Technology and choice.

Advances in reproductive technology do not necessarily mean greater reproductive freedom for individuals around the globe. The most obvious example of this is in China, where the government recently announced a chilling plan to use fetal testing, forced sterilization, abortion, and a ban on marriages between people with congenital illnesses to weed out "new births of inferior quality."

While China - long criticized by the rest of the world for its coercive birth-control policies - has now bowed to international pressure to temper its plan, state interference in citizens' reproduction is a serious concern in the West as well.

In the United States, after fetal tests showed that twenty-two-year-old Tabita Bricci's baby might not be getting enough oxygen, the pregnant woman found herself in a Cook County courtroom, facing a court-appointed attorney for her unborn fetus. County officials argued that the woman should be forced to follow her doctors' orders to undergo a Cesarean section - which she had refused for religious and personal reasons - for the sake of her baby's health.

The case, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court, was overtaken by events when the woman gave birth to an apparently healthy baby in December. But it would have been an appalling illustration of the state's coercive power had the prosecutor's office prevailed, restraining Bricci all the way to the operating table.

That sort of coercive government intervention in people's bodies, whether for the sake of eliminating "undesirables," controlling population, or protecting "fetal rights" is an intolerable violation of individual freedom.

The same principle applies in Europe, where public furor over a fifty-nine-year-old English woman who gave birth to twins prompted officials in France and Italy to propose legislation forbidding women from using medical technology to become pregnant after menopause. "To have a child after menopause, thanks to assisted procreation, is ... to show no respect for biological law," said France's deputy health minister Philippe Douste-Blazy. (Critics in France pointed out that the hysteria over older women having babies was a little exaggerated, given that men are routinely congratulated for producing children in their dotage.)

Certainly, the idea of the state codifying and enforcing "biological law" ought to set off a few alarm bells. And as Adolph Reed Jr. pointed out last month (Class Notes, February issue), renewed interest in eugenics has a variety of ominous social-policy implications.

No one has thought harder about this subject than the disabled and their advocates. In the January/February issue of The Disability Rag & Resource, Lisa Blumberg discusses disabled activists' concerns that doctors who insist on fetal tests for disability exert a subtle pressure on parents to abort "defective" children. While Blumberg and other disabled activists support individual women's right to choose abortion, they worry that, as sophisticated fetal tests become routine, a de-facto policy of weeding out disabled fetuses may add up to genocide. Particularly worrisome is the prospect of insurance companies refusing coverage for disabled children by categorizing their disabilities as "pre-existing conditions" which ought to have been eliminated through abortion.

The proper role of government is not to regulate the child-bearing decisions or genetic stock of the population, but rather to create a humane society for the people who are already here.