On Suing If Your Parents Were Not Given the Chance to Abort You ...
On a French law that allows disabled children to sue if their mothers were not given a chance to abort
By Lance Morrow, Time, Monday, Jul. 16, 2001

Remember the self-cancelling black box?

You pushed a button on the outside of it, it made a whirring sound, a lid opened, a small plastic hand reached out of the box, and pushed the button again....The hand withdrew, the box lid closed, and all was silence again. A battery-operated metaphysical joke.

France's highest court of appeal, the Cour de Cessation, has reproduced the self-cancelling black box as law. It has ruled that disabled children are entitled to be compensated if their mothers were not given a chance to abort the defective fetus. It has decided in favor of the families of three children-one with a malformed spine, two born with only one arm-whose lawyers argued that if doctors had detected the fetuses' disabilities, they would have had the pregnancies terminated.

The metaphysics is breathtaking. A child stands in court, and demands the legal right never to have existed. The judges on the bench nod gravely. Except that it is not the "deformed" child that stands in court. It is parents and lawyers, collaborating in odious work.

The filmmaker Jean Cocteau once remarked, "Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it." Stupidity's first cousins are evil and venality, which carry briefcases and are ingenious. God knows this decision is an ingenious, not to say hilarious, piece of work. I sometimes think that the absurdities of the French, philosophical and otherwise, result from the beauty and seductive elegance of their language, with which they can talk themselves into anything.

The Cour de Cessation persuaded itself to uphold last year's Perruche decision, in which a mentally retarded boy received damages because he had not been aborted.

The abandonment of common sense is not an exclusively French problem. But it is disturbing to find the French courts affirming Nazi principles of eugenics. The decision savors of Vichy. The court's logic-which is the true deformity-would encourage wholesale prenatal slaughter. It stigmatizes the handicapped and states, as a principle of law, that they never should have been born. Such children are an error that would, in the utopia toward which the idealism of the law aspires, be eliminated, pre-emptively.

Under the menace of this decision, French doctors, whenever the slightest shadow turns up on the sonogram, will advise: Abort. Perfect children are mandated by law. Parents will be considered irresponsible if they bring forth a specimen less than perfect. Think of the charming effect this decision would have if it were applied in those many countries around the world where a fetus that turns up with a vagina rather than a penis is considered to be defective.

We proceed, one generation to the next, through genes and memes. It was the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who proposed some years ago that, just as genetics has genes, culture must have its own units of transmission, which he called "memes"-ideas of all kinds, images, tunes, games, concepts, movies, books, gestures, all the propagating thoughts that leap from mind to mind and, in our interactive information culture, have become a chaotically boiling universal soup.

The idea of perfectibility by abortion is an odious meme that should have vanished with Dr. Mengele. But instead, it has survived and prospered. Instead of being tried as a war criminal, the idea ends up being validated by a French court. It ends up, in fact, as a chief option of what might be called the Hubristic Scientific Override, the mechanism whereby human expertise may correct the blunders of the genes.

Some miraculous medical pre-emptions are possible. But the promise of them has tended to override the wholesome memes of humility and common sense. That way lies tragedy, farce, and paradox: You try for the perfect human... you get the ultimate inhumanity.