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Comment by oldgregg | Hacker News Reader

society has no problem with mass-eugenics? see: abortion. or transgenderism. when you grow up in a digital world where everything can be manipulated effortlessly bringing that human agency and engineering into the real world is rather predictable. add the substantial profit motive in there and there is no end to what we might see.

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Having an abortion after a prenatal diagnosis isn't the same as eugenics. Obviously, eugenicist or ableist beliefs could motivate an abortion after a prenatal diagnosis, but choosing to have an abortion is primarily a decision about you and your family.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with the transgender reference—any medical interventions trans people have are initiated by the trans person, making it completely unlike eugenics.

Edit: I should probably add that eugenics was widely popular less than a century ago in the U.S. and hasn't gone away completely. I think these examples are poor, however.

For me the motivation is rather important. A women terminating a pregnancy that's an obvious developmental train wreck is different than a political movement with some esthetic it wants to violently force onto society.

How are abortion or "transgenderism" examples of "mass-eugenics"?

fetuses with down's syndrome are routinely aborted.

And if not for our medical system people with Down syndrome would die to natural selection.

> And if not for our medical system people with Down syndrome would die to natural selection.

I guess I don't understand your comment; what does natural selection have to do with it?

I'm making no statements here except that the abortion of Down-positive children is in fact eugenics. Parent's comment was asking specifically how abortion is "mass eugenics." Maybe saying abortion in toto is "mass eugenics" is overly broad, but certainly it's used for eugenic purposes--Down Syndrome being one such case.

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