Survival of the Fittest (26 page)

Carrie Buck’s baby—the “third generation of imbeciles” in question—grew up to be an honor student. Carrie Buck, herself, was eventually paroled from the Virginia Colony for Feebleminded and Epileptics, and lived out her life quietly as the wife of a small-town sheriff. She was later found out not to be retarded.

The Buck decision sped up the pace of forced sterilization and more than sixty thousand people, mostly residents of state hospitals, were operated on all across the U.S., as late as the 1970s.

In 1933, the Carrie Buck opinion was adopted as law in Germany and within one year, fifty-six thousand German “patients” had been sterilized. By 1945, under the aegis of the Nazis, the number had climbed to two million. For as Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf,
“the right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race. The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.”

After World War II, the tide began turning. Revulsion at the Nazi atrocities—but more important, the demands of wartime service upon surgeons—slowed down the rate of eugenic sterilization, and though the practice continued for decades, most eugenics laws were eventually reversed in the face of scientific debunking.

But the cause hadn’t been abandoned.

Far from it.

And sterilization seemed tame compared to some of the ideas being tossed about now. I found myself swimming in an ethical cesspool.

Calls for assisted suicide sliding quickly into recommendations that those with nothing to live for be put out of their misery.

A report from Holland, where physician-assisted suicide had been liberalized, that as many as one-third of euthanasias—“mercy killings”—had been carried out without patients’ consent.

An Australian “bioethicist” proclaiming religion no longer the basis for making moral judgments and the sanctity of human life no longer a valid concept. His alternative: Fellow ethicists should assign numerical “quality of life” measurements to people and parcel out health care based upon scores.

The retarded, the handicapped, the elderly, the infirm, would find themselves low on the list and be treated accordingly. In the case of deformed and retarded babies, a twenty-eight-day waiting period would be offered so parents could choose infanticide for “a life that has begun very badly.”

Anyone who fell short on objective criteria of “personhood: rational thought and self-consciousness,” could be killed without fear of penalty. Humanely.

Gentle strangulation, indeed.

Britain’s National Health Insurance had recently put forth a policy offering free abortions to mothers of genetically defective babies—rescinding the usual twenty-four-week limit and allowing termination til shortly before birth.

Also in England, the Green party’s annual conference proposed a very deliberate 25 percent reduction in the U.K.’s population in the name of saving the planet, leading critics to evoke memories of the Nazi party’s infatuation with ecology, natural purity, and antiurbanism.

The government of China was ahead of all this, having long enforced population control through coerced abortion, sterilization, and starving orphans to death in state-run facilities.

In the U.S., calls for prioritizing health-care services in the age of tight dollars and managed care had led many to question whether the seriously ill and the genetically disadvantaged should be allowed to “dominate” health-care expenditure.

I found a
U.S. News and World Report
article detailing the struggle of a thirty-four-year-old woman with Down’s syndrome to receive a life-saving heart-lung operation. Stanford University Medical Center had rejected her because “We do not feel that patients with Down’s syndrome are appropriate candidates for heart-lung transplantation,” as had the University of California at San Diego because it judged her incapable of cooperating with the medical regimen. Her doctor disagreed and the publicity had forced both hospitals to reconsider. But what of others, languishing outside the media spotlight?

It reminded me of a case I’d seen years ago, while working with child cancer patients at Western Pediatrics Hospital. A fourteen-year-old boy diagnosed with acute leukemia, by then a treatable disease with an excellent prognosis for remission. But this leukemia patient was retarded and several interns and residents began grumbling about wasting their precious time.

I lectured to them, with meager results—because I wasn’t an M.D., wouldn’t be administering chemotherapy and radiotherapy, simply didn’t
understand
what was involved. The attending physician, a passionate and dedicated man, caught wind of the protest and delivered a diatribe about Hippocrates and morality that silenced the grumblers. But it had been a begrudging compliance.

What kind of doctors had those interns become?

Who were they judging, now?

Quality of life.

I’d worked with thousands of children with birth defects, deformities, mental retardation, learning disabilities, chronic and painful and fatal diseases.

Most experienced a full range of emotions, including joy.

I remembered one little girl, eight years old, a thalidomide casualty. No arms, stunted flipper feet, shining eyes, an eagerness to embrace life.

Better quality of life than some face-lifted psychopaths I’d known.

Not that it mattered, for it wasn’t my role to judge, either.

The eugenecists argued that society’s progress could be measured by the achievement of the gifted, and in part, that was true. But what good was progress if it led to callousness, cruelty, cold judgments about deservedness, a degradation of the godly spark in all of us?

Who’d be the new gods? Geneticists? Ethicists?

Scientists had flocked to Nazism in record numbers.

Politicians?

HMO executives with bottom-line obsessions?

And after we cleansed the world of one group of “degenerates,” who’d be next on the chromosomal hit list?

The flabby? The charmless? The boring? The ugly?

Scary stuff, and the fact that psychology had once swallowed it whole disgusted me.

The racist swill propagated by Goddard and Terman still reverberated in my head. Both had been names uttered with reverence in the corridors of the Psych Tower.

Like a child discovering his parents are felons, I felt a cold, dark pit open in my gut.

I’d administered countless IQ tests, had prided myself upon knowing the limitations of the instrument as well as the virtues.

Properly done, testing
was
valuable. Still, the rotten spot I’d just found at the core of my field’s golden apple made me wonder what else I’d missed, despite all my education.

It was 1:00
P.M.
and I’d been in the library for five hours. Lunchtime, but I had no appetite.

I picked up
The Brain Drain.

The book’s sole premise became obvious within pages:

Material success, morality, happy marriages, superior parenthood—all were caused by high g—a supposed general-intelligence trait whose validity had been debated for years.

This author presented it as a given.

The book had a smarmy, congratulatory tone: addressing itself to “you, the highly intelligent reader.”

The ultimate kiss-up, virtue by association.

Maybe that—and a harnessing of upper-middle-class anxiety during hard times—could explain its best-sellerdom.

It sure wasn’t the science, because I came across page after page of faulty assumptions, shoddy referencing, articles the author claimed as supportive that turned out to be just the opposite when I looked them up.

Promises to back up assertions with numbers that never appeared. Revival of Galton’s one-gene theory of intelligence.

Hundred-year-old nonsense—who’d written this garbage?

The author bio at the back said a “social scholar” named Arthur Haldane, Ph.D.

Resident scholar at the Loomis Institute in New York City.

No further credentials.

No book jacket on the library copy, so no photo.

Ugly stuff.

Ugly times.

So what else was new?

My head hurt and my eyes ached.

What would I report to Milo and Sharavi?

Pseudoscientific crap sold well?

What connection was there to three dead kids?

The killer, watching, stalking, culling the herd   .   .   .

With scholarly justification?

Because some lives just weren’t worth living?

So he wasn’t really a murderer.

He was a freelance bioethicist.

Chapter

29

The only thing i hadn’t gotten to was
Twisted Science,
the critique of
The Brain Drain,
and though I couldn’t see what it could add, I checked it out and took it home with me.

One message at my service. Milo’s home number but the caller was Dr. Richard Silverman.

Rick and Milo had lived together for years but he and I rarely spoke. He was more prone to listening than talking. Reserved, meticulous, fit, always well-dressed, he was a striking contrast to Milo’s aesthetic impairment and some people saw the two of them as an odd couple. I knew they were both thoughtful, driven, highly self-critical, had suffered deeply from being homosexual, had taken a long time to find their niche, both as individuals and members of a couple. Both buried themselves in bloody work—Rick spent over one hundred hours a week as a senior E.R. physician at Cedars-Sinai—and their time together was often silent.

He said, “Thanks, Alex. How’s everything?”

“Great. With you?”

“Fine, fine. Listen, I just wanted to ask how Helena Dahl’s doing—nothing confidential, just if she’s okay.”

“I haven’t seen her recently, Rick.”

“Oh.”

“Something wrong?”

“Well,” he said, “she quit the hospital yesterday, no explanation. I guess what’s happened to her could unnerve anybody.”

“It’s tough,” I said.

“I met the brother once. Not through her. He came in with a gunshot case, never mentioned being her brother, and I wasn’t paying attention to nametags. But someone told me later.”

“Helena wasn’t on duty?”

“No, not that particular night.”

“Anything unusual about him?”

“Not really. Big guy, young, very quiet, could have stepped right out of an LAPD recruiting poster. Back when that was the type they recruited. I was struck by the fact that he never bothered to ask for Helena, thought maybe he knew she was off. But when I told her he’d been in, she looked surprised. Anyway, I don’t want to pry. Take care. If you do see her, say hi.”

“Will do.”

He laughed. “Say hi to Milo, too. You’re probably seeing him more than I am. This case—the retarded kids—it’s really disturbing him. Not that he’s been talking about it. But he’s been tossing in his sleep.”

It was two-thirty. I hadn’t come up with a thing on the DVLL killings. Robin was out for the afternoon, the house was too damn big, and the day seemed hollow.

I’d pushed Helena and Nolan to the back of my mind but Rick’s call got me ruminating again.

What had caused her to make such a complete break?

Those family photos in Nolan’s garage? Primal memories that strong?

She was tough and competent on the job but isolated in her private life.

More like her brother than she’d realized?

Had his self-destruction gotten her wondering about where she’d end up? Paths that hadn’t been taken?

Depression ran in families. Had I missed something?

I called her home. The phone kept ringing and worst-case scenarios flashed through my head.

I thought about Nolan’s showing up at the E.R., never asking for her.

Even when we were little kids we went our separate ways. Just ignored each other. Is that normal?

That kind of distance could pass for civility when life’s rhythms remained shallow. But when things went bad, it could lead to the worst kind of guilt.

Parents dead, abandoned by her husband when he moved to North Carolina.

Going to work each day at the E.R., performing heroics. Coming home to   .   .   .   ?

Had the reliable engine finally broken down?

I had nothing to do and decided to take a drive out to her house.

Maybe I’d find her in a bathrobe on the sofa, watching soap operas and stuffing her face with junk food. Maybe she’d get angry at the intrusion and I’d feel like a fool.

I could live with that.

It took forty-five minutes to reach the west end of the Valley and another ten to find her address in Woodland Hills.

The house was a small yellow structure of no particular style on a hot, wide side street lined with mature bottlebrush trees in full bloom. Red flowers and sticky patches from the trees littered the sidewalks and California jays dove among the branches. The sun bore down through the haze and even though I couldn’t hear the freeway, I could smell it.

The front lawn was dry and needed mowing. Big, shapeless margarita daisy bushes pushed up against the front porch. No sign of her Mustang in the driveway and the garage door was shut. The mailbox was empty and my ring and knock went unanswered.

Two cars in the driveway next door, a white minivan and a white Acura.

I went over there. The ceramic plaque beneath the bell said
THE MILLERS
under a crucifix, and looked homemade. A window air conditioner played a waltz.

I rang and the brass cover on the peephole snicked back.

“Yes?” Male voice.

“My name is Dr. Alex Delaware. I’m a friend of your neighbor, Helena Dahl. She hasn’t been around for a while and some of us have been getting a little concerned.”

“Um   .   .   . one second.”

The door opened and cold air hit my face. A couple in their late twenties looked me over. He was tall, dark, bearded, with a sunburned nose, and wore a pink Hawaiian shirt, denim shorts, no shoes. The can of Sprite in his hand was sweating but he wasn’t.