Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Colson

Colson is doing two things at once: baptizing a family anecdote into a public ethic, and turning a biotech policy debate into a character test for the culture. The line about his autistic grandson isn’t just sentimental color. It’s a tactical move that forces an abstract argument about genetic screening and embryo selection into the intimate register of kinship. If this child is a “gift,” then the moral burden shifts: the question stops being “Can we prevent suffering?” and becomes “Who gets counted as worth welcoming?”

The subtext is a warning about modernity’s favorite temptation: treating human life like a solvable engineering problem. Colson doesn’t deny the appeal of “getting rid of genetic diseases”; he concedes the seduction, then frames the trade-off as existential. The cost isn’t money or risk, but “our own humanity” - a deliberately elastic phrase that yokes religious anthropology to civic alarm. It suggests that once a society normalizes selecting against certain traits, it quietly installs a new hierarchy of acceptable people, with compassion recoded as optimization.

Context matters: Colson was a Watergate-era lawyer turned evangelical public intellectual, deeply invested in “culture war” questions about abortion, disability, and the moral limits of science. His call for Christians to “take the lead” signals political intent as much as pastoral concern: to mobilize faith communities as the counterweight to technocratic consensus. The rhetoric works because it reframes choice as formation. Not “what should parents do,” but “what kind of society are we becoming when the imperfect are treated as preventable errors?”