Cruel but ahead of the curve, Phil Bredesen is the Democrat running for Senate in Tennessee, and he is a eugenicist. Bredesen once supported using taxpayer money to abort babies with Down syndrome.
“I am opposed to federal funding of it [abortion],” Bredesen said in a recently unearthed 1987 interview with the Nashville Banner, “except in the case of danger to the life or medical health of the mother, rape, incest, or children with substantial development deformities such as Down syndrome.”
Bredesen has moderated his tone since then and through his two terms as governor. Why bother, though? The Democrat shouldn’t be shy about his abortion politics. Support for eugenic genocide has (almost) never been more in vogue.
And let’s be clear. What Bredesen called for absolutely fits the clinical definition of eugenics. He wants the government to subsidize the elimination of an entire group of people who happen to have third chromosomes and physical deformities that don’t prevent a happy, productive, and largely healthy life. But they are imperfect, and so the state should pay for their termination.
That sounds ugly, but it’s actually quite popular. Not long ago the deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus, wrote about how she would have aborted her own children if she found out they had Down syndrome. “I would have grieved the loss and moved on,” she writes, because such children come with lower IQs and higher medical costs. She isn’t alone.
Thanks to prenatal screening, mothers can screen their unborn children for the disease and, if need be, snuff out the ones with Down syndrome. Many of them do. Something like two-thirds of women make that choice and decide to start over in the U.S. In Iceland, it’s almost universal.
With a population of roughly 330,000 people, on average only two or three children with Down syndrome are born each year in Iceland. The rest are aborted.
“My understanding is that we have basically eradicated, almost, Down syndrome from our society — that there is hardly ever a child with Down syndrome in Iceland anymore,” geneticist Kari Stefansson told CBS News apparently unaware of the historical horror echoing in his own words.
At this point some will protest that Bredesen does not, in fact, want Tennessee to be like Iceland. The candidate himself might even say that there is a difference between providing funds for and normalizing the abortion of children with Down syndrome. But this is a paper-thin distinction
The right to abort a child becomes an obligation to abort that child as soon as it becomes socially unacceptable to bring a somehow imperfect life into this world. Bredesen didn’t just provide the means by advocating for taxpayer cash. He supplied a reason when he dismissed children with Down syndrome as being less deserving of life.
Might as well stand by it now.
