Sydney S's List: Eugenics

• Eugenics literally means “good birth,” and it seeks to “improve” the human gene pool.
• Modern eugenicists do not fear the horrors of the past. They support aborting fetuses with disease or disability, what is sometimes called eugenic abortion. Or they advocate the screening of in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos for disease and “throwing out” the “defective” ones.
• it was the fact that the authorities forced their will on the people that made eugenics go wrong. Modern eugenicists believe improving the gene pool by making sure the genetically unfit are not born is not a dangerous prospect for the 21st century.

• Savulescu, chair of the Oxford Center for Practical Ethics at the University  of Oxford, argues that people should choose the best children by looking at  their genetics before they are born.

   

  In his 2002 paper “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best  Children,” he wrote, “Couples should select embryos or fetuses which are most  likely to have the best life, based on available genetic information, including  information about non-disease genes.”

   

  So Savulescu argues for the selection of children not just based on health,  but also on traits like intelligence and gender.

• In the West, we do not have a prejudice against girls. We have a prejudice against the sick, the disabled and the genetically “defective.”

  Despite a study that shows 99% of adults with Down syndrome report being happy, a statistic that would likely never be duplicated in the “normal” adult population, 90% of children with Down syndrome are aborted.

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• . Modern inquiries into the potential use of genetic engineering have led to an increased invocation of the history of eugenics in the discourse of bioethics, usually as a cautionary tale, though some ethicists have questioned whether non-coercive eugenics programs would be inherently unethical.

• On the basis of the well-known risk of Down syndrome, about 6,150 of these babies would be expected to suffer from this genetic condition, which is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. In reality, only about 4,370 babies are born with Down syndrome; the others have been aborted during pregnancy.
• These abortions are eugenic in both intention and effect—that is, their purpose is to eliminate a genetically defective fetus and thus allow for a genetically superior child in a subsequent pregnancy. This is a harsh way of phrasing it; another way is to say that parents just want to have healthy children
• terminating the pregnancy of a genetically defective fetus is widespread.
• The widespread acceptance of abortion as a eugenic practice suggests that there might be little resistance to more sophisticated methods of eugenic selection and, in general, this has been the case.

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