Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14Plough Quarterly • Winter 2015  to the cross. They feel it; they sense it; they’re part of it more than I am. I sometimes have to think my way there, whereas they simply guide me–they take me by the hand and bring me there. When you are there with them you are next to the resurrected Christ. That is the revealed glory of God. You recently spoke to the Catholic Medical Association about the development of a modern form of eugenics, commenting, “Functional eugenics has now permeated our culture to a level of acceptance never achieved before.” How do you account for this insidious trend? There was a time, twenty to thirty years ago, when we really thought special education was important. It was a priority for us as a society; we passed laws, we appropriated funds, and we talked about it in depth. Now we think we cannot afford it. It has become almost exclu- sively an economic issue. And when you take the money away, all the other arguments–the cultural and social arguments–have no depth. It’s like walking into the ocean up to your ankles: all that water, but only your feet get wet. This is what we’re seeing with eugenics. The difference between the eugenics of a hundred years ago and today’s functional eugenics is pri- marily economic. Our mentality today says if something isn’t going to earn money for you (or worse, if it’s going to cost you money), throw it away. This approach is bad enough if we’re talking about coffee machines or cars. But it’s gotten so bad that now we treat people this way. Dr. Jérôme Lejeune was the physician who first counted forty-seven chromosomes on a tissue sample from a person with Down syndrome. He was struck immediately with two competing realizations. One was that for the first time, there existed a scientific basis that could be used to improve the lives of people with Down syndrome. But the second was that society could use this discovery to subject these people to discrimination, segregation, and even extermination. He wrote, “I see only one way left to save them, and that is to cure them.” Photograph courtesy of Rifton Equipment