Who can derail the high-speed eugenics train?

SIR – Sally Phillips asks, in her excellent and thought-provoking documentary on Down’s syndrome, whether “choice is always the wonderful thing it’s cracked up to be”, and she wonders “where all these individual choices are going to take us”; Madeleine Teahan concludes that we are travelling on a “high-speed eugenics train” (Comment, October 14).

She is right to be worried: Professor David Galton of the Eugenics Society’s successor body, the Galton Institute, in his book In Our Own Image: Eugenics and the Genetic Modification of People (2001), deplored historic abuses, but referred to abortion as the simplest of eugenic techniques, and saw the future of eugenics as based on choice.