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Scientists playing God? We should rejoice
‘What a piece of work is a man!” as Hamlet says. “How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! . . . In apprehension how like a god!” Usually I think rather less enthusiastically than that about humankind, but sometimes I am reminded of the nobility of man and of woman and it is often by scientists.
Last week British scientists announced a revolutionary screening process for inherited diseases in embryos. It will be quicker and more accurate than the existing method and it will detect thousands more genetic defects than previously possible.
About 200 heritable conditions can be detected by pre-implantation diagnosis in IVF treatment so that only healthy embryos are implanted in the mother or frozen; the new technique — pre-implantation genetic haplotyping — will be able to detect nearly 6,000 diseases and conditions. As one of the British pioneers said, this changes everything. One could almost call it godlike.
What it means is that thousands of parents who are at known risk of passing on terrible disabilities and diseases will now be able to have only healthy babies. This is the best news I have heard for years.
Those who don’t know about it can perhaps hardly imagine the drawn out suffering of Huntington’s disease or Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Prader-Willi syndrome or Fragile X, both for the people affected and for their families, until death puts an end to it.
Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy. One can only be dazzled by the inventiveness and compassion of the scientists involved in this screening breakthrough — “in action”, as Hamlet said, “how like an angel!” Admittedly genetic screening means that embryos carrying disabilities and diseases will be discarded. It is a stretch, however, to use the word destroyed, or even killed, as the test is done on embryos that are only three days old. And what is appealing about this early screening is that it offers the hope that, in the foreseeable future, abortion and late abortion will be less frequently used in dealing with serious defects and disabilities.
It will be easier and better in every way to get rid of a tiny collection of cells. This is indeed playing God, as all the usual campaigners were quick to point out last week. But what on earth is wrong with humans playing God? I am all for it, especially as God doesn’t seem to be doing it. Besides, whatever we may think about playing God and defying nature, we are doing it already and even though we don’t necessarily recognise it, we approve of it.
For instance, there are many people who in the course of nature would die before they were old enough to have children. They might suffer from inherited heart defects or blood disorders that would kill them if they did not get transplants or dialysis. They might have disabilities that would kill them as newborn babies, without intervention. If properly treated these people may well live to be able to have children and some of those children will be at risk of inheriting the same problems and, in their turn, may pass them down the generations.
Eugenicists might think, and used to say publicly, that this is bad for the gene pool. Yet hardly anybody, I imagine, believes that such people should be denied treatment. It now seems absurd and cruel to suggest that people with heritable problems should not risk having children. It’s hard to imagine the intellectual climate in which Marie Stopes could oppose her son marrying a girl with the heritable defect of short sight.
It is surely the point of modern medicine to relieve suffering and restore people to as full a life as possible. If one wanted to risk sounding unfeeling and darkly Darwinist (and I don’t), one could argue that rescuing such people from extinction is also rescuing their disability from extinction — a godlike activity, surely.
Such is the miraculous power of human invention that even this problem is on the way to being solved — by the screening tests announced last week. One way of playing God has now been balanced by another, even more ingenious, human invention. That is the way of science. It mystifies me that so many people oppose it.
There will always be absolutists, who claim the right to life for even the most infinitesimal scrap of tissue. But there are others who oppose screening on what seem to me to be even more irrational grounds.
Simone Aspis of the British Council of Disabled People said last week that she was opposed in principle to such screening on the grounds that it sent the signal that being born disabled was a bad thing. The mind reels. Over the years I have got used to the disability lobby talking in this spirit, so it no longer seems as absurd as once it did, but surely it must be obvious that it would be far better for a person not to have a disability than to have one.
It would be far better to be able to walk, or hear or see than not to. It would be far better not to have a miserable fate like Huntington’s or Fragile X. In a culture where many normal girls are obsessed to the point of illness with their minor imperfections, it is surely better not to have major impairments. In that sense, being born with a disability is obviously a bad thing.
For some reason the disability lobby seems to be in denial about this, perhaps because it’s in the grip of a logical muddle. Apsis made a typical expression of it when she wondered whether the intention of the screening was to remove disabled people. It sent a message, she said, particularly to young people with disabilities, that their lives were worth less than everyone else’s. This seems to me to confuse a disability with a person with a disability. (This is a confusion that people with disabilities normally resent, understandably.)
To say that a disability is undesirable in itself is not to say that a person with that disability is undesirable in herself, or her life worth less than someone else’s. The disability is not the person. It is to say that her life would be better without that disability. And saying it assumes that a person with a life and a history here in the world, with family and friends, is not the same as a minuscule collection of defective cells on a petri dish. One is dispensable, the other most certainly is not.
What a piece of work is a man and partly, now, it is the work of godlike humankind.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 25, 2006 | Comments (1)
The dangerous business of happiness
Now that the Conservatives are trying, wisely, to reposition themselves as a party of fellow-feeling free from the old, damaging charge of selfish greed, they are increasingly using the language of feeling.
It can be dangerous. Although Conservatism has a long and honourable history of social responsibility and concern for the less fortunate, I think it is rather un-Conservative to dwell incautiously on abstractions such as happiness. Pursuing abstractions is what statists do.
David Cameron spoke recently of wellbeing — the new Conservative buzz word. “It’s time we focused not on GDP but on GWB — general wellbeing” he said. “There’s more to life than money.” Wellbeing, he went on, has to do with our surroundings, our culture and “above all, the strength of our relationships”.
It is true that wellbeing is not quite the same as happiness, but the idea clearly has its origins in the work of Professor Lord Layard of the London School of Economics, who caused a great stir a year ago with his views on happiness in society and what promotes it. I think it is fair enough to assume that Cameron means something quite like happiness, or at least contentment.
I accept that although we are richer than in 1950, we are no happier. Of course I would like to see more happiness (or less unhappiness) in this country. I do believe that politics is about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or at least the liberty to pursue happiness. But the idea that there might be some sort of happiness agenda among new Conservatives is distinctly alarming.
When Cameron says that “improving society’s sense of wellbeing is the central political challenge of our time”, that sounds like a happiness agenda to me.
The essential difference between left and right — between Conservatives and Labour — is that the left seeks actively to intervene in every aspect of life and to set one agenda for us all, whereas the right seeks to promote freedom and security, so that people can pursue their own many agendas. The left is hands on, the right is hands off. It is the difference between enforcing and enabling.
The suspicion that Conservatives may be toying with some kind of felicific or hedonic calculus, to organise our joys for us just like the social engineering tendency, is too terrible. I doubt that they are, but it is all too easy, when talking the language of happiness, for them to sound as if they might be. One wonders what David Cameron had in mind for “celebrating parenthood”, as he promises. In politics, as in science, it is surely more effective to eliminate what is clearly wrong rather than to pursue what may elusively be right. The greatest obstacle to happiness, obviously enough, is unhappiness and unhappiness is something that can sometimes be relieved.
One of the chief causes of unhappiness which a government — or at least Britain’s government-controlled National Health Service — could do something about is mental illness. Relieving someone’s mental distress might not make him or her happy, but it would make them feel freer to pursue happiness in their own ways.
Treatments for mental illness are still quite crude, but there is no doubt that modern medicine can help many people very significantly. Of the talking therapies, the only one that impresses me is cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), a rapid retraining of one’s negative thoughts and feelings, which is both effective and cheap. Modern antidepressants can be almost miraculously effective, although not cheap.
The country is full of people who need such help — people who are profoundly unhappy in one way or another. Most families have at least one person who is made wretched by depression or anxiety, whose relationships and whose work are blighted by it. It is now clearly recognised that even quite young children can suffer badly from mood disorders. One in six people suffers from significant depression or anxiety. About 40% of disability is due to mental illness.
Yet mental illness or, as it is now usually called in the euphemistic spirit of the times, mental health is scandalously neglected. Common as they are, miserable though they are, depression and anxiety get only 2% of NHS spending. Mental health units are often little more than hellholes and there are hardly any beds anyway. Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) suggest that everyone suffering from depression should be offered CBT because it is so cost-effective.
Yet the guidelines are being ignored because there is not enough money. Care in the community is all too often a double oxymoron — no care and no community. Yet if the acute pain of mental illness were recognised in the way that physical pain attracts instant sympathy and painkillers, this cruelty and neglect could not continue.
For once I find myself in total agreement with Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist, that this is a scandal. But I am in total disagreement with her attitude to it. Drawing on a report on depression by Lord Layard, of happiness fame, to be published tomorrow, she argues it would be cheap and easy to relieve a huge amount of mental suffering, to do away with whole sloughs of despond.
As Layard points out, if the NHS ignored Nice guidelines to offer some very expensive new cancer drug, there would be a public scandal. Why is it that there is no public outrage at the shortage of money that goes to relieve mental illness and at the way Nice guidelines are being ignored? Toynbee and Layard are both entirely right.
Where Toynbee, a cheerleader for another natural interventionist, Gordon Brown, remains alarming, though, is in her general view that happiness is the concern of the state. She even believes that happiness can be objectively quantified by measuring electrical activity in the brain. She thinks that it would be easy to audit the progress of national happiness each year, just as we monitor the GDP.
The “national happiness audit” would enable us to form and judge social policies, she explains. This is without a doubt the scariest idea I have read for many years. If Cameron is going to carry on talking of gross domestic happiness, he would be well advised to distance himself from this horrifying vision of a Happy New World.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 18, 2006 | Comments (0)
Our mealy-mouthed muddle over rape
In the dog days of this government there seems to be a mood in the air not just of incompetence but of confusion. It cannot entirely be new Labour’s fault — we probably get the Establishment we deserve — and it probably isn’t entirely new, but there is a feeling of moral muddle that seems more intense than in the days of cool Britannia.
There are countless examples of it. Three from last week have to do with the lurid subject of rape and they show all too clearly the sort of doubt and dither I mean.
It must be obvious to most people that rape — sex without consent — is always wrong. It ought to be obvious, too, that some rapes are worse than others. The degree of guilt must depend on the circumstances and so must the degree of punishment. To have confidence in British justice the public needs to feel that the punishment fits the crime, and fits the criminal, and consistently so. But we are beginning to feel that less and less. Last week’s rape cases — baby rape, wife rape and bride rape — were a strange medley of contradictions.
In the case of the baby rapist, Alan Webster had raped a girl of only 12 weeks old. He had also indecently assaulted a teenager and downloaded more than 7,000 pornographic pictures involving the rape and sexual abuse of children, including pictures of the rape of the baby. He was given a life sentence with a minimum of six years in jail, but last week, following understandable public outrage, the Court of Appeal increased that minimum to eight years.
That means that eight years from now, if the Parole Board sees fit, this man of “horrifying depravity” could be living in the community again. Meanwhile the Home Office is considering proposals to classify as dealers people possessing enough cannabis for just 10 joints, and make them liable to up to 14 years in prison. Where is the moral consistency in all this?
Admittedly the Parole Board might not see fit to let the baby rapist loose after eight years. As the appeal court said, it is “questionable” whether Webster will ever be released. On the other hand we know from recent and bitter experience that the Parole Board and the probation service have made terrible mistakes with obviously dangerous prisoners, who have been let out to kill again. Besides, the idea that eight years means anything one way or another with a man like Webster is absurd. Quite clearly this man is either so mad or so bad that there should be no “question” of letting him out at all, unless and until there is some future revolution in psychiatric medicine.
For now the evidence that serious sex offenders can redeem themselves and control their dreadful appetites is at best weak and controversial. In extreme cases, like the Moors murders, life should mean life, or at least that should be the presumption, rather than the current presumption that it doesn’t.
So here was the revolting rape of a baby being leniently treated, on the face of it. But in the same week new draft sentencing guidelines were announced that recommended rape in marriage should be treated as seriously as, or more seriously than, rape by a stranger: a husband convicted of raping his wife might face the same punishment as rapists who abduct their victims or attack them in a gang. According to the guidelines, the seriousness of rape is “always aggravated when the offender is in a position of trust in relation to the victim”.
Aggravated means made more serious; according to the draft guidelines, a rape by a male partner is more serious than a typical rape by a stranger. I suppose there may be cases when that is so, but mostly speaking it is plainly daft. I know which I would find more traumatic and more criminal.
There is one case, however, of rape in marriage that is obviously shocking and wrong — bride rape. When British women of Asian origin are forced into marriage against their consent, they are, one can only assume, forced into sex against their consent, or in plain English raped. It is bad enough that it happens all over the underdeveloped world; it is unacceptable that it happens here.
Forced marriage is not the same as arranged marriage. It is the horrible practice of forcing a young British girl (or boy) to marry someone of his or her parents’ choice, often so the spouse can acquire British nationality and its benefits. And it is all too common. About 300 are reported every year and there are probably many others that go unreported, along with some suspected cases of honour killings in Britain and a high rate of suicide among young Asian females here, at three times the national average.
If ever there were a case for protecting vulnerable young women from institutionalised rape, this must be it. For some time the government has been contemplating laws specifically against forced marriage, and though new Labour regularly proposes quite unnecessary laws to make political points when there are plenty of adequate laws in existence (as with incitement to religious hatred), this time for once I thought there was good reason to make forced marriage an offence. It would send a clear message that it goes against British values and is unacceptable no matter how multicultural anyone might feel.
However, despite some ambitious proposals and consultations, last week the government did one of its many U-turns and announced that a specific law to ban forced marriage was “not needed”. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that this was yet again done for political advantage — either to hang on to ethnic minority votes, or to appease the multicultural lobby.
This is not an end to the inconsistencies. Although the guidelines advise that “date rape” and “acquaintance rape” are as serious as “stranger rape”, they also say that where both parties have indulged in some consensual intimacy before the rape, that “must have some relevance for sentencing purposes”. As you were then: acquaintance rape is not necessarily so serious.
It so happens that I agree with that, but I remain puzzled about the inconsistencies. As Ruth Hall of Women Against Rape promptly said: “The Sentencing Guidelines Council is talking out of both sides of its mouth.” That’s what you do when you are confused, of course, and confusion does seem to have taken over, among lawyers just as much as among the rest of us.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 11, 2006 | Comments (0)
Don’t call them prisons, but build them
Last year Verna Bryant’s daughter Naomi was brutally murdered by a dangerous sex offender who had just been let out of jail on parole (life licence). His release into the community was not just a tragic mistake, the sort of terrible error that can occur from time to time in any system. It was, in the words of a damning report by the chief inspector of probation, due to “a string of failures”. Last Friday Verna Bryant announced that she is suing the government under the Human Rights Act for violation of her daughter’s human right to be protected by the state.
One can only sympathise, odd though this sounds. I am extremely wary of the notion of human rights and of the ways in which human rights legislation can be used to perverse ends. However, it does certainly seem to me that the single most important duty that a government has to its citizens is to protect them. One might call that a universal human right, or one might more reasonably call it the first essential of a social contract in a civilised society. Yet it is becoming increasingly obvious that in this country our government and our criminal justice service are failing us and — if you want to put it this way, which I wouldn’t — violating our right to be safe.
Naomi Bryant’s murder is not an isolated case. One of the killers of John Monckton, the London banker, was let out of jail despite an official assessment that he was 91% likely to commit a violent offence again. Four of the torturers and killers of the teenager Mary-Ann Leneghan were on probation, supposedly under proper supervision. Perhaps the victims’ families should consider suing the government.
Admittedly it would be unfair to dump the entire burden of blame on the probation service; it suffers from recruitment problems, overwork, underfunding and a departmental shake-up. These things are disasters waiting to happen and along with them are many other lesser crimes.
For all new Labour’s promises to be tough on crime, violent crime has gone up since 1997 and recent reports of stabbings among teenagers suggest what police and social workers have also been saying: that a frightening new knife culture has developed — so much so that the government recently promised a daft knife amnesty.
This is to say nothing of dangerous foreign criminals being let loose into the community and then “lost”, despite the repeated warnings since 2002 of the chief inspector of prisons, who broke silence on this last week.
What is the response of the powers that be to all this? Confusion, contradiction and undignified spats between government and top judges. It defies belief. The home secretary took office just the other day saying that the government wanted tougher jail sentences, and last Thursday he was considering plans with ministers to give longer sentences of up to five years to people who carry knives.
Yet the same day it emerged that murderers and rapists who confess could get their sentences hugely reduced in accordance with new proposals being considered by the Sentencing Advisory Panel under Lord Phillips, the lord chief justice.
He caused quite a sensation last week by saying in public that the prison service is fatally flawed and warning that judges should not send people to prison unless they absolutely have to; overcrowding makes rehabilitation impossible and “the sensible place for rehabilitation is in the community”. He went on to say, however, that the public would not tolerate community sentencing if it did not involve “significant punishment”.
Then, in a genuinely shocking exposure in The Times on Friday, it emerged that for all the government’s tough talk, ministers are seeking emergency powers to allow the early release of thousands of prisoners, not on judicial grounds but to relieve overcrowding in prisons; there are only 1,860 spaces left in jails in England and Wales. The wonderfully weaselly name which has been dreamt up for this ruse is “administrative release”.
This hardly inspires confidence. It is ludicrous. Yet there is, if only people could get the better of their preconceptions, a solution which would suit everyone from liberal to authoritarian. The two passionately held preconceptions that have to go are first, that prison doesn’t work (as a deterrent) and second, that community sentencing does.
Neither is true and there is plenty of evidence. Nor is it true that we imprison more people, proportionately, than other countries do; on the contrary, we have a higher crime rate than most Europeans and jail relatively fewer criminals.
It is true that prisons are no place for rehabilitation (in so far as it might be possible) as they are today, but nor is the community. If it is impossible, as it clearly is, even to supervise offenders for a couple of hours a week in the community, how could it be possible genuinely to teach and guide and help them? It is also true that many of the wrong people are in prison, so to speak, for lack of anything else to do with them. Many suffer from mental illness, personality disorders or learning disabilities, and at least two-thirds are illiterate and unemployable, and they are all slung in together to take their miserable chances.
What all these offenders need is a safe, uncrowded place where they can be humanely detained, treated and educated — perhaps rehabilitated. They don’t all need the same kind of place and they don’t all need the same kind of treatment, but they need to be separated from the rest of us, for a time at least, for our protection. For their own protection they should be sent to different kinds of institution, from decent mental hospitals to enlightened training centres as well as secure prisons.
What is blindingly clear is that we need more institutions for offenders, whether they are actually called prisons or not. And the man who is standing in the way of this, in the way of proper treatment of prisoners and proper protection of the public, is Gordon Brown. Labour has been very reluctant to build new jails and all but two requests for more prisons have been turned down by the Treasury.
I am beginning to have some sympathy with the quaint idea of suing the government, starting with the Treasury.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 04, 2006 | Comments (0)
