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Unspeakable Conversations

By HARRIET McBRYDE JOHNSON

He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

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It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

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It's not that I'm ugly. It's more that most people don't know how to look at me. The sight of me is routinely discombobulating. The power wheelchair is enough to inspire gawking, but that's the least of it. Much more impressive is the impact on my body of more than four decades of a muscle-wasting disease.

He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

This is an amazing article. I've often had internal debates over the parent's choice in the life or death of a child with serious disabilities. Unfortunately, this article doesn't touch base on how Harriet McBryde Johnson feels about the advances of genetic engineering and early detection of such disabilties.

I'm still a bit confused about the animal rights angle that Professor Singer has. Perhaps he feels that by taking the animal rights angle, he has more of a valid argument that somehow people who are severely disabled suffer as much as animals by being subjected to life? Maybe he feels that if we value human life in its early development stages so much, then we should value animal life just as much in proportion? Which argument supports which ;-)