I remember, a long time ago, an article in New Scientist that said there might be a way to correct a certain birth defect that led to deafness. There was outrage. How dare scientists imply that deaf people were less than perfect. How dare they force people to hear without giving them the choice. How dare they impose their ideal of a hearing person on someone born to be deaf. Naturally, these comments came from charities set up to help the hearing impaired.

I can hear perfectly well. I have the choice not to listen to what I hear, and I have the choice to not hear at all simply by putting on headphones and playing some Led Zeppelin through them. I have the choice. If I was deaf, I would not have the choice. So the ‘choice’ protestations of these self-sustaining charities sounded very hollow indeed.

Now, there has been a child born to a family with a history of breast cancer who does not carry the faulty gene that causes between five and ten percent of breast cancers. Her chances of getting that particular ailment are small (unfortunately they are never zero) and best of all, she will not pass on a faulty copy of the gene to any children she has. A disease that has blighted that family for generations has stopped here. Good news, one would think.

After all, there are around 44,000 cases of breast cancer a year. If the faulty gene causes five to ten percent of them, that’s between 2,200 and 4,400 cases of breast cancer that could be stopped before the child is even born. Those children will grow and have children of their own, who also don't carry the duff gene. For those who purport to battle the scourge of cancer, this must be wonderful news.

 
Dr Sarah Cant, policy manager at Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: “The decision to screen embryos to see whether they have a faulty breast cancer gene is a complex and very personal issue.

No, it isn’t. Not really. If a couple have no history of breast cancer at all in either family, then there’s no point doing the test. If one or both of them come from a family where breast cancer is endemic, then there is every reason to do the test. Whether the couple want to do it is up to them. Personal, yes, but complex, not very.

 
“Women with a family history of breast cancer tell us that what might be right for one person may not be right for another.

That didn’t take long. The news is only just out and already the charity has canvassed their subjects and decided their opinion for them. Perhaps I’m getting cynical, but after being told that everyone is demanding ID cards from Jacq the Ripper, as well as all those ‘vast majority’ quotes, I have to take this with a pinch of salt.

 
“It’s important for anyone affected to have appropriate information and support so they can make the right choice for them.”

Aha. Translated, this means it’s important to the charity to be able to instruct people in what choice they should make.

Consider. If you had a baby girl, knowing that almost every woman in your family had suffered breast cancer, and knowing that this technique was available, could you later look that child in the eye when they are diagnosed and admit you had the chance to stop it, but decided against it?

If I had been born deaf, and later discovered that I could have been born hearing, but my parents didn’t take the option because it would have interfered with my ‘right to be me’, I’d be furious. I would not have said ‘That’s okay, I like being ostracised by everyone because I can’t hear and my voice is a mess’. I’d more likely say ‘get out of my life and stay out.’

That idea of ‘it’s right and proper to be born doomed’ is what the charities want. They want us to think they are ‘helping’ the disabled and the diseased, when their real aim is to sustain a population of clients. If breast cancer were eliminated, what would happen to all those breast cancer charities? If deafness were eliminated, what would happen to all those charities and businesses that depend on a client base of deaf people?

Not all charities are like this. There are cancer charities who sponsor research into prevention, early detection and cure. There are cancer charities who recognise they can’t cure it but who work hard to make life as easy as possible for those going through it. Charities like these would welcome the news that they might become redundant in future.

Those charities don’t have ‘policy managers’. They don’t react to breakthroughs like this one by saying ‘well, we’ll have to think about it’. They don’t sound frightened every time a chunk of their client base is threatened with cure.

Too many charities are now nothing more than havens for the Righteous, where they collect people and ensure their dependency. Too many charities take all their money from tax and collect little to nothing from their own efforts. There are many charities we never even hear of until one of them pops up to save their own skin.

Maybe we should look very closely at the definition of ‘charity’. I suspect many of them could be reclassified ‘quango’.