Christy Nolan was deprived of oxygen at birth and suffered from cerebral palsy. Nolan couldn’t walk, talk or use his hands. He spent his short life (he died aged 43 in 2008) in a wheelchair. Until...

Christy Nolan was deprived of oxygen at birth and suffered from cerebral palsy. Nolan couldn’t walk, talk or use his hands. He spent his short life (he died aged 43 in 2008) in a wheelchair. Until Nolan was 11 he couldn’t communicate with words at all. Then a new drug Lioresal made it possible for him to use a ‘unicorn stick’ on a headband. In 1987, with the help of his mother Bernadette, Nolan published his autobiography entitled Under The Eye of the Clock. Nolan’s mother held his head whilst he picked out the letters he wanted. He managed a couple of pages a day. The book won the Whitbread Award and was described as ‘astonishing’ for its extraordinary use of language, comparable, it was said, to Yeats and Joyce. Here is Nolan’s description of the process of writing: ‘My mind is just like a spin-dryer at full speed; my thoughts fly around my skull while millions of beautiful words cascade into my lap. Images gunfire across my consciousness. Try then to give expression to that avalanche in efforts of one great nod after another.’ It is undeniable, of course, that there are diseases and disabilities that are incompatible with a worthwhile life. Tay Sachs disease leads to certain death by the age of 4 after the child has become progressively paralysed, deaf and blind. It is difficult to imagine that such a life could be deemed worthwhile even from the point of view of the one whose life it is. It also seems reasonable to think that anencephaly, the condition of being born without a functioning cerebellum, is incompatible with a worthwhile life. But the existence of such diseases and disabilities does not detract from the fact that the vast majority of genetic diseases and disabilities are entirely consistent with a life that, seen from the point of view of the one who will live it, is entirely worthwhile. Once this is accepted it might not seem so straightforwardly morally acceptable to discard or abort embryos with diseases and disabilities. At the very least the claim that in discarding them we are attempting to alleviate their suffering will not stand up. Indeed this claim, if it is not just confused, starts to look unbearably self-serving.