Was any licensed doctor, in the US, named in these selections? If a licensed doctor knowingly participated in selecting a child with a handicap, that is a violation of his oath, to be reported to the licensing board and the child abuse hotline. Other doctors with personal knowledge of such collaboration with the intentional handicapping of a child have an affirmative duty to report such conduct.

I bring my normal child into a doctor’s office. I request, “Using sterile surgical technique that will do no other damage and anesthesia to prevent pain, take an ice pick, destroy both my child’s hearing.”

Someone has to explain how the scenario in the article differs from that in its intent and result.

One knows dwarfism is associated with a short lifespan, and physically painful conditions. What about the doctor that decides to shoot a patient because he has reached the age of 30? How is the intentional selecting for a condition associated with a shortened lifespan, and physical pain different from shortening life by murder. Shooting someone involves less pain, less torment, less worry about the future than selecting for a condition with known physical consequences. Many murders are impulsive, this is the ultimate in intentional injury, with careful selection, using difficult techniques.

Walter, with respect, this may be an area where we are underlawyered.

I would support a lawsuit brought on behalf of the child against the parents and the doctor for wrongful genetic selection, a new intentional tort, qualified for exemplary damages.

This form of PC is unbearable, and merits criminal penalties for all parties participating.

Give that man a prize!

If we were literally leaving no child behind, no one would be allowd to READ.

I suppose that we are obligated to be understanding, but I’m having trouble doing that. If these parents were selecting for stronger, faster and smarter genes, of course, they’d be called Nazis. Or, say, blonde hair and blue eyes. But the desire for children that share your traits is pretty universal,and I just read something in the NYT Magazine about a black/white gay couple that wants their designer child to be biracial. Obviously, like the deaf parents, they aren’t going to be targeted as “racists,” etc. But it’s the same thing.

I don’t know how in this day and age you’d legislate against the practice, because you’d be in the now-forbidden position of making a determination of which genetic traits are good and which are bad. The “bizarre idea that the lack of hearing is no more a disability than being female or black” isn’t bizarre at all, given the now unbelievable reaches of politically correct orthodoxy. The position that we cannot make general-direction societal determinations about such things is going to launch us into some very weird territory. If it hasn’t already – I sense a sort of fetishization of disability creeping into our society, whereby we single out the disabled (of any kind) for lavish treatment and spending, and virtually ignore those on the other end of the spectrum (my apologies to those who reject the idea of such a spectrum). Gifted programs are cut, while “special education” programs are given unlimited funding. All in the name of a fair, equitable society. Yet if no child is left behind, no child gets ahead.