Did They Deserve to be Born?
By Michael Coren

Tatiana and Krista Hogan-Simms appear to be on the wanted posters of every euthanasia advocate in Canada.

Because the little girls were born as conjoined twins there is some bloody, vulgar rush to argue that they should not have been allowed to be born or, in some cases, that they should now be exterminated.

Instead of relishing life and praying and hoping that the girls will survive and even be surgically separated, the foot soldiers of the eugenics movement shout for death. But it should not really come as much of a surprise.

The eugenics movement in question became immensely popular in the early 1900s. It was embraced by the socialist left, with famous authors such as Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells advocating all sorts of extermination policies.

Humanity had to be purified and improved, they argued, and this meant emulating the animal kingdom and removing the weaker of the species. The ideology became intensely racist under Hitler, but was at heart no different even from what many Canadian “progressives” were saying at the time.

The list of undesirables included homosexuals, Africans, the “slow and simple” and, according to Wells, the author of the Time Machine and the Invisible Man, “anybody who doesn’t fi t into the demands of the modern age.”

Which quite clearly these little girls do not. They’ll never appear on American Idol, never take illegal drugs and be promiscuous, never scream and swear at anybody who challenges them. Never be typical stars of the contemporary mess in which we live. Even worse, they’ll be
different!

Yet I meet people every day who are not very clever, not very attractive, not very entertaining. They ostensibly contribute very little and may appear to make society less compelling than it could otherwise be. Thing is, according to whom?

It’s easy to see that someone like Stephen Hawking expands our knowledge and imagination to an enormous degree, but may well have been killed if the social engineers had their way. Yet even if he’d only sat in a chair for his entire life his life would still have possessed an objective quality.

And this surely is the point. Objective quality. If we are subjective and make our own value judgments we might as well wipe out all sorts of people. Or we could simply grow up, develop our compassion and intelligence and realize that existence is a sufficient contribution in itself.

There is an absolute that we have to tackle. Life is either sacred or it is not. If it is, preserve it at all costs. If it is not, we might as well destroy it at will. It is terribly expensive to keep the sick alive and wholly impractical to prolong the life of an ill person who will die anyway.

No civilized person or society, however, considers expense and practicality to be more important than goodness and humanity. If it did, it would immediately wipe out, for example, drug addicts, the homeless and people with AIDS.

Tatiana and Krista will be loved and, important this, will love back. They will smile, laugh, cry, be sad and happy, sometimes frightened, sometimes excited. Just be. Which is quite enough. And God forgive anyone who awards themselves the right to decide who may be and who may not.

First published in the Toronto Sun. Reprinted with permission of the author. See www.michaelcoren.com.
Note: Tatiana and Krista Hogan-Simms were born joined at the head in Vancouver. BC. On October 25, 2006.