Deadly Medicine
The anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision was last week. Usually around that time someone writes for some big publication, like the Times or the New Yorker some sort of "bittersweet" personal essay about how they elected to terminate a pregnancy of a disabled child. It wasn't written this year, but Amy had linked to one the other day that was written by Michael Chabon's wife.
I was talking with Randy last night about reading some of these types of articles and how upset it made me to think how people dispose of life like this. "I would have accepted a disabled child," I told him.
"You would have adored her," he replied to me.
Maybe that was my problem. Maybe I would have become one of those in-your-face crusaders for the rights of the disabled. Maybe I would have turned into a pain-in-the-neck inclusive nightmare for every school, church, and public space we frequented. Maybe I would have been too proud. Maybe? I know I would have been.
There's a potentially fascinating exhibit and lecture series going on at the Warhol this month. It is called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." It is described as
The temptation is to go to the exhibit and come back and write about how our current "Culture of Death" really employs reasoning along the lines of what we now refer to as Nazi pseudo-science, and how putting this in a musuem allows us to feel distant and too sophisticated for such 20th century barbarism while pretending that what happens today is nothing like what happened in the 1940s. However, the Warhol is also hosting a series of lectures, every Sunday this month to examine teh exhibit as well as "contemporary issues." On February 18, Professor Elizabeth Gettig is the lecturer. She is the director of the Genetic Counseling Program at the University of Pittsburgh. I don't know if I will have the stomach/state of mind to listen calmly to such a lecture, but I think it would be fascinating to hear how she can establish the distance between the racial purity goals of the Nazis and the perfect family goals of the United States.
I was talking with Randy last night about reading some of these types of articles and how upset it made me to think how people dispose of life like this. "I would have accepted a disabled child," I told him.
"You would have adored her," he replied to me.
Maybe that was my problem. Maybe I would have become one of those in-your-face crusaders for the rights of the disabled. Maybe I would have turned into a pain-in-the-neck inclusive nightmare for every school, church, and public space we frequented. Maybe I would have been too proud. Maybe? I know I would have been.
There's a potentially fascinating exhibit and lecture series going on at the Warhol this month. It is called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." It is described as
This exhibition explores the Holocaust’s roots in then-contemporary scientific and pseudo-scientific theory. The eugenics theory sprang from turn-of-the-century scientific beliefs asserting that Charles Darwin’s theories of the “survival of the fittest” could be applied to humans, and that the “inferior” should be eliminated from the population. Supporters believed that through careful controls on marriage and reproduction, a nation’s genetic health could be improved. Deadly Medicine includes 40 archival sources from around the world and is the first U.S. exhibition to represent a history of the Nazi biological state. More than 50 artifacts, 200 photographs and photographic reproductions as well as survivor testimony are included in the exhibition.
The temptation is to go to the exhibit and come back and write about how our current "Culture of Death" really employs reasoning along the lines of what we now refer to as Nazi pseudo-science, and how putting this in a musuem allows us to feel distant and too sophisticated for such 20th century barbarism while pretending that what happens today is nothing like what happened in the 1940s. However, the Warhol is also hosting a series of lectures, every Sunday this month to examine teh exhibit as well as "contemporary issues." On February 18, Professor Elizabeth Gettig is the lecturer. She is the director of the Genetic Counseling Program at the University of Pittsburgh. I don't know if I will have the stomach/state of mind to listen calmly to such a lecture, but I think it would be fascinating to hear how she can establish the distance between the racial purity goals of the Nazis and the perfect family goals of the United States.
Comments
I was just watching a video on CNN about how Chinese boys are being born at a hugely greater rate than Chinese girls. Do people really believe that abortion and eugenics have no ties? I realize aborting girls isn't technically eugenics...but c'mon. It's certainly a good indicator of things to come.