For the past year, the House of Lords has been shaken by these arguments. Kevin Shinkwin is humble and resolute, with a visible disability—a congenital bone disease that affects his eyes as well. But he is above all a recognized British public figure whose service to society is well known.
Now he has launched an attack, through a bill, on a grave discrimination he says targets people with disabilities. His logic is unassailable: why fight every form of discrimination after birth while maintaining one—a "mortal" one—before? Like France, English law permits abortion until the end of pregnancy if a disability is detected in the fetus. Fetuses carrying disabilities are thereby penalized compared to all others.
Before his peers, Baron Shinkwin paid tribute to the surgeon—a Nazi regime survivor—who operated on him countless times as a child, and to his mother, who raised him "without discrimination" relative to others. He thanked his fellow peers for welcoming him without casting him aside. In his view, prenatal eugenics guaranteed by his country's law does not stem from rational decision-making. It stands in total contradiction with the laws his nation has passed to ensure that disabled people have their full place in society. But the "grotesque incoherence" he denounces carries a "tragic impact": the high rate of abortions when an anomaly is discovered.
Lord Shinkwin's conclusion is compelling: "People with congenital disabilities are at risk of extinction. If we were animals, we would undoubtedly be considered an endangered species. But we are human beings living with disabilities…"
Will the advocate for the voiceless be heard? A whole current of international thought makes no secret of wanting to eradicate genetic imperfection. Already in 1978, Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA's structure, declared: "No newborn should be recognized as human before passing a certain number of tests related to his genetic endowment." At the price of a radical verdict: "If he fails this test, he loses the right to life!"
Lord Shinkwin responds by asking us to look at him. For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, "the face is what prevents killing." The inscrutable nobility that radiates from the fragile face of Kevin Shinkwin is surely the nobility of our shared humanity.
by Tugdual Derville (from O&L no. 218)
Translated by Rita Massi