all ages. I look at today’s couples who restlessly explore the salad bar of technological advancements — each treatment and procedure more dangerous and daring than the last — and I realize it’s no longer a matter of “We want a child”; it’s “We want the perfect child.”
We never feel satisfied when beguiled by idols. We become enslaved by the very thing we desperately seek and, in so doing, we lose our bearings. We lose what it truly means to “have a baby.”
Our land is full of idols. We’ve become entranced by the technological work of our hands and convinced that with each advance, humankind is being exalted. Little do we realize . . . we are about to be brought low. About to be humbled.
It may be the only way to save humankind.
JONI
Back in the middle of the nineteenth century, while Charles Darwin was writing about the “survival of the fittest” as the driving force behind his idea of evolution, his cousin, Francis Galton, came up with another idea: getting superior men and women to marry each other so that their children would be “fitter.” Eugenics literally means “good genes,” and at the beginning of the twentieth century this way of thinking used the new science of genetics to build a movement for the breeding of better people. It fast became one of the dominant movements in America in the first part of the century. This chapter tells a sad story we all need to remember one hundred years later.
The goal of eugenics is to have healthy, attractive, gifted babies in order to have better, more productive, and happier adults. Of course, some problems with this approach seem obvious. Healthy, attractive, gifted people are, in fact, no more likely to be happy than disabled, ugly, or dumb people. If happiness is the goal, this is not the best way to go. It’s well known that the genetic abnormality known as Down syndrome produces people who are generally happier than the rest of us. It is also the case that cats are generally much more content than their owners, but we don’t all want to be cats. The search for “happiness” has always eluded us. But eugenics was driven even more by the idea that the rest of us will be happier (and wealthier) without “inferior” people around.
When most people hear the word eugenics they think of the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s and the terrible crimes committed by the Nazis. But the Nazis did not invent eugenics; they simply built on ideas from America. In his powerful book The War against the Weak, Edwin
Someone Special
I’m writing part of this chapter in a coffee house in my hometown of Deerfield, Illinois. As I write, I watch a young woman wipe down tables. She is here every morning. She chatters quietly to herself as she works, and smiles if someone passes her. Occasionally she pauses to talk with a friend. It occurs to me that there is something very appropriate in my writing this chapter here and now. This young woman has Down syndrome, a genetic abnormality that causes mental impairment and has some physical features (in the past it has been called “mongolism”). Some people with Down syndrome can lead mostly independent lives; others cannot. A wonderful French film called The Eighth Day stars actors with Down syndrome. People often abort babies with Down syndrome, although Down syndrome people are generally happier than the rest of us.
NIGEL CAMERON
Black, a best-selling writer on the Holocaust, takes us back in depressing detail to the enormously popular eugenics industry that caught the diseased imagination of the United States in the first part of the last century. His subtitle says it all: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race.
Black explains how the eugenicists got organized with funding from the great philanthropists of the day (Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harriman):
In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation’s social service agencies and associations.
This project was known as the “Eugenics Record Office,” which made it sound official — and it built card indexes based on the private information of millions of Americans, much of it obtained without the subjects’ permission from hospitals and other public institutions. Here is an example of how it worked in the state of Virginia:
A single day in the 1930s was typical. The Montgomery County sheriff drove up unannounced onto Brush Mountain and began one of his many raids against the hill families considered socially inadequate. More precisely, these hill families were deemed “unfit,” that is, unfit to exist in nature. On this day the Montgomery County sheriff grabbed six brothers from one family, bundled them into several vehicles and then disappeared down the road. Earlier, the sheriff had come for the boys’ sister. Another time, deputies snared two cousins. . . .
These mountain people were systematically sterilized under a Virginia law compelling such operations for those ruled unfit.
Black’s source for this particular story? A former Montgomery County supervisor, many years later. In his book, Black chronicles the history of the Eugenics Record Office and the other institutions of American eugenics. He demonstrates US leadership in the worldwide movement and the support of American statesmen for the project: it was the US Secretary of State who sent out the invitations to the first worldwide eugenics conferences. He sets out in damning detail the linkages between foundations such as the Rockefellers’ and not only American eugenics but the eugenics research of the Nazis themselves. Just before the outbreak of war in 1939, Josef Mengele’s university boss, to whom he later sent his samples and records from Auschwitz, was still supported by American foundation money.
Eugenics was an idea whose time seemed to have come in the early twentieth century. But since the Nazis adopted it and took it to its logical conclusion, it soon disappeared from respectable company. Black notes that “eugenics” quickly morphed into “genetics.” Societies and journals changed their names to this more “scientific” term as eugenics became unpopular. Black warns of a “newgenics” to come, as the Carrie Buck mindset makes a comeback in the biotech age of far more sophisticated technology.
But who was Carrie Buck?
THE CARRIE BUCK STORY
One key to eugenics is to see it as a search for what might be considered “other people’s happiness.” The child with Down syndrome is rarely the center of discussion once the debate begins. Typically, concern surrounds the family members, caretakers, and others who are presumably burdened by the one who has yet to die or who was born with some type of physical deficiency. Disabled people who don’t meet the current criteria of “attractiveness” embarrass other people. They cause inconvenience. There may be an associated financial burden. These are the motivations that lie behind the infamous decision of the US Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell.
Carrie Buck was born out of wedlock in 1906 to Emma Harlow, who was then married to Frank Buck. Carrie had two half-siblings born to two different fathers. At four years of age Carrie was given up for adoption. Until she reached the sixth grade, Carrie showed no signs of mental impairments. At puberty, according to record, Carrie began to cause trouble. When she was eighteen, she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, and Carrie’s adoptive family requested that she be institutionalized. So, in January 1924, eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck was committed to a state institution because the Juvenile and Domestic Court of Charlottesville ruled her to be “epileptic and feeble-minded.” At the institution, Carrie’s primary physician, Dr. Albert S. Priddy, signed an order for her mandatory sterilization. Her appointed guardian took the case to court. Judge Bennett T. Gorgon of the Circuit Court of Amherst County ruled in April of 1925 that the sterilization of Carrie Buck was constitutional. The guardian appealed the ruling and the case then went to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. The decision to move forward with the sterilization was upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, and the appeal continued all the way to the US Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell provides a telling display of the American eugenics movement at work. The defense argued that Carrie Buck should be involuntarily sterilized because it was better for society if her hereditary traits were not passed on to another generation. Descriptions of Carrie Buck included things such as having a life of “immorality, prostitution, and untruthfulness.” During the case lawyers argued that Carrie could not sustain herself, and since she already had an illegitimate child whom she could not care for, her ability to reproduce should be terminated.
Documentation concerning the life of Carrie’s mother also made it into the case. Lawyers pointed out that Emma Harlow’s life also had a record of immorality, prostitution, and untruthfulness. These traits were attributed to Carrie as “feeblemindedness.” The Eugenics Record Office tried to offer a genetic account of her “feeblemindedness” as a trait passed down through her mother. At one point during the trial, an expert witness stated of Carrie Buck, her mother, and child that “these people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” On May 2, 1927, the Court approved the sterilization of Carrie Buck, upholding the Virginia statute and other state laws that deemed compulsory sterilization constitutional in people considered genetically unfit. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — by far the most famous judge of his day —delivered the opinion of the court: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The eugenicists could not have been more pleased with the outcome. It not only demonstrated that their view agreed with the Constitution, it also greatly encouraged the use of existing sterilization statutes and the passing of more.
The IQ tests used on Carrie Buck have long since been discredited. Little evidence suggests that Carrie and her family came up seriously short in intellect. It seems clear that Carrie and her mother got locked away in institutions because they did not conform; people simply did not approve of their behavior. Sadly, Carrie Buck’s daughter, Vivian, died of an intestinal disorder while in the second grade; her teachers and others reported that she was very smart.
Meanwhile, eugenic sterilization laws spread to nearly thirty states, California being among the most important. Black writes:
In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the twentieth century’s first decades, California’s eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as US Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.
EUGENICS IN AMERICA
But the leaders of the eugenics movement did not limit their activities to incarceration and sterilization. In 1920 they conducted the first of many “fitter family” contests at the Kansas Free Fair. “Fitter Families” were judged on their physical health, records of heredity, educational attainments, and measurable intellectual capacities. Winning families received a medal that carried the logo, “Yea, I Have a Goodly Heritage.” The eugenics movement propagated the belief that environment played little part in determining character and achievement. Instead, leaders taught that bad character traits resulted from bad genes.
The tragic story of the wide embrace of eugenics in America is told vividly on the website www.eugenicsarchive.org. As Christine Rosen has shown in her fine book Preaching Eugenics, the churches — and synagogues — had a key role in promoting the eugenics agenda, which was driven by racism as well as the pseudo-science of eugenics itself. Edwin Black puts it like this:
The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the Earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.
How? By identifying so-called defective family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was literally to wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior — the so-called unfit. The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.
Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 “Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder’s Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population.” Point number eight was euthanasia.
HITLER TAKES OVER
THE EUGENICS AGENDA
Shortly after taking power, Hitler passed a national law for the mandatory sterilization of certain members of the population, based on US eugenic models. This law targeted half a million people deemed physically or mentally impaired and included the feebleminded, psychotic, epileptic, blind, deaf, malformed, and chronic alcoholics. About 250,000 Germans were sterilized under these laws during the 1930s. When the Nazis opened the death camps, sterilization became less frequent, because many of those who would have been affected by this law were instead sent to the camps and killed.
The bridge from sterilization to killing was crossed quickly. Seriously malformed or retarded infants and young children were either starved to death or overdosed with drugs to end their lives. Parents and physicians received notice that the child had died of an infection or of major organ failure. But when parents and physicians protested, Hitler eventually ended this project.
The euthanasia agenda quickly grew to include misfit adults, when it came to be known under its code name “T4.” Killing centers most commonly used poisonous carbon monoxide gas and sprang into action long before the killing of the Jews and others in concentration camps.
LOOKING AHEAD:
THE EUGENICS AGENDA
We’ve been looking backwards and forwards: how eugenics got such a grip on the twentieth century and what may await us as we move further into the twenty-first. It should disturb us to see how the pieces fit together. Eugenics is the big-picture story of the challenges we face in biotechnology.
Patents
We’ll see in chapter 10 that the biotech industry tried hard to prevent Congress from passing a ban on patents on human embryos. Why? As one leading legal expert wrote in an editorial comment on their strategy, there are millions of babies born in the US every year, and they want to collect royalties on them.
Genetic engineering and designer babies
Some want to do this because the technology is becoming available to make big changes in human nature — to enable you to “design” your baby. These changes could be inheritable (changes in the “germline”), so that human nature itself changes in the process. We’ll look at this in more detail in chapter 7.
Cloning
Cloning technology is a key stepping stone to many of these changes. That’s one reason that some biotech leaders have been fighting so hard to defend their “right” to mass-produce human embryos for experiments, and why there is growing support for the cloning of babies. In chapter 6 we’ll examine the baby cloning movement, and in chapter 8 the push to make cloned human embryos for experiments.
Discrimination
Genetic information gives some people power over others. So there is a move to change the law to make it clear that no human being should be subject to genetic discrimination. But the law can do only so much. In the movie Gattaca, we see a society built on genetic discrimination — even while it is technically illegal.
These four themes all come together in the eugenics agenda. That’s why they provide the themes for the Manifesto on the Sanctity of Life in a Brave New World that we signed on Capitol Hill.
The Sanctity of Life in a Brave New World:
A Manifesto on Biotechnology and Human Dignity
Our children are creations, not commodities.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after are the patients of that power, slaves to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners.
C. S. LEWIS
The Issue
The debates over human cloning have focused our attention on the significance for the human race of what has been called “the biotech century.” Biotechnology raises great hopes for technological progress, but it also raises profound moral questions, since it gives us new power over our own nature. It poses in the sharpest form the question: What does it mean to be human?
Biotechnology and Moral Questions
We are thankful for the hope that biotechnology offers of new treatments for some of the most dreaded diseases. But the same technology can be used for good or ill. Scientists are already working in many countries to clone human beings, either for embryo experiments or for live birth.
In December 2002, the Raelians, a religious sect that believes the human race was cloned by space aliens, announced that a baby they called “Eve” was the first cloned human. But it is not just the fringe cults that are involved in cloning; that same month, Stanford University announced a project to create cloned embryos for medical experimentation.
Before long, scientists will also be able to intervene in human nature by making inheritable genetic changes. Biotechnology companies are already staking claims to parts of the human body through patents on human genes, cells, and other tissues for commercial use. Genetic information about the individual may make possible advances in diagnosis and treatment of disease, but it may also make those with “weaker” genes subject to discrimination along eugenic lines.
The Uniqueness of Humanity and Its Dignity
These questions have led many to believe that in biotechnology we meet the moral challenge of the twenty-first century. For the uniqueness of human nature is at stake. Human dignity is indivisible: the aged, the sick, the very young, those with genetic diseases — every human being is possessed of an equal dignity; any threat to the dignity of one is a threat to us all. This challenge is not simply for Christians. Jews, Muslims, and members of other faiths have voiced the same concerns. So too have millions of others who understand that humans are distinct from all other species; at every stage of life and in every condition of dependency they are intrinsically valuable and deserving of full moral respect. To argue otherwise will lead to the ultimate tyranny in which someone determines those who are deemed worthy of protection and those who are not.
Why This Must Be Addressed
As C. S. Lewis warned a half century ago in his remarkable essay The Abolition of Man, the new capacities of biotechnology give us power over ourselves and our own nature. But such power will always tend to turn us into commodities that have been manufactured. As we develop powers to make inheritable changes in human nature, we become controllers of every future generation.
It is therefore vital that we undertake a serious national conversation to ensure a thorough understanding of these questions, and their answers, so that our democratic institutions will be able to make prudent choices as public policy is shaped for the future.
What We Propose
We strongly favor work in biotechnology that will lead to cures for diseases and disabilities, and are excited by the promise of stem cells from adult donors and other ethical avenues of research. We see that around the world other jurisdictions have begun to develop ethical standards within which biotech can flourish. We note that Germany, which because of its Nazi past has a unique sensitivity to unethical science and medicine, has enacted laws that prohibit all cloning and other unethical biotech options. We note that the one international bioethics treaty, the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, outlaws all inheritable genetic changes and has been amended to prohibit all cloning.
We therefore seek as an urgent first step a comprehensive ban on all human cloning and inheritable genetic modification. This is imperative to prevent the birth of a generation of malformed humans (animal cloning has led to grotesque failures), and vast experimental embryo farms with millions of cloned humans.
We emphasize: All human cloning must be banned. There are those who argue that cloning can be sanctioned for medical experimentation — so-called “therapeutic” purposes. No matter what promise this might hold — all of which we note is speculative — it is morally offensive since it involves creating, killing, and harvesting one human being in the service of others. No civilized state could countenance such a practice. Moreover, if cloning for experiments is allowed, how could we ensure that a cloned embryo would not be implanted in a womb? The Department of Justice has testified that such a law would be unenforceable.
We also seek legislation to prohibit discrimination based on genetic information, which is private to the individual. We seek a wide-ranging review of the patent law to protect human dignity from the commercial use of human genes, cells, and other tissue. We believe that such public policy initiatives will help ensure the progress of ethical biotechnology while protecting the sanctity of human life.
We welcome all medical and scientific research as long as it is firmly tethered to moral truth. History teaches that whenever the two have been separated, the consequence is disaster and great suffering for humanity.
Signed by:
Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight, Knights of Columbus
Robert H. Bork, Senior Fellow, The American Enterprise Institute
Nigel M. de S. Cameron, PhD, Founding Editor, Ethics and Medicine;
Dean, The Wilberforce Forum; Director, Council for Biotechnology Policy
Dr. Ben Carson, Neurosurgeon, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Department of Neurosurgery
Charles W. Colson, Chairman, The Wilberforce Forum, Prison Fellowship Ministries
Ken Connor, President, Family Research Council
Paige Comstock Cunningham, JD, Board Chair and former President, Americans United for Life
Dr. James Dobson, Focus on the Family Dr. Maxie D. Dunnam, Asbury Theological Seminary
C. Christopher Hook, MD, Mayo Clinic
Deal W. Hudson, Editor and Publisher, CRISIS magazine
Dr. Henk Jochemsen, Director, Lindeboom Institute
Dr. D. James Kennedy, Senior Pastor, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church
C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD, C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth, Former US Surgeon General
Bill Kristol, Chairman, Project for the New American Century; Editor, The Weekly Standard
Jennifer Lahl, Executive Director, The Center for Bioethics and Culture
Dr. Richard D. Land, President, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention
Dr. C. Ben Mitchell, Trinity International University
R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Fr. Richard Neuhaus, Institute for Religion and Public Life
David Prentice, Ph.D., Professor, Life Sciences, Indiana State University
Sandy Rios, President, Concerned Women for America
Dr. William Saunders, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Human Life & Bioethics, Family Research Council
Joni Eareckson Tada, President, Joni and Friends
Paul Weyrich, Chairman and CEO, The Free Congress Foundation
Ravi Zacharias, President, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries
God made us in his image, weak and strong, those with genes that make life easy and those with genes that can make life very hard. Our task is to treat every human being as someone worthy of the dignity God has granted each of us. What did Jesus say? If you do it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you do it to me.
Eugenics. The word alone sends shivers up the paralyzed spine of someone like me.
Last month, I read an essay by Dr. Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He noted that individuals in persistent vegetative states have no rights — since they lack self-awareness and the ability to reason, they should not be considered equal members of the human community. Peter Singer believes that people with profound retardation have no voice because they cannot make moral decisions, they are unable to rationalize, they have no volition.
Dr. Singer carries this reasoning to its logical conclusion, reminding society that the retarded and those in persistent vegetative states need no advocacy. Why speak up for individuals who are “post-persons”? He even allows for the killing of certain disabled infants up to twenty-eight days after their birth, citing they are “pre-persons.” Already, his warped ethics are inf luencing hospital boards, hospices, and state institutions, not to mention students at Princeton University. Psalm 10:2 appears to describe well Dr. Singer’s kind of ethics: “In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak, who are caught in the schemes he devises.”
But the Word of God gives hope to those in deep comas, suffering from locked-brain conditions, or who are retarded. Psalm 10:17 assures, “You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed.” God is bending over backward to alleviate the suffering, rescue the fragile, console the dying, comfort the despairing, be a friend to, speak up for, and advocate on behalf of the weak and vulnerable. But he calls us to use our hands and our voice to speak up for, and advocate on behalf of, those who are too fragile — too small — to speak for themselves.
Our nation needs advocates for the weak. Our nation needs heart. Our society needs a moral center, renewed and inspired. The genuine rights of the weak, the disadvantaged, the unborn, the elderly, the cloned, the fertilized, can be safeguarded only in a society that honors life, treats humanity with respect, and shows heart. The Lord speaks to this lack of heart in Deuteronomy 30:16 – 20: “I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are going to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient . . . I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.”
I know a little bit about heart and advocacy. Under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, I was appointed to the National Council on Disability. It was our responsibility to advise these two administrations, as well as Congress, on disability-related issues. I will never forget sitting on the White House lawn with other council members in the spring of 1990 as President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. It was a great day. This new legislation was designed to open areas of access in everything from employment to transportation. After the signing ceremony on the South Lawn, our council retired to a nearby hotel for a reception. As champagne got passed around, our council’s executive director, Paul Hearne, seemed quiet. After fingering his champagne glass, he said he wanted to make an announcement.
“The ADA will mean that there will soon be mechanical lifts on busses,” he said, “and ramps into restaurants . . . and open doors in places of employment.” Paul then fell silent again. After a long moment, he continued, “But this law will not change the heart of the bus driver. It will not change the heart of the restaurant owner or the employer.” After another long pause and with wet eyes, Paul Hearne lifted his glass in a toast: “Here’s to changed hearts.”
Laws and public policy reflect the heart of a country and the soul of a nation. God reminds us in Ezekiel 11:19 – 20, “I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God.”
I don’t want America to move into the future with a heart of stone.
Christians are charged with the only message that can change the heart of the bus driver, restaurant owner, and employer. We are commissioned to shake salt in newspaper editorial columns, at the market, dry cleaners, PTA, or university classrooms. We have the message — and God has given us the means — to speak to ethicists who promote the idea that people are “better off dead than disabled.” It is fundamentally at this level that a nation’s heart is healed.
It’s how my heart was healed when I despaired of life as a quadriplegic. Thank God there were advocates. There were friends and visitors, neighbors and family members who showed heart. They came into the institution where I rehabbed for two years. These dear people spoke up for and gave voice to my plight, as well as the needs of my roommates. They advocated for us, whether to the floor supervisor when our sheets were soiled and left unchanged, or at the University of Maryland where I needed access to second-story classrooms. These wonderful Christian friends took time to shake salt and shine light. They were God’s hands . . . they were his advocates for one weak, depressed, paralyzed girl. And I am still feeling the repercussions of their love.
You are like these friends. You have something to say to “experts” like Dr. Singer. You have 1 Corinthians 1:20, 27 – 28, for,
Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher [the so-called ethicist] of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? . . . God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
And what do we say when the weakest are abused for the convenience of the strong? “This is what the LORD says: ‘Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength . . . but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,’ declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 9:23 – 24).
You are an ambassador who represents God’s kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. You have a message that will turn a nation’s heart of stone into flesh.
JONI