By Kathleen Sloan, Consultant to the CBC

Once again, the mainstream media has jumped on the bandwagon of the latest attempt to link intelligence with genetics, hailing the “wunderkind” behind it. The Wall Street Journal of February 16, 2013, grabbed attention with the headline “A Genetic Code for Genius?” Any serious geneticist would easily dismiss such quixotic claims. The danger here is that the general reader gullibly swallows this snake oil.

Zhao Bowen, the “wunderkind” in question, is a 20 year-old high school dropout who interned with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences where he commenced his genetic studies by participating in a project to sequence the cucumber genome. Soon after, Mr. Bowen started to work for BGI, one of the largest genomics research centers in the world. Nominally private, BGI receives half of its’ funding from the Shenzhen government where it is based.

Located near Hong Kong on the Chinese mainland, BGI created a cognitive genomics unit in 2010 and named Zhao as its director. Barely established in the position, Bowen met Stephen Hsu, a theoretical physicist from the University of Oregon, during a visit to BGI and the two quickly teamed up to launch the BGI intelligence project.

The goal of their project is to identify genes that contribute to intelligence by studying the genomes of exceptionally intelligent people, particularly those with PhDs in physics or math from elite universities. They then plan to compare the genomes with DNA samples from the general population. Most of their “genius” samples come from participants in a similar study based at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee that has been underway for 40 years.

BGI will compare the genomes of 2,200 high-IQ individuals with a similar number drawn from the general population and will publish their findings this summer. Their efforts could provide the foundation for a genetic test to predict inherited intelligence. This is where the trouble begins and where actual science sharply diverges from attempts to reify genetic determinism.

For those unfamiliar with genetic or biological determinism, it is a scientifically discredited construct that posits that biological factors such as an individual’s genes (as opposed to social or environmental factors) completely determine a person’s destiny. As Pilar Ossorio, Professor of Law and Bioethics of the University of Wisconsin at Madison has noted: “Over the past two centuries, biomedical science has, at times, provided justification for white privilege. Science has been used to support the proposition that differences in achievement reflect innate differences in ability among racial groups. Some will look to molecular genetics to provide scientific justifications for racial inequalities.”

Messrs. Bowen and Hsu are adherents of the Hereditarian theory of IQ which falsely asserts that intelligence is genetically-based and permanently fixed, ignoring the overwhelming influence of one’s environment, genotypic and phenotypic (or trait) variation. No research has demonstrated a causal connection between a particular gene variant and a particular degree of cognitive skill.

When variants of particular genes have been associated with IQ, the effects reported are relatively small—in the range of a couple of IQ points—and few of the observed correlations have been replicated. In contrast, altering environmental factors, such as the quality of education and child care, has been associated with IQ variation of 10 points or more.

Cognitive abilities are complex and influenced by a myriad of environmental factors and genes. Given the complexity of the brain and cognition, one ought not expect that a few genes will play a dominant role in shaping the normal range of human cognitive abilities; rather numerous genes will be involved.

In my book Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth and Culture, I devote an entire section to intelligence and genetics, exploring the studies of Robert J. Sternberg (Oklahoma State University), Elena Grigorenko (Yale), Kenneth Kidd (Yale) and Steven Stemler (Wesleyan University) who jointly conclude: “To study the interrelationship among intelligence and genetics, we need to know what intelligence is. We do not know. Hence, any conclusions about its relationships to other constructs will be, at best, tentative.”

There is no universal definition of intelligence. Even theorists of intelligence do not themselves agree as to what intelligence is. IQ tests are largely measures of achievement at various levels of competency. As professionals in the field note, some act as though IQ tests somehow provide the kind of measurement of intelligence that a tape measure provides of height. When dealing with lay audiences, Sternberg warns “it is especially important that we acknowledge that we have nothing even vaguely close to the ‘tape measure’ of intelligence.”

Heritability is the ratio of genetic variation to total variation in an attribute within a population. Again, Sternberg et al.: “There is no way of estimating heritability for an individual, nor is the concept meaningful for individuals.” It is essential to understand that these concepts apply to populations not individuals.

An important implication of these facts is that heritability is NOT tantamount to genetic influence. An attribute could be highly genetically influenced and have little or no heritability. The reason is that heritability depends on the existence of individual differences. For example, being born with two eyes is 100% under genetic control. Regardless of the environment into which one is born, a human being will have two eyes. But it is not meaningful to speak of the heritability of having two eyes, because there are no individual differences.

Heritability is not a fixed value for a given attribute. Although we may read about “the heritability of IQ,” there really is no single fixed value that represents any true, constant value for the heritability of IQ or anything else. Heritability depends on many factors, but the most important one is the range of environments.

Genes always operate within environmental contexts. For example, genotype sets a reaction range for the possible heights a person can attain, but childhood nutrition, diseases, and many other factors affect the adult height realized. Genes express themselves through interaction with the environment.

With intelligence or any other trait, we cannot change the genetic structure underlying manifestations of intelligence, but we can change those manifestations or expressions of genes in the environment. Thus, knowing the heritability of a trait does not tell us anything about its modifiability. This is why studies like Bowen and Hsu’s are so misleading and erroneous.

The true genetic nature of humans is far from being defined. But what is absolutely clear is that genes do not act in a vacuum; they act in the environment, and their actions can be altered by the environment.

The bottom line here is that there is evidence that intelligence is influenced by environmental factors that are pervasively and systematically patterned along class-based socioeconomic lines in the U.S. especially, as well as throughout the world.

Readers of the Wall Street Journal article would have been far better served had the publication pointed out that the evidence proves that differences in IQ scores are the result of social inequality rather than its cause and any test purporting to predict inherited intelligence is fallacious and disingenuous.

 
Kathleen Sloan is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW), a consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, and the former Program Director of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

I thought we were finally finished with all the hype over embryonic stem cell research. During the first decade of the 21st century, that was pretty much all we got in the media, mostly wild hype about pending CURES! CURES! CURES!

Adult stem cell successes—already forging ahead at breakneck speed—were mostly ignored, even though the New York Times’ headlines would have taken up half the front page had similar advanced been made using embryonic cells.

Part of all that hype on one stem cell hand—and chirping of crickets on the other—was politics, a way to “get Bush,” whose mild restrictions on federal funding were often mendaciously depicted by Democrats and a hostile media as a religiously-inspired “ban.”

Bush’s NIH actually awarded hundreds of millions in grants for human embryonic stem cell studies. Moreover, during the Bush years, according to a Rockefeller Institute study, about $2 billion was invested from all sources in ESCR in the USA alone. Hardly a starvation diet.

The controversy lost much of its steam in 2007 when scientists announced the invention of embryonic-like “induced pluripotent stem cells” (iPSCs) made from human skin cells. Suddenly, much of what ESCR promised to do in the future could perhaps be accomplished in the present—and without destroying embryos.

And indeed, while iPSCs still can’t be used in treatments due to the same tumor fears that inhibited ESCR studies, iPSCs are currently being tailor made from specific patients in order to study drugs and disease models—powerful research tools that scientists once swore would require human therapeutic cloning to accomplish.

The breakthrough was so stunning, its prime inventor, Shinya Yamanaka, was just awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine.

But wait, there’s more: stories have begun to appear about the ubiquitous human trials with adult stem cells for afflictions such as paralysis, heart disease, MS, and diabetes, just to name a few. Meanwhile, embryonic stem cell research has not gone very far at all. Geron’s first ever ESCR human trial crashed and burned, and the company went completely out of the stem cell business.

At the moment, only three very small safety studies are ongoing using embryonic cells in the world (for degenerative eye conditions), while adult stem cell human trials are in the thousands, including a recently announced FDA approved-trial for the treatment of spinal cord injury.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine—founded to fund embryonic stem cell and human cloning research—now touts its adult stem cell funding. None other than Michael J. Fox—who often filmed election ads for pro ESCR politicians—has gotten over his embryonic stem cell fixation and expanded his vision to include support for other, more promising, approaches to the treatment of Parkinson’s.

And wonder of wonders: The New York Times even published a front page story a few weeks ago describing how adult stem cells are being used experimentally to manufacture replacement human organs.

That is why it is rather disquieting to see an attempt in Fortune to reignite the old ESCR hype in a story that laments the poor economic outlook for embryonic stem cell companies. From, “The Great Stem Cell Dilemma:”

To be clear, the earliest stem cell therapies are almost certainly years from distribution. But so much progress has been made at venerable research institutions that it now seems possible to honestly discuss the possibility of a new medical paradigm emerging within a generation. Working primarily with rodents in preclinical trials, MDs and PhDs are making the paralyzed walk and the impotent virile. A stem cell therapy for two types of macular degeneration recently restored the vision of two women. Once they were blind. Now they see!

Some experts assert that AMD could be eradicated within a decade. Other scientists are heralding a drug-free fix for HIV/AIDS. Various forms of cancer, Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and ALS have already been eradicated in mice. If such work translates to humans, it will represent the type of platform advancement that comes along in medicine only once in a lifetime or two. The effect on the economy would be substantial. Champions of stem cell research say it would be on the order of the Internet or even the transistor.

Oh, please. That is sooo 2004. Much of the above litany involved non embryonic stem cell research. For example, HIV studies in humans are showing great promise using stem cells contained in bone marrow.

You can’t reinflate a leaky balloon. The science of regenerative medicine is moving on. And that, fundamentally, is why the embryonic stem cell industry is faltering financially.

 
CBC Special Consultant Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is also a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and a consultant for the Patient’s Rights Council.

By Christopher White, CBC Director of Education and Programs, and a Fellow of the Paul Ramsey Institute.

Governor Christie’s recent veto of a bill that would lower restrictions on gestational surrogate mothers should prompt us to consider surrogacy’s harmful effects on mothers and children.

Meet Cathleen: a twenty-year-old from New Brunswick, Canada, who served as a surrogate mother of twins for an infertile British couple. Twenty-seven weeks into the pregnancy, Cathleen was informed—via text message—that the couple was divorcing and would no longer need the children she had been carrying for them.

Then there’s Carrie: a mom of four from Colorado who agreed to carry a child for an Austrian couple who had spent twenty years unsuccessfully trying to conceive. After the child was born and they returned home, Carrie was hit with medical fees of $217,000. The Austrian couple paid none of it, and failed to make the agreed-upon surrogacy payment.

Consider too the story of Premila Vaghela, an Indian woman who was paid to serve as a surrogate for a couple from the United States. After a premature birth at eight months into the pregnancy, the child survived but the mother died of complications from delivery. These are just a few of the many surrogacy horror stories. Meanwhile, surrogacy remains a lucrative enterprise with an ever-expanding reach.

In recent weeks, the New Jersey state legislature spent the closing days of the legislative session quietly trying to weaken restrictions for gestational surrogates in the state. Their efforts were foiled, however, when Governor Chris Christie vetoed the bill last Wednesday, August 8, citing “the profound change in the traditional beginnings of the family that this bill will enact.” For advocates of women’s health, children’s rights, and stable families, this is a huge victory. It also should be used as a teaching moment to expose the many moral and ethical concerns raised by surrogacy, and the health risks to mothers and children that surrogacy introduces.

The practice of surrogacy traditionally has taken place by inserting freshly thawed or new sperm into the mother. This is the standard procedure for fertile women who are able to serve as the child’s gestational and genetic mother. The second method, used increasingly more often, is known as gestational surrogacy, in which a previously created embryo is implanted inside the surrogate mother, who delivers a child that is not genetically related to her. While some surrogate mothers agree to carry another couple’s child for what they consider to be altruistic reasons, the more common motivation is the financial incentive that couples desperate to conceive a child can offer.

Like anonymous sperm donation and the buying and selling of women’s eggs, the practice of surrogacy in the United States is barely regulated, since the desires of the parents are valued above the child in gestation. There also are few records to determine how many children are born through surrogacy each year. According to the most recent data from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, nearly 1,400 children were born through surrogacy in 2008. That number indicates an almost 100-percent increase from the 738 babies reported born through surrogacy in 2004. Regrettably, few studies have explored the health risks posed by surrogacy or its effect on children. However, if the anecdotes above are any indication, all is not well for the mothers or the children involved in the process.

Consider the commodification of women caused by surrogacy. Gestational surrogacy reduces women to their biological capacities as mere instruments to be used in the manufacturing of a product, comparable to the way we view car factories in Detroit.

At the same time, surrogate-produced children are manufactured as designer babies: Wealthy parents can select their perfect fusion of sperm from an athletic male with the egg of a female who graduated from an Ivy League school with a 4.0 GPA. Indeed, surrogacy is a medium in which couples—or even single men or women—can attempt to create their dream child.

This effort, however, comes at a high cost, since it usually ends in the exploitation of impoverished women. The death of Ms. Vaghela of India, who chose to become a surrogate in hopes of providing a better life for her two children, offers a perfect example of this problem. Now her children will live in poverty indefinitely as orphans. Moreover, surrogacy tourism has become an industry in itself: wealthy westerners travel to places such as India and Southeast Asia to hire surrogate mothers to carry their children. In some patriarchal societies, there are reports of women being forced by their husbands to serve as surrogates in order to contribute to household income.

Then there’s the other side of the coin: the children created by the surrogacy process. In a 2010 study, “My Daddy’s Name is Donor,” 45 percent of children conceived from an anonymous sperm donation reported that they were bothered by the fact that money was exchanged in order to conceive them. The same is likely to be said by children conceived through surrogacy, and the psychological effects of being separated from their birth mother pose numerous consequences that likely will remain with them for the rest of their lives. There is a natural, hormonal bonding that takes place between a mother and a child that she carries in her womb. The hormone oxytocin, for example, is released in large amounts both during and after childbirth, which establishes and increases the trust between mother and child. Surrogacy intentionally severs this natural and beneficial relationship, a relationship we should seek to encourage and protect, not prevent.

Lastly, those who promote marriage between a man and a woman and the parenting of a mom and a dad as ideal should be concerned about the effects of surrogacy. As proponents of same-sex marriage continue to make their case, their arguments will probably coincide with a greater demand for surrogate mothers who can provide children to same-sex couples. While there is no way to measure how many same-sex couples are in the surrogacy market, a review of surrogacy organizations reveals that many testimonials and advertisements are either from or targeted at same-sex couples.

While surrogacy legislation or regulation is unlikely to be a matter of debate in this year’s presidential election—especially when Mitt Romney’s son Tagg recently had twins via a surrogate mother—it is an important issue that should make us pause and reflect on the type of society we are building. Are we willing to prioritize the desires—not needs—of a select, wealthy few at the expense of future children? And if so, when and where should we draw the line?

In his statement criticizing Governor Christie’s veto, state senator and co-sponsor of the New Jersey bill Joseph Vitale called the veto “a major setback for parents who wish to create life and give a baby a loving home.” Yet for victims like Premila Vaghela of India or the surrogate children who fall asleep at night wondering about their biological mothers and fathers, that line was crossed long ago.

Christopher White is the Director of Education and Programs for the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC) and a Fellow of the Paul Ramsey Institute. The CBC is in pre-production for an upcoming documentary on the consequences of surrogacy for women and children.

Copyright 2012 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

This article originally appeared at The Public Discourse. Used by Permission.

Friends, you’ve done it again. This is the third funding project I’ve done through KickStarter, and each of them has been fully funded. I want to make sure you know how grateful I am for your support of the CBC’s work. Thank you.

Your gifts will place the important message of Eggsploitation before a huge, international audience. I can’t wait to report back to you about the showing, which will take place on August 22.

While the minimum funding goal has been met (this was our bare-bones budget) the KickStarter campaign will remain open until July 20. This means there is still time for you to join us in this significant opportunity. Additional gifts will go toward the translation of promotional materials, printing costs, and additional expenses that will allow me to maximize the impact of the trip. In particular, it will allow me to do even more to spread the word about the showing once I’m on the ground at the conference in Italy.

Once again, thank you

Jennifer

Dear Friend,

As you probably know, I have the incredible opportunity to show Eggsploitation at a conference in Italy this August. More than 100,000 people are expected to attend the conference. Can you imagine the impact we might have in bringing the important message of Eggsploitation to such a large, international audience?

The CBC team has been helping me prepare for this for more than a year. We have had the film translated into Italian. Things are falling into place.

But I need your help to be sure we are able to pull this off successfully.

This trip is going to cost at least $3,350. Much of that will go toward travel and lodging, but it will also help me to spread the word about the showing to the conference attendees once I am on the ground in Italy.

I have setup a giving campaign on the funding website Kickstarter. We have rewards for various levels of giving. Will you visit the website and consider giving a gift to help us make the most of this strategic opportunity?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1934341806/send-eggsploitation-to-italy

Many people have already given generously so that our minimum budget is 68% funded as I write. We still need $1,065. Will you push us over the top?

Thank you,

Jennifer

–
Jennifer Lahl
President the Center for Bioethics and Culture

PS — Eggsploitation was recently rated “Highly Recommended” by Educational Media Reviews Online, the “bible” for librarians looking to purchase quality materials for their institutions. Be encouraged by this affirmation of the importance of our message and our work!

PPS — Please also consider forwarding this message to others you know who might be able to help me take the important message of Eggsploitation to Italy.

Send Eggsploitation to Italy
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1934341806/send-eggsploitation-to-italy

In the world of commercialized conception, it seems we’ve decided the freezer is a great place to keep eggs, sperm, and “spare” embryos until we need them. We think they do pretty well in the freezer, but the verdict is still out on what happens over the long haul when you freeze and store human reproductive material and nascent human life. Commercial conceivers simply assume that because we can freeze and thaw our reproductive cells or progeny, it causes no harm or danger.

And not only can we do it; it has become big business.

Case in point: the new fad of egg freezing. It began with the laudable goal of helping the younger woman who was diagnosed with cancer. A woman facing cancer treatment is at risk for compromised fertility induced by chemotherapy. Egg freezing was used to try to preserve and protect her fertility, so that after her cancer treatment was completed and her health was restored, she might still be able to conceive — using in vitro fertilization — her own biological child. It is also used in veterinary medicine to preserve species, especially endangered species.

But this new egg-freezing industry has popped up more and more as a lifestyle choice. Maybe, baby later. National Public Radio devoted a segment to this fad titled, “Egg Freezing Puts the Biological Clock on Hold.” They reported, “As more women postpone motherhood into their 30s, even 40s, they’re hitting that age-old constraint: the biological clock. Now, technology is dangling the possibility that women can stop that clock, at least for a while.”

Even grandparents are getting into (and paying for) the act! The New York Times heralded, “So Eager for Grandchildren, They’re Paying the Egg-Freezing Clinic”! The story paints this picture, “The gray-haired entourages, it turns out, are the parents, tagging along to lend support — emotional and often financial — as their daughters turn to the fledgling field of egg freezing to improve their chances of having children later on, when they are ready to start a family.”

But of course, the facts seem to get lost in all the hoopla over a newfangled way to manipulate reproduction.

First, there is the pragmatic reality of the cost of this new experimental service. I called one egg freezing agency in Southern California, and the woman I spoke with was putting the hard sell on me. I explained I was only writing an article on this and wasn’t interested in this for myself! The costs are high – meaning if you are poor, don’t even think about freezing your eggs. It’s about $7,000 to $12,000 to harvest the eggs, and an additional $4,000 to $5,000 later to transfer the embryos into the woman’s uterus once she’s ready to have a baby. Then there are the fertility drugs to super ovulate the woman in order to maximize the number of eggs retrieve, adding an additional $2,700. Plus the annual storage fee of $300 to $600.

Then, there are the medical realities. Nowhere on any egg freezing sites that I visited did anyone disclose the realities of the risks to women and children related to maternal age and pregnancy. I’ve written before about the risks of advanced maternal age which heightens the risk of “fetal loss” – meaning age increases the likelihood that she won’t carry the baby to term.

One important study noted this stark conclusion:

There is an increasing risk of fetal loss with increasing maternal age in women aged more than 30 years. Fetal loss is high in women in their late 30s or older, irrespective of reproductive history. This should be taken into consideration in pregnancy planning and counseling.

Shouldn’t a technology that claims to be able to put the biological clock on hold be accountable for disclosing the maternal-child health risks to women?

And this is still experimental science. Even the sites that show their methods and success rates show that this is a field still learning about the best methods and techniques. Do women really, if properly informed, want to experiment on their future children? This graph demonstrates the wide range of “success” depending on the freezing method:

 
I say freezers are for food, like the Thanksgiving turkey, not for our future progeny.

 
The Human Egg Freezing Project (West Coast Fertility Center, YouTube):

 
This article also appears at NewFeminism.co

It is a disturbing sign of the times that Princeton’s notorious bioethicist Peter Singer has been awarded Australia’s highest civic award “for eminent service to philosophy and bioethics as a leader of public debate and communicator of ideas in the areas of global poverty, animal welfare and the human condition.”

This is a disgrace. Would the promoter of racial bigotry ever receive such a prestigious award? No matter how eloquently communicated or elegantly written, not a chance in the world. But as we will see below, Singer’s views are just as discriminatory as racial supremacism. Indeed, considering the potentially dire consequences to the medically vulnerable in specific, and universal human rights in general, perhaps even more dangerous.

Singer adamantly opposes human exceptionalism, that is, he denies the sanctity of life ethic and the existence of intrinsic human dignity—the backbone of Western freedom. Not only that, but Singer claims that holding the lives and well being of humans to have greater import than those of animals is immoral discrimination against animals—a concept known as “speciesism.”

To avoid the odor of speciesism, Singer advocates that we eschew the principle of universal human equality in favor of judging the value of individuals—be they human or animal—individually. Specifically, Singer wrote in Animal Liberation:

To avoid speciesism we must allow that beings who are similar in all relevant respects have a similar right to life—and mere membership in our own biological species cannot be a morally relevant criterion for this right . . . A chimpanzee, dog, or pig, for instance, will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of senility.

Singer thus proposes a radical departure in the morality of society: individuals with higher cognitive capacities or abilities would have greater moral worth than those with lower acumen. Singer calls this the “quality of life ethic,” and he proposes that it explicitly replace the sanctity of human life view. This would mean that the right to life (as just one example) would not be inherent but would vary individual by individual and moment by moment.

Singer claims that personhood should replace humanhood as the measure of highest value. In this view, individuals who are not self-aware are not “persons,” and thus have lower value—to the point that so-called human non persons can be killed. In this regard, Singer made an explicit moral equivalency between some people and mackerel in Rethinking Life and Death, writing “Since neither a newborn infant nor a fish is a person the wrongness of killing such beings is not as great as the wrongness of killing a person.”

Singer’s infamous pro infanticide views are well known. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. For example:

• Singer supports using the disabled in medical experiments: In 2006, Singer enraged animal rights activists over the use of monkeys in researching cures for Parkinson’s disease. But he would have said the same thing about using human “non-persons.” In fact, he often has. For example, when asked by Psychology Today about the benefits that chimps provided in developing the hepatitis vaccine, Singer said that disabled humans should be used in such research instead.

• Singer is pro-medical discrimination: Singer supports health care rationing, writing in the July 15, 2009, New York Times, “The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable.” Singer prefers the “Quality Adjusted Life Year” (QALY) approach that has been used for years by the United Kingdom’s socialized National Health Service. QALYs give greater value to the lives of the able-bodied and young than to people with disabilities and the elderly (which are “adjusted” down based on low “quality”) when determining whether the cost of a treatment is worth the price.

• Singer has defended bestiality: Singer positively reviewed a book celebrating the history of bestiality, and concluded that the proscription against sex with animals was merely a vestigial “taboo” from a more sexually repressed era. Indeed, he extolled a woman for being unconcerned at the prospect of forced sexual intercourse with an orangutan, on the basis that “We are great apes. This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”

• Singer Co-Founded The Great Ape Project (GAP): The GAP was the brainchild of Peter Singer and Italian philosopher Paola Cavalieri, and seeks “equality beyond humanity.” Realizing that obtaining equal moral consideration for all animals will be a multi-generational project, Singer and Cavalieri decided to “break the species barrier” by obtaining legal recognition that all great apes—us, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos—are a “community of equals.” In what could be construed as a parody of the Declaration of Independence, Cavalieri and Singer identified three rights—not intended as an exhaustive list—to which all members of the community of equals are entitled: 1: The Right to Life, 2: “The Protection of Individual Liberty;” and, 3: “The Prohibition of Torture.”

A Peter Singer world would be profoundly immoral. It would be a society in which babies that did not suit the interests of their parents could be killed. It would be an era in which the most vulnerable human beings—living fetuses, unwanted infants, people with profound cognitive impairments—could be used in medical experiments of the kind decried by the Nuremberg Code and/or be subjected to death by organ harvesting. It would be a world in which universal human rights would have been discarded and replaced by a society in which our rights were subject to revocation based on our quality of life.

And yet, despite these and other awful consequences, he’s the most celebrated bioethicist and moral philosopher of our times.

Here’s the hard truth: The problem isn’t Singer. The real source of the moral collapse comes because too many of us are unwilling or unable to defend the intrinsic dignity and importance of human life.

 
CBC special consultant Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Center’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, and a consultant for the Patients Rights Council.