COVER -> DAY ONE
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By the time you read this I will --- by accident I assure you --- be in Australia, my visit coinciding with the Olympic Games; at least I will be in Perth rather than Sydney. I have never had any interest in pursuits of pure strength or physical virtuosity and any possibility of acquiring such a taste was obliterated by the grotesque Eastern Bloc freaks of the 1960s and 1970s who discredited the Olympic movement forever. It was not that the officials could indefinitely hold back the tide of drug enhancement; it was their silence, and the connivance of the television networks which had paid huge fees for airing the Games, that offended.
Such efforts as competitors and their coaches make to use chemical additives to improve their performances will soon seem as primitive as the bottle of brandy and the hacksaw in surgery. Improvements in physique as the result of exercise and diet far outweigh banned substances in improving performances but the elevation of victory over drama, and brute strength over subtlety, are rapidly reserving our most popular sports for freaks. Only soccer and golf are physically democratic. Soon the biological sciences will allow competitors to alter themselves beyond the recognition of any laboratory test so that by 2020 the Olympic Games will be as reputable as professional wrestling.
This, of course, raises -- in an acute form -- the question of what is natural and what is interference with nature.
Some drugs, for instance, which relieve mild influenza contain substances banned by sports administrators. How far should nature take its course and how far should we interfere with it, curing diseases, controlling fertility, splashing disinfectant everywhere? Not being ruminants any longer, we take our tonsils out and at one time, being opera lovers, castrati sang to us. Even from these examples it can be seen that there is no firm line to be drawn between nature taking its course and humankind interfering with it; there is, in any case, a recursive argument that we are part of nature and that all species change over time. In our case the exception is our ability to make changes and the radical nature of the changes we make.
During the next century we will suffer from an extreme disjuncture between science and our ability to handle the ethics of what it achieves. The only predictable outcome is that, whatever the development, the rich will prosper at the expense of the poor, the strong at the expense of the weak. There is already a sex imbalance in some sections of the Asian population as the result of female abortion following screening. If perfectly healthy female foetuses are to be aborted the halt and the blind don't stand a chance.
So, why are we in Britain agonising so much over the case of Jodie and Mary, conjoined twins who will die within six months if matters are left to take their course? The case of the two girls is almost identical to that of the Lakeberg case in the USA in 1993.
On that occasion the doctors said that if nothing was done the twins would die in weeks. The operation that killed Amy gave Angela ten months.
In this case a judge has over-ruled the parents' wish by supporting a medical application for Mary to be separated from Jodie in order that Jodie should have a much better chance of living a normal life. Naturally, the Roman Catholic ethic of non-interference has been cited, together with the anti-utilitarian principle that no end, no matter how desirable, can justify a means as radical as taking life.
There is a theoretically attractive question as to whether Mary (and Amy) are not really people at all but biological growths or parasites. There may come a time when we can reach this conclusion without flinching, but for the time being it is a distant psychological shadow. Some of the most beautiful orchids in the world are, after all, parasites.
For the time being the consensus seems to be that as the parents will most have to live with the consequences whether or not Mary is separated from Jodie it should be the parents wish which prevails. The problem with this argument is, of course, that it is not a principle of parental choice that is being upheld but glad support for parents who happen to agree with the conclusion of Catholic moralists and disagree with the judge. There would be no sympathy for the parents if they had applied for Mary's death as a means for saving Jodie and been contradicted by a judge.
Ultimately, then, if we are to support the principle of parental choice we must have the courage to support it whatever the choice.
We are then left with, by far, the most difficult line in the whole of the legal system, when does a matter of parental choice become a legitimate concern of the legal system? The failure to solve this problem in Britain means that surgeons might be breaking the law if they separate the twins but might equally be breaking the law if they leave matters as they are.
When prenatal screening forms its deadly alliance with mammon, matters will be even more complex. In the face of fiscal eugenics I am rationally as well as emotionally inclined towards the "Right to life" lobby, but I accept that the argument against abortion must be moral rather than legislative.
I equally accept that it is untenable to classify as a human being an egg at the instant it is punctured by a sperm. The 'thin end of the wedge' argument is wonderfully tidy and consoling but, even - perhaps particularly - in the case of eugenics which will massively magnify and intensify the abortion issue up to now, it will not do.
Neither will it do to claim that the two twins each have an immortal soul. So they may, but this only leads back to the initial question of what physical attributes a person must have in order to possess a soul. If a baby is born with six fingers on its left hand is the sixth finger another being with a soul? Of course not, you reply, but somewhere between the sixth finger and the weaker of conjoined twins there lies a boundary which all of us must demarcate if we are to make sense of ourselves.
The inability, particularly in the United States, to conduct a civilised debate on the question of abortion augurs badly for our future. Any argument which says that it is right to kill a doctor because he is carrying out abortions starts from the premise that the murderer has a unilateral right because he carries the Lord's sword of justice. As there has been disagreement since the Garden of Eden about the Lord's intentions in respect of his relationship with the human race and the obligations on both sides, this is an unhelpful starting point. Nor is the argument helped when so many who are against abortion are in favour of judicial murder which, all agree, sometimes involves the murder of the innocent. I do not know the answer to these profound ethical problems but that act of moral humility is a necessary precondition for finding a solution.
