xhxhxhx:

It might well turn out, for example, that U.S. decision makers would be willing, among other things, to accept the high risk of an additional 1 per cent of our children being born deformed if that meant not giving up Europe to Soviet Russia. Or it might be that under certain circumstances the Russians would be willing to accept even higher risks than this, if by doing so they could eliminate the United States.

At this point in the lecture a lady in the audience got up and said in a very accusing voice, “I don’t want to live in your world in which 1 per cent of the children are born defective.” My answer was rather brutal, I fear. “It is not my world,” I observed, and I then pointed out that if she did not want to live in a world in which 1 per cent of the children were born defective she had a real problem, since 4 per cent of the children are born defective now. …

I can easily imagine that if we lived in a world in which no children had ever been born defective and we were told that as a result of some new contingencies 4 per cent of the children would be born seriously defective we would consider such a world to be intolerable. We might not believe that people would be willing to bear and raise children if the risk were about 1 in 25 that these children would have a serious congenital defect. However, we live in that world now. We not only bear this relatively high rate of tragedy; we come close to ignoring it. While some women are greatly concerned about such possibilities during their pregnancy, it is only in such critical periods or when they are touched personally that most people think about this continuing burden of life. To add a further 1 per cent to the burden would be a terrible thing to do, but this additional burden is clearly comparable to the kinds of risks to which we have become accustomed in the peacetime world. Most people will be able to live with such increased risks.

beautiful