This book tackles the great questions of life through five essays by as many authors: assisted reproduction and abortion, euthanasia, disability, birth control, and the animation of corpses. These are the bioethical problems that advances in technoscience now force us to confront. The authors show how such questions are ancient—some rooted deep in human history—and how our attitudes toward them have shifted over time. Particularly striking is Giulia Galeotti's approach to disability in her essay "Conceiving Disability."
She examines the subject historically, beginning with the cultural shift now underway regarding the choice to have a child even if disabled. Her historical survey covers the persecution of disabled people and the mentally ill, the excesses of eugenic theory, and the shameful laws it inspired. Starting with the first school for the deaf founded by the Abbé de l'Épée in 1771, she traces how disabled people came to be excluded from society.
Galeotti then narrates the different approaches to disability across the centuries, moving toward the positive legislative turn that came after the 1970s. Yet she concludes with a troubling observation: in our own time, we seem to be sliding backward. In a society obsessed with efficiency, health, and productivity, she warns, the winds of a new eugenics are beginning to blow.
The chapter closes with an illuminating and beautiful story of the Indian water carrier and his two pots. "Bioethics as History" is a book for everyone—worth reading because it prompts reflection even in the general reader about the great bioethical questions we now all must face. These are questions that can touch any of us at any moment in our lives.
R.M., 2011