Unspeakable Conversations – The New York Times

Unspeakable Conversations

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

Supported by

Continue reading the main story

Unspeakable Conversations

By Harriet McBryde Johnson

• Feb. 16, 2003

He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it’s . . . almost fun. Mercy! It’s like ”Alice in Wonderland.”

It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called — and not just by his book publicist — the most influential [...]