Christianity and the New Eugenics

Director of Research of a medical charity in Scotland and a Visiting Lecturer in Bioethics at St Mary’s University in London, England. He is also a Fellow with the Centre for Bioethics and Human Dignity at Trinity International University, Chicago, USA. In 1998, he was ordained an elder of the Church of Scotland (the Reformed and Presbyterian national church in Scotland since 1560) and was a member of its Church and Society Council from 2005 to 2013. Previously, he had been a senior civil servant with the Bioethics Division of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. He is the author of The Image of God, Personhood and the Embryo (SCM Press) and the co-editor of several volumes on biomedical ethics including The Ethics of the New Eugenics (Berghahn Books).

Most people will be totally unaware of the dark legacy of eugenics in the UK, let alone in the rest of Europe and the US. MacKellar is probably the world’s most clear-sighted Christian exponent of this history and its modern counterpart – the new eugenics. It presents its apparently benign face throughout the National Health Service in the UK, but beneath the surface are issues that all of us need to know about. This book is a lucid, balanced and unique guide to help discern the truly therapeutic from the eugenic.