Eugenics Isn't Dead–It's Thriving in Tech
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
If you support birth control, abortion, and, genetic testing, prenatal tests then you support eugenics.
What is important in this discussion is to always place individual autonomy as the highest priority here.
Everyone should have the right and opportunity to make choices that maximize the health and wellbeing of their themselves and their offspring.
Facial symmetry is correlated with genetic health.. and so on..
All parents care about "improving the genetic quality of their children".
It's a fact of life that attractive people attract. Eugenics is when you 'help the process along' and the ramifications of that are pretty creepy.
It is entirely possible that the kind of person that another finds sexually attractive is sterile or grossly deficient in some other non-obvious way.
The problem with eugenics is exactly that it denies individual autonomy and human rights in favor of a supposedly “better” population.
Support for modern reproductive healthcare is not equal to support for eugenics as it rejects coercion in favor of personal agency.
Eugenics historically encompasses all of the things I listed, and the things that you have listed as well.
They are grouped into two terms -- positive eugenics and negative eugenics.
Positive eugenics is about encouraging the people to reproduce in the best way possible while negative eugenics is about discouraging or outright denying people to breed because of sometimes subjective judgment ascribed to their reproductive fitness.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to rehabilitate the term eugenics or defend the kind of odious stuff that the article is talking about , I just think that in this discussion it's important for people to acknowledge that 'modern reproductive healthcare' is eugenics.
As to birth control and abortion, you are flat out 100% wrong, they have nothing whatsoever to do with eugenics. These exist because people don't want to disrupt their lives with the difficulty of raising a child. In 99.9% of cases the genetic fitness of that child is completely immaterial. Birth control was also not significant in Margaret Sanger's eugenics writing: she advocated sterilization, and her support of birth control distinguished her from other eugenicists since she thought "fit" mothers still had a right to limit the number of "fit" offspring.
Which leads to another point: you are misstating "positive eugenics." Positive eugenics is encourage "fit" people to have more kids, not to encourage everyone to "reproduce in the best way possible." Again it seems like you are being plain dishonest - which is especially frustrating because I don't think you're arguing for eugenics, you're just trying to win an argument on the internet, and that argument rests on a dumb word game which ignores reality.
Genetic testing actually is a bit more relevant, but there are sharp distinctions between "medically justifiable interventions" and "attempting to optimize your children," and even optimizing your children is not the same thing as eugenics. It is irresponsible and childish to use the same term without being careful.
The goal of enhancing individuals and the human species by engineering the genes related to some characteristics and traits is not to be confused with the barbarous projects of eugenics that planned the simple elimination of human beings considered as 'imperfect' on an ideological basis. However, it impinges upon the principle of respect for human dignity in several ways. It weakens the idea that the differences among human beings, regardless of the measure of their endowment, are exactly what the recognition of their equality presupposes and therefore protects. It introduces the risk of new forms of discrimination and stigmatization for those who cannot afford such enhancement or simply do not want to resort to it. The arguments that have been produced in favour of the so-called liberal eugenics do not trump the indication to apply the limit of medical reasons also in this case.
Margaret Sanger’s involvement with the eugenics movement isn’t just a footnote, it is a well documented cornerstone of modern reproductive medicine and social policy that people fight over (defund planned parenthood). She did support birth control in part as a tool for what she (and many others of a variety of social/political stripes) saw as social improvement via population control. People who support planned parenthood today have a hard time admitting that the services it provides aren't just about improving the well being of the people who seek them out, but society as a whole.
Your comment assumes a hard boundary between individual choice and eugenics but historically, eugenics wasn't always state-imposed or coercive — there was also a significant "voluntary" eugenics movement, which promoted individual choices aligned with what was considered beneficial to the population. That included birth control, selective breeding, and now, genetic counselling. This is often referred to as liberal eugenics in bioethics, which even today is a subject of serious debate — not just "word games."
“Positive eugenics” is encouraging the reproduction of the “fit.” That’s exactly what I said — that it’s about encouraging the “best” possible reproduction. “Fit” is a subjective term, a racist Japanese eugenicist would tell you that it means something different than what a racist South African eugenicist would tell you, and a person versed in biological science pre-Watson and Crick would tell you that it means something different than a genetic councillor of of today.
I agree with your concerns about human dignity, discrimination, and coercion in genetic intervention. But I feel that the way to do that is to put as many of these tools as possible into the hands of the people who want to reproduce, and have trained experts with proper oversight guide them to make the choices that they want to make.
I'm not defending hideous eugenics practices. I'm just saying that we can't pretend like it’s an alien concept that has nothing to do with the modern reproductive medicine.
Would it help if I, a true tech boy, stopped trying to reproduce and worked my bones out to make a machine that enpowers you? No strings attached, no expectations, just free hard work with no pay or credits.