While reading CBS’s recent story on Iceland’s success at reducing the number of Down syndrome cases, I was reminded of the Amazon Prime series Man in the High Castle.
The show, based on the celebrated alternative history novel by Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), explores a timeline wherein the Axis powers won World War II. The United States is divided between the Greater Nazi Reich and the Empire of Japan.
In one scene, one of the protagonists — a hero? a villain? — is stalled on a Midwest country roadside. He smells something in the air. Smoke. Ash.
The very American sheriff explains: it is a local hospital destroying defective humans. The weak, the sick, the disabled.
And we, the viewers, recoil: how evil. Nazis actually execute the weak, the sick, the disabled. Well, they did, in history, not just fiction.
But, as CBS explains, the reason Down syndrome cases are disappearing all over the place, and in Iceland most of all, is not a new cure. Chalk it up to the rise of prenatal screenings. We see fewer Down syndrome people because, before birth, they are executed. Aborted.
In our non-fictional timeline, many Americans are incensed that a few folks proclaiming to be Nazis have been “allowed” to demonstrate in public.
Nazism is evil. I agree.
But how do these morally horrified people react about the very “progressive” and culturally acceptable practice of killing the unwanted?
Think I’ve gone over the top, have abused a revered author to make a point alien to his own? Well, please read Dick’s “The Pre-Persons,” a story about abortion, way post-natal . . . until the age at which a person can understand algebra.*
Quite the moral calculation we make, eh?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* That could mean it’s open season for murder as states are moving to drop algebra requirements because so many fail to master the subject.
