The Federalist’s Evita Duffy joined Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Friday to criticize an article in The Atlantic endorsing abortions of babies with Down Syndrome. The author of the article, Duffy warned, took a “dangerous” approach to the issue and attempted to “normalize eugenics.”
“It was a perfect example of selective leftist outrage,” Duffy said. “The liberals, they have no problem taking a moral stance when it’s the Covington Catholic schoolboy, but when you were faced with the real-world dilemma, the extermination of people with Down Syndrome, they say, ‘No judgment.'”
“When I first read the article, I immediately thought about how dangerous it is. [The author] essentially tries to normalize eugenics and some of the least powerful people in the world, people with Down Syndrome. And she does it by creating this ‘no judgment’ narrative,” Duffy added.
While aborting babies with Down Syndrome is outrageous on its own, it hits even closer to home for Duffy, whose youngest sister has Down Syndrome.
“When I read it, I immediately thought of my little sister,” Duffy said. “She’s so sweet, so adorable, she loves music, she’s the favorite of the family — I think even the favorite of my parents, though they won’t admit it. It made me think really, what’s at stake here?”
“There is an incentive to not have people with disabilities because more people with disabilities causes strain on the state. But that’s the original goal of eugenics. It didn’t end with World War II. It’s alive and well today,” she added.
Duffy pointed out the idea of aborting babies with “unwanted” conditions is a slippery slope and could easily be expanded beyond Down Syndrome to target others in the future.
“In the future, scientific technologies are only getting better. We are going to be able to know what kind of future diseases they are going to have, how tall they might be, or even what’s going to be their sexual orientation before they are born,” Duffy said.
“We have to decide as a culture, are we going to be people who discriminate against others based on their immutable qualities, or are we going to be a culture of life and of authentic tolerance?” she added.
You can read Evita’s article criticizing The Atlantic’s praise for eugenics here.