By Hilary White
LONDON, August 30, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The mentally and morally "unfit" should be sterilized, Professor David Marsland, a sociologist and health expert, said this weekend. The professor made the remarks on the BBC radio program Iconoclasts, which advertises itself as the place to "think the unthinkable."
Pro-life advocates and disability rights campaigners have responded by saying that Marsland's proposed system is a straightforward throwback to the coercive eugenics practices of the past.
Marsland, Emeritus Scholar of Sociology and Health
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"Children are abused or grossly neglected by a very small minority of inadequate parents." Such parents, he said, are not distinguished by "disadvantage, poverty or exploitation," he said, but by "a number or moral and mental inadequacies" caused by "serious mental defect," "chronic mental illness" and drug addiction and alcoholism.
"Short of lifetime incarceration," he said, the solution is "permanent sterilization."
The debate, chaired by the BBC's Edward Stourton, was held in response to a request by a local council in the West Midlands that wanted to force contraception on a 29-year-old woman who members of the council judged was mentally incapable of making decisions about childrearing. The judge in the case refused to permit it, saying such a decision would "raise profound questions about state intervention in private and family life."
Children whose parents are alcoholics or drug addicts can be rescued from abusive situations, but, Marlsand said, "Why should we allow further predictable victims to be harmed by the same perpetrators? Here too, sterilization provides a dependable answer."
He dismissed possible objections based on human rights, saying that "Rights is a grossly overused and fundamentally incoherent concept … Neither philosophers nor political activists can agree on the nature of human rights or on their extent."
Complaints that court-ordered sterilization could be abused "should be ignored," he added. "This argument would inhibit any and every action of social defense."
Brian Clowes, director of research for Human Life International (HLI), told LifeSiteNews (LSN) that in his view Professor Marsland is just one more in a long line of eugenicists who want to solve human problems by erasing the humans who have them. Clowes compared Marsland to Lothrop Stoddard and Margaret Sanger, prominent early 20th century eugenicists who promoted contraception and sterilization for blacks, Catholics, the poor and the mentally ill and disabled whom they classified as "human weeds."
He told LSN, "It does not seem to occur to Marsland that most severe child abuse is committed by people he might consider 'perfectly normal,' people like his elitist friends and neighbors."
"Most frightening of all," he said, "is Marsland's dismissal of human rights. In essence, he is saying people have no rights whatsoever, because there is no universal agreement on what those rights actually are."
The program, which aired on Saturday, August 28, also featured a professor of ethics and philosophy at Oxford, who expressed concern about Marland's proposal, saying, "There are serious problems about who makes the decisions, and abuses." Janet Radcliffe Richards, a Professor of Practical Philosophy at Oxford, continued, "I would dispute the argument that this is for the sake of the children.
"It's curious case that if the child doesn't exist, it can't be harmed. And to say that it would be better for the child not to exist, you need to be able to say that its life is worse than nothing. Now I think that's a difficult thing to do because most people are glad they exist."
But Radcliffe Richards refused to reject categorically the notion of forced sterilization as a solution to social problems. She said there "is a really serious argument" about the "cost to the rest of society of allowing people to have children when you can pretty strongly predict that those children are going to be a nuisance."
Marsland's remarks also drew a response from Alison Davis, head of the campaign group No Less Human, who rejected his entire argument, saying that compulsory sterilization would itself be "an abuse of some of the most vulnerable people in society."
Marsland's closing comments, Davis said, were indicative of his anti-human perspective. In those remarks he said that nothing in the discussion had changed his mind, and that the reduction of births would be desirable since "there are too many people anyway."
Davis commented, "As a disabled person myself I find his comments offensive, degrading and eugenic in content.
"The BBC is supposed to stand against prejudicial comments against any minority group. As such it is against it's own code of conduct, as well as a breach of basic human decency, to broadcast such inflammatory and ableist views."
