Chromosomes. Image: CC BY 3.0 Blausen staff.
“…the situation we have now in modern cultures is that the technologies that we have available to us are being used in advance of the ethics and the political conversations that should surround them in democratic, egalitarian orders.
So what we have is a free market, basically, that is making decisions about the technologies that are created, that shape people and populations in certain ways...
Down’s Syndrome is a marvellous example, a case study if you will, in the identification of certain characteristics in people that the general population may understand as undesirable, and then technologies being developed in order to identify that certain set of characteristics prenatally, before birth, and then to eliminate those people - that kind of person - from the world on the basis of imagining and understanding those kinds of people, that cluster of characteristics, as being inferior.”
- Prof. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
What do we lose if we eliminated disability in society, through either technology or eugenics?
Disability activist Prof. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson of Emory University talks to Bryan Crump.
