Our very own Helen Rittelmeyer has had an article published in the current issue of Doublethink entitled ‘Toward a Bioethics of Love’ . Here’s a teaser:
To frame the idea in a different way, we all hope for our friends’ continual self-improvement: that our favorite penny-pincher will become more charitable, that our directionless nephew will discover some driving passion, that the melancholic next door will find inner peace. But in none of these cases would we want our friend to become someone else . They should become better, but should stay recognizably themselves. When a man’s disability is fundamental to his character, then there is no difference between wishing for a cure and wishing he were someone else. As Jim Sinclair put it in 1993 , “It is not possible to separate autism from the person. Therefore, when parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Ethics of Rhetoric in Times of War
What we say matters. And the way we say it matters. This is especially true in times…
How the State Failed Noelia Castillo
On March 26, Noelia Castillo, a twenty-five-year-old Spanish woman, was killed by her doctors at her own…
The Mind’s Profane and Sacred Loves
The teachers you have make all the difference in your life. That they happened to come into…
