Education Sacrifices
Education Sacrifices
The Lesson That Never Left
I grew up with cystic fibrosis. If you don’t know what that is — it’s a genetic disease that clogs your lungs with thick mucus, destroys your pancreas, and turns living into a daily negotiation. Hospital stays, three weeks at a time, two or three times a year. Daily treatments before school and after. That was just how it was. I didn’t know any different.
It was Health and PE class, early high school, around thirteen years old. I don’t remember the whole lesson — just the part that stuck. It was a lesson on which lives are worth keeping alive — on how easily a culture can decide, and teach its kids to accept, that people like me shouldn’t exist. The teacher said it the way you’d state a capital city, something to write down and remember: killing a baby not yet born, with a serious illness or genetic difference — is considered acceptable, the baby is nothing. The mother is pitied, not punished. That’s just how it is. Move on.
And I sat there — a kid with CF, in a room full of other kids — being taught that my death as a baby would have been understood. Maybe even kind.
That lesson didn’t fade. It moved in.
A couple of years on, it had changed shape. It stopped being “people think I should have died” and became “maybe they’re right.” CF doesn’t ease up. There’s no version of it that gets better. Every year is treatments, hospital corridors, and the quiet arithmetic of a body running out of road. I was living that, and I’d been told in a classroom that the world would have understood if someone had ended it before it started.
So I did the logic. The lesson had been about ending it before birth — but I pushed it one step further, the way a confused, sick teenager might. If it was acceptable before I existed, why not right after? Before I knew anything, before I’d built a single memory worth keeping — why was fifteen-year-old me still fighting? Same person. Same DNA. Same disease. The only thing that had changed was that I was big enough now to have an opinion about it. If someone had ended it the moment I was born, I’d have never known there was anything to lose. No suffering, no memory, no grief. Was that really the worse outcome?
I want to be precise about what this was. I’d thought about it, and once, it stopped being just a thought — a feeble, impulsive moment, not a plan. But that’s not really the story here. The real thing was colder than that — a logic problem, and I hadn’t built it myself. It had been handed to me, by people whose job was supposedly to educate me. That’s the part that still unsettles me more than the moment itself did. Not that a sick kid had a dark thought — kids do, and it passes. What’s disturbing is that the thought wasn’t mine to begin with. It was planted, by adults, in a classroom, dressed up as a neutral fact about the world.
Here’s the part I need you to actually sit with, not just read past.
A baby killed by a parent, with a doctor’s quiet blessing and a culture that understands, never gets a vote. That baby was defenceless when it happened. There was no later, no growing into an opinion, no chance to say wait. Somebody else decided the whole thing on their behalf and closed the file.
I was born at a time when doctors told my parents I might not see eight. By the time I was a kid, that number had crept up toward eighteen. Now, with drugs like Trikafta — which didn’t exist when I was young — a baby diagnosed with CF today is looking at a life expectancy pushing well past sixty, and some of the modelling puts early-treated kids close to a normal lifespan altogether. The disease changed underneath me. It kept changing after people had already made up their minds about what a life like mine was worth.
I’ve watched a 27-year-old mum with CF say goodbye to her seven-year-old daughter, knowing it was the last one. She’d already outlived what anyone predicted for her. It still wasn’t enough time.
So think about what that means. Whatever calculation anyone makes about a “short, hard life” gets outdated the moment the medicine moves — and medicine moves faster than attitudes do. People are still making decisions off a picture of CF that stopped being true years ago.
And even the “short life” argument doesn’t hold the way people think it does. Strip infant and childhood deaths out of the historical record, and adults who survived to twenty in medieval England lived, on average, into their sixties. The reason old life-expectancy numbers look so grim — thirty, thirty-five — is child mortality dragging the average down, not adults dying young. If you made it past childhood, you got roughly the lifespan people get now. So “they’ll only live to sixty” was never really an argument against disabled life. It’s just what happens to everyone, dressed up as a special tragedy when it’s attached to a diagnosis.
But say the life really was short. What then? Every CF person I’ve known who’s faced the end has faced it the same way — fighting, right up until there was no fight left to give. My best mate had man’s best friend brought in for one last pat. And I’ve heard more than one hooroo said to a family that both sides knew meant goodbye for good. That’s not tragedy performing itself for an audience. That’s what living looks like when you know the clock’s run out and you spend what’s left on your own terms anyway.
I can’t imagine anyone else having the right to take that from them before it happened — to decide, on their behalf, that the time left, the experience still coming, the effort it took, or the burden it put on other people, was never going to be worth it. None of that was ever the real measure of a life. It just looks like it is, from a safe distance.
Which brings me to the mother who’s told killing her baby is the compassionate choice. She’s often acting on information about the disease that was true a generation ago and isn’t true now. The culture reassuring her hasn’t caught up either. And the baby — the one detail nobody asks about — never gets the chance to say actually, there’s a drug for that now.
And it isn’t theoretical. They test for it in the womb now, and when a genetic test confirms two parents are carriers and the fetus has CF, the pregnancy ends 94.6% of the time. Not most of the time. Almost every time. Same reasoning as the classroom lesson: better gone than suffering. The baby doesn’t get delivered into an argument about their own worth. They get dumped.
I asked my mum recently — if I’d been conceived today, with prenatal testing what it is, would she have made a different choice? She said no. But I know people in my own extended family who’d answer differently. Some who have. That’s not an easy thing to carry — knowing that somewhere in your own bloodline, there’s a version of “compassion” that would have written you off before you took a breath. Same human. Same DNA. Same future nobody bothered to check on. Just a test now, and a story that makes it feel kind.
Which leaves the question that actually matters here: if that surviving kid — sick, exhausted, raised on the idea that his existence was negotiable — grows up and eventually asks a doctor to help him die, is that a choice? Or is it just the lesson from that classroom, finally collected on?
I’ve been digging into where that lesson actually came from. Because it didn’t start with my teacher, and it didn’t start with me. I kept reading.
I wanted to know where that lesson had come from.
The Idea That Won’t Stay Dead
The idea that some people are better off dead than alive isn’t new. In the early 1900s it was called eugenics, and it wasn’t fringe thinking — it was taught at Harvard, Columbia, and UCL as progressive science. The leading minds of the day believed humanity could be improved by stopping “inferior” people from having children, or by removing them altogether.
In 1907, Indiana passed the first forced sterilisation law in the United States. Dozens of states followed within two decades. In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled in Buck v. Bell that sterilising disabled people was constitutional. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the line that’s still quoted today: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Around 60,000 Americans were sterilised under these laws, disabled people and Black Americans disproportionately among them.
In the UK, the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act locked away “feeble-minded” people in institutions for life. The reasoning was stated plainly: some lives are a burden on everyone else.
In Germany, the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring led to the sterilisation of more than 400,000 people. Doctors decided who counted as “unfit.” Then, from 1939 to 1945, came Aktion T4 — a program in which German doctors killed disabled children and adults, estimates ranging from the low hundreds of thousands upward depending on how “wild euthanasia” killings after the program’s official end are counted. The gas chambers built for Aktion T4 became the prototype for the Holocaust. The phrase used to justify it — “life unworthy of life” — was coined by a lawyer and a psychiatrist in 1920, over a decade before the Nazis took power.
All of this was considered progressive at the time. It was taught in universities as the cutting edge of science and medicine.
After the war, the world said never again. The Nuremberg Code was written. Eugenics laws were repealed. For a while, the idea that some people were better off dead went out of fashion.
It never actually left.
Turns out bad ideas don’t die.
The Philosopher and the Scale
They just get filed away until someone finds a new use for them.
In 1979, the philosopher Peter Singer published Practical Ethics. In it, he argued that newborn infants — particularly disabled ones — don’t yet meet the criteria for full moral personhood, because they lack self-awareness and the capacity to want a future for themselves. On that basis, he argued that killing a disabled infant isn’t equivalent to killing an adult, and that if a disabled infant’s death is followed by the birth of a healthier one, total happiness in the world increases as a result. This became known as the replaceability argument.
Sit with that for a second. A serious, widely-read philosopher arguing that ending a disabled baby’s life can be the right call, specifically because a different baby might be happier. Singer wasn’t a fringe voice — he remains one of the most cited living philosophers, and his work on personhood and quality of life has shaped medical ethics, health policy, and law well beyond academic journals.
Disability advocates pushed back hard, and their case still holds up. Eva Kittay, a philosopher and the mother of a daughter with profound disabilities, argued that Singer’s coldly impersonal calculation ignores the real moral weight of relationships — that the bond between a person and the people who care for them creates obligations no utility calculation can capture. Harriet McBryde Johnson, a disability rights lawyer who debated Singer face to face, made the point just as directly: disability itself tells you nothing about how good or bad a life actually is.
But Singer’s framework had already taken root, because it offered medicine something it wanted: a way to put a number on a life. That’s the QALY — the Quality-Adjusted Life Year. One year of full health counts as 1 QALY. A year lived with a disability is scored lower, sometimes much lower. When a health system rations care using QALYs, a disabled person’s year of life is, by design, worth less on the ledger than a non-disabled person’s. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s standard practice in health economics in multiple countries.
Disability advocates have spent years documenting bias in the bioethics field itself — the recurring assumption, in textbooks and case studies, that a disabled life is inherently a lesser one, a tragedy to be prevented rather than a life to be lived. That pattern is real, documented across decades of essays and critiques from disabled scholars and bioethicists, whether or not it gets reduced to a single number.
The education becomes the sacrifice. Teach a generation that some lives are worth less, in language dressed up as ethics rather than eugenics, and some of them will believe it about themselves.
While the philosophy was being argued over in journals and lecture halls, three countries turned it into law and found out what actually happens when you do.
A philosophy book can sit on a shelf for decades.
A law doesn’t.
Laws change what doctors do, what courts allow, and what ordinary people come to accept.
That’s what I wanted to understand.
The Three Laboratories
Or they re-emerge wearing the language of a new ideology.
The Netherlands. In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country to legalise euthanasia, for anyone over twelve suffering unbearably with no prospect of improvement. That first year: 1,882 cases. In 2005, the Groningen Protocol extended the practice to newborns — infants born with conditions doctors judged incompatible with a bearable life, killed with parental consent, because an infant can’t give its own. In 2016, a Dutch court upheld euthanising a woman with advanced dementia on the strength of an advance directive she’d signed years earlier — before she lost the capacity to confirm, in the moment, that this was still what she wanted. By 2022, annual cases had reached 8,720 — 5.1% of all deaths in the country that year. Psychiatric suffering, with no physical illness involved at all, accounted for 115 of those cases in 2022, up from a handful two decades earlier. And in 2023, the Netherlands went further than it ever had: eligibility was extended down to children aged 1 to 12, for terminal illness with unbearable suffering, effective 2024.
I read that criteria more than once, doing the maths on my own childhood. Terminal illness. Unbearable suffering. No prospect of improvement, as far as the doctors of the time could tell. Before Trikafta existed, before the outlook changed, I don’t know for certain a doctor would have called it terminal in the strict legal sense — but I was close enough to those words, for long enough, that I can’t read that provision without seeing myself in it.
Belgium. Also in 2002, euthanasia was legalised for adults — no requirement that the illness be terminal, unlike the Netherlands. In 2014, Belgium went further than anyone: it removed the age limit on euthanasia entirely. Not lowered it. Removed it. A child of any age can be approved, if a psychologist certifies they have “capacity of discernment” and a parent consents. Between 2016 and 2017, three children were killed under this provision. One was nine. One was eleven. One was seventeen. Their conditions were a brain tumour, muscular dystrophy — and cystic fibrosis. By 2024, the cumulative total had grown to six. Total euthanasia deaths across all ages reached 2,966 in 2022, up from around 235 in 2003.
Read that again. A child with the same disease I have was legally killed by a doctor in Belgium, with a psychologist’s sign-off and a parent’s consent, under a law built on the same logic as the lesson I was taught in an Australian classroom: some suffering is not worth living through. The only difference between that child and me is a border and an age of consent that Belgium decided didn’t need to exist.
I watched a girl named Zoe fight for her last breath in a kids’ ward. She wasn’t resigned to it. She was fighting for every second of it, right to the end. That’s not what “incompatible with a bearable life” looks like from inside the room. It’s a word doctors and lawmakers use from a safe distance.
Canada. In 2016, Canada legalised MAID — Medical Assistance in Dying — for terminal illness. Just 1,018 cases that year. In 2021, the law expanded to “grievous and irremediable” conditions — you no longer had to be dying, just suffering with no real prospect of relief. By 2022, the number had climbed to 13,241. That’s 4.1% of all deaths in the country — roughly one in twenty-four. The government has tried three times to extend MAID to cover mental illness alone, with no physical condition required — 2023, then 2024, now pushed to March 2027 — pulling back each time after public and clinical alarm. The line keeps moving. It just hasn’t crossed yet.
In 2022, a 51-year-old Ontario woman with multiple chemical sensitivities was approved for MAID after two years spent unable to find housing free of the chemicals that triggered her condition. Not terminal. Not even close to it. A law professor who studies MAID called it “a concerning case.” She died before anyone fixed the actual problem, which was housing.
The pattern is the same in every country. The laws start narrow — terminal adults, strict safeguards. Within a decade, the restrictions loosen. Children are included. Psychiatric suffering is included. People who aren’t dying are included. The numbers climb every year. The language shifts from “choice” to “compassion” to “why are you still fighting.”
It would’ve been easy to leave all of this overseas.
Different countries.
Different laws.
Different cultures.
Then I looked at Australia.
The Fourth Laboratory (This One’s Ours)
It’s easy to read all that and think: overseas. Not here. We’re more careful than that.
We’re not. We just started later.
Australia actually got here first, technically, and then got talked out of it. In 1995, the Northern Territory passed the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act — the first assisted dying law anywhere in the world. It lasted a few months before the Federal Parliament overrode it in 1997 and banned the whole idea outright. For twenty years, that was the end of it.
Then, in 2017, Victoria brought it back. The Voluntary Assisted Dying Act was about as conservative as this kind of law gets: you had to be an adult, of sound mind, suffering from an illness expected to kill you within six months — twelve if it was neurodegenerative. It came into effect in mid-2019, built on every safeguard its architects could think of. Doctors weren’t even allowed to raise it with a patient first. The patient had to ask.
Then it spread. Western Australia in 2021. Tasmania in 2022. Queensland and South Australia in early 2023. New South Wales by the end of that year. The ACT in late 2025 — the only jurisdiction with no fixed timeframe requirement at all; you just have to be dying, on no particular schedule. Sit with that for a second: every human being is dying, on no particular schedule. That’s not a criterion. That’s just being alive. Six years, every state and territory bar the Northern Territory, which is still banned by the same 1997 federal override.
And in November 2025, Victoria — the original, the most cautious version of this law in the country — amended itself. The six-month rule became twelve months, for everyone, not just neurodegenerative cases. And the rule stopping doctors from bringing it up unprompted — the “gag clause,” the one safeguard that meant a suffering patient had to be the one to open that conversation — was removed. From April 2027, a doctor will be allowed to raise voluntary assisted dying with you before you’ve asked. You won’t have to find the words. They’ll offer.
That’s not a slippery slope in some other country’s language and law. That’s Victoria, amending itself, eight years after telling its own public how careful and conservative it was being.
I have a genetic disease that’s watched doctors, treatments, and life expectancy change out from under it more than once in my lifetime. I know exactly how fast “the current medical picture” stops being current. A law is no different. The version you’re told is safe is the version that exists on the day it passes. Nobody’s asked to vote again once it starts moving.
History told me where the idea came from.
I still wanted to know how it had been installed here.
Sixty to Ninety a Year
An idea in some weirdo’s book doesn’t scare me nearly as much as an idea written into law.
And look at us, Aussies — reducing the worth of a human, someone right here in our own community, to a bunch of checkboxes on a genetic test, same as any of those mobs overseas we like to think we’re more careful than.
I wanted to know how many people like me — CF, right here in Australia — don’t get born at all. Nobody publishes that number. Australia doesn’t run a national CF carrier-screening program, and nobody counts the terminations nationally. But health economists have modelled what national screening would do to the birth rate, and the number, if it were applied everywhere, comes out somewhere between sixty and ninety CF-affected pregnancies ended a year. Nobody’s counting for certain. That might be the point.
Sixty to ninety people a year. Estimated, because nobody in this country is even counting for certain. Each one had roughly the same odds I’ve had — decades of life, most of it ordinary, some of it hard, all of it theirs. Each one was ended not because of what their life would have been, but because of what a test said before they’d had the chance to live any of it. Sixty to ninety humans a year, in Australia, killed for having different genes. Ended for what? So a family wouldn’t have to do what my family did. So a health system wouldn’t have to spend on a person our own economists have already modelled the cost of, instead of the worth of. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s not overseas. That’s here, every year, and it doesn’t make the news, because it’s not supposed to look like anything.
I thought I’d reached the end of the road.
I hadn’t.
The idea had already moved on again.
The Spreadsheet
So what’s next in the killing line-up? A family history of diabetes? Cancer? Alzheimer’s? Arthritis?
Wrong question. It’s not next. It’s already here — and it’s more absurd than you’d guess. Companies with names like Orchid, LifeView, and Nucleus will sequence your IVF embryos right now and hand you a scorecard. Cancer’s on it. Alzheimer’s is on it. So is arthritis — both kinds, rheumatoid and osteoarthritis. So is seasonal allergies. So is restless legs syndrome. So is baldness. So is acne. So is being left-handed. All on the same printout, all ranked the same way, all feeding into which embryo gets a chance and which one doesn’t. You pick the row with the best numbers. The others don’t get implanted. No pregnancy to terminate. No mother to pity or condemn. No classroom lesson a kid carries for thirty years. Just a spreadsheet, and one row that doesn’t make the cut — maybe because of a cancer risk, maybe because of a bit of hay fever.
That’s the real progression. It’s not that they’re coming for more conditions. It’s that they’ve found a way to remove the humanity from the decision entirely, and flatten the difference between “will suffer terribly” and “might sneeze in spring” into the same ranked list. A baby with CF is at least someone’s baby — grieved, argued about, felt. An embryo on a printout is a row of data, scored the same whether the flaw is cancer or a preference for your left hand. They didn’t just widen who qualifies for ending. They engineered the ending so nobody has to look at it, or call it what it is.
What They’re Teaching Your Kids
Here’s the part that brings it back to my own story.
I was told, in a classroom, that killing a baby with a serious illness or genetic difference was culturally acceptable. I spent years afterward wondering if my own life was worth living. I made it. I’m still here. But I don’t know how many kids in that same room, hearing the same lesson, didn’t.
There’s a parallel happening right now, in a different and just as contested corner of the same argument: youth gender transition. I’m not a clinician, and I’m not going to pretend I can adjudicate the medical evidence from a cabin my mate and I built. What I want to point at is narrower than any of that, and it doesn’t depend on picking a side.
There’s a statistic that gets passed around in that debate — a “2.2% regret rate from a Karolinska study” — and it’s real, as far as it goes. It comes from a 2014 study by Cecilia Dhejne at Karolinska Institutet, looking at everyone in Sweden who applied for legal and surgical gender reassignment between 1960 and 2010 — adults, across five decades, these are real people in a real community.
What I’m actually pointing at isn’t a specific statistic. It’s a shape. A kid is told, by doctors, teachers, and institutions who are supposed to know better, that an irreversible decision about their own body or their own life is the compassionate, forward-thinking choice. Sometimes that kid grows up and is glad they made that choice. Sometimes they grow up, look back, and say: I was too young. I was pushed. I wish someone had said wait. Both things are real, and I don’t think either one cancels the other out.
The difference that matters to me is this: someone who detransitions gets to speak. They lived long enough to look back and reassess. A baby who’s killed for having CF, or an embryo that doesn’t make the cut on a genetic scorecard, never gets that chance. They don’t get to grow up and disagree with the decision made on their behalf. The detransitioner is the closest we have to a living witness for the child who wasn’t allowed to grow into an opinion at all.
Same mechanism, in both cases — authority figures, institutional confidence, language borrowed from compassion. The only difference is whether the person lives long enough to tell you it was wrong.
Bloody hell… this wasn’t just one teacher pushing bad ideas.
It was what the teachers themselves were being taught to teach.
The Question That Can’t Be Answered
I’m 40 now. A CF transplant survivor. I did my electrical trade. I built a cabin with my mate, and I live in it. I have a life the teenage version of me couldn’t see coming.
But that teenage version of me wasn’t stupid. He was sick, exhausted, and educated to believe his life was optional.
I outlived the life expectancy I was given, right up until my lungs finally gave out at 30. Then came the transplant workup — a different kind of hell entirely. The constant threat, however gently it was meant: if you don’t do this, we’ll take you off the list, and you’ll die. I understand now it was probably meant as a well-intentioned push. At the time, it felt like being held at gunpoint. Comply, or be let go. The people who were supposed to be saving me were the ones holding the threat over my head.
I got my transplant in June 2016. Three months of recovery. The day before I was due to make the eight-hour drive back home, an x-ray to check my vagus nerve function — I had to eat a radioactive egg for the test, of all things — the radiographer noticed the lower half of my heart looked odd. In it was a 2-centimetre clot. Back under the knife I went. By some miracle, they caught it before it killed me.
That was ten years ago. I’m still here. Still fighting.
Another thing that shits me: not so long ago, I had to fight — with advocates and lawyers — just to convince the government I was disabled enough to qualify for the Disability Support Pension. Nobody needed lawyers and advocates to decide I shouldn’t be born, because of my genetic makeup. Yet those same genetics were not afforded the same logic when it came to welfare support — I needed to come out all guns blazing to get it.
And I’ve found something in the years since that I didn’t have back then. Faith. Christianity. It’s given me an ethical foundation that doesn’t rest on a running cost-benefit analysis of my own worth. I surround myself with others who see value in my life the same way I see value in theirs. It’s let me stop needing to “think positive” just to keep surviving. Hope in Jesus is easier than forcing positivity — the hard work’s already been done, and I get to rest in that instead of manufacturing it myself every day.
Jesus died for my soul. And a young bloke in Queensland, who I never met and whose name I don’t know, died and gave me his lungs. One saved what happens to me after this life ends. The other gave me the years I’ve had since 2016. I don’t know how to hold both of those truths except at the same time, with the same gratitude, because that’s exactly what happened.
If euthanasia laws had existed in Australia when I was a teenager, and I’d brought those thoughts to a doctor, would I be dead? Would some well-meaning doctor have heard a sick kid say “I’m tired, I don’t want to do this,” and helped him sign the papers? Would they have looked at a patient in pain and called it compassion?
I don’t know. I never will. But I think about it.
I’m not writing this to convince you that voluntary assisted dying is wrong, full stop. I’m asking something narrower: when a child has been taught that their life is disposable, and is then handed the option to end it, has anyone actually helped them?
The baby who’s killed never gets to speak.
The embryo that doesn’t make the cut never gets to disagree with the spreadsheet.
The child whose life is ended before they’ve had the chance to understand it never gets to grow up and ask whether the decision made for them was the right one.
The CF kid who wondered if he should’ve been killed at birth only gets to speak because he survived long enough to see past what he was taught.
That’s me.
The CF kid who wondered if he should’ve been killed at birth only gets to speak because he survived long enough to see past what he was taught.
Not because I was stronger than anyone else. Not because I had more courage. Simply because I was born at a time when nobody acted on the lesson I was taught later.
That’s the only reason you’re reading these words.
I’m forty now.
The doctors who thought I might not reach eight were wrong. The people who believed a life like mine wasn’t worth beginning were wrong. The teenage boy who sat in that classroom wondering whether they were right was wrong too — but only because he hadn’t lived long enough to find out.
I’ve worked. I’ve loved. I’ve laughed until my ribs hurt. I’ve buried friends. I’ve built a cabin with my mate. I’ve received lungs from a young man whose name I’ll never know. I’ve found faith in Jesus Christ. I’ve discovered that some of the hardest years of my life became the very experiences that gave me compassion for other people walking the same road.
I know another mate who had one last hit of the hong-kong in the bush beside the hospital, under the gum trees, because he wanted one more of the small, stupid, ordinary pleasures before he went.
None of that could have been measured by a prenatal test.
None of it could have been predicted by a philosophy textbook.
None of it existed on the day someone might have decided my story wasn’t worth telling.
I don’t expect everyone who reads this book to agree with every conclusion I’ve reached. Some won’t. That’s all right.
But I hope you’ll question one thing.
Before we tell a child their future isn’t worth having…
Before we make a decision they’ll never have the chance to revisit…
Before we call something compassion…
…we should be very sure we’re not simply repeating a sick idea with a kinder name.
Because I was one of the lucky ones.
I lived long enough to discover that my life was worth more than the lesson I’d been given.
Simon, 2026
Sources: Buck v. Bell (1927); Indiana Sterilisation Act (1907); UK Mental Deficiency Act (1913); Germany’s 1933 sterilisation law and Aktion T4 — eugenics and forced-sterilisation history. Singer, Practical Ethics (1979) — replaceability argument. Kittay & Johnson — disability-rights critiques of Singer. de Jong et al., Genetics in Medicine (2020) — 94.6% CF pregnancy termination rate. Netherlands/Belgium/Canada government euthanasia review board annual reports — case numbers, Groningen Protocol, Belgian child euthanasia cases, Canada’s MAID expansion. Maxwell et al. & Massie et al., ANZJOG (2009/2010) — Australian CF screening modelling. Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Trikafta survival modelling. Dhejne et al., PLOS ONE (2014) — Swedish detransition/regret data. Full citations available on request.
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