Christianity and the New Eugenics: Should We Choose To Have Only Healthy Or Enhanced Children?

Christianity and the New Eugenics: Should We Choose To Have Only Healthy Or Enhanced Children?

by Calum MacKellar
Christianity and the New Eugenics: Should We Choose To Have Only Healthy Or Enhanced Children?

Christianity and the New Eugenics: Should We Choose To Have Only Healthy Or Enhanced Children?

by Calum MacKellar

Paperback

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Overview

What will it mean for society if science enables us to choose a future child whose health, athletic ability or intelligence is predetermined? This future is becoming ever more likely with the latest developments in human reproduction — but concerns are growing about the implications.

New procedures making possible heritable genetic modifications such as genome editing open the door to ‘sanitized’ selective eugenics; but these practices have some unnerving similarities to the discredited eugenic programmes of early twentieth-century regimes. A Christian perspective based on Scripture gives us the resources we urgently need to evaluate both current and future selection practices.

Calum MacKellar offers an accessible, inter-disciplinary analysis, blending science, history and Christian theology. This book will enable you to become fully informed about the new scientific developments in human reproduction – developments that will affect us all.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781783599134
Publisher: IVP
Publication date: 05/21/2020
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 5.38(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Director of Research of a medical charity in Scotland and a Visiting Lecturer in Bioethics at St Mary’s University in London, England. He is also a Fellow with the Centre for Bioethics and Human Dignity at Trinity International University, Chicago, USA. In 1998, he was ordained an elder of the Church of Scotland (the Reformed and Presbyterian national church in Scotland since 1560) and was a member of its Church and Society Council from 2005 to 2013. Previously, he had been a senior civil servant with the Bioethics Division of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. He is the author of The Image of God, Personhood and the Embryo (SCM Press) and the co-editor of several volumes on biomedical ethics including The Ethics of the New Eugenics (Berghahn Books).

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

Learning from the past 6

Looking to the present 8

2 Eugenics in its historical context 11

The history of eugenics in Germany 12

The history of eugenics in the UK 15

The history of eugenics in the USA 20

3 A Christian enquiry into the new eugenics 23

Creation and the image of God 26

Procreation, love and unconditional acceptance 44

The new eugenics and the equality of all 80

Other arguments relevant to the new eugenics 101

4 Presentation of different eugenic procedures 125

Reproductive eugenics through the selection of partners 125

Reproductive eugenics through selecting to have many, few or no children 128

Eugenics through selective adoption 129

Eugenics through sex selection 132

Eugenics through egg and sperm selection 134

Eugenics through prenatal genetic selection 139

Eugenics and embryonic selection 143

Eugenic selection through human cloning 148

Eugenic selection through infanticide 152

Eugenics through genome and germline modifications 156

5 Conclusion 177

God's creation of the child 180

Unconditional acceptance in procreation 181

The immeasurable worth and value of all individuals created in the same image of God 183

The ethics of the new eugenics 185

Risks of discrimination 187

The value and worth of life versus the quality of life 192

Further reading 198

Glossary 200

General index 208

Index of Scripture references 212

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