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.’
