Eugenics is one of those words I knew to be terrible before I even knew what it actually meant. Something disturbing and creepy, invented by people who hate humanity. The first two things that come to mind from the word now are the Nazi holocaust and the compulsory sterilisations of insane and mentally retarded people in Sweden – both sinister events that continue to cause feelings of shame. Of course, eugenics is now happily buried and forgotten. Except that it isn’t. Most people who get pregnant have their fetuses screened for certain developmental problems, and most (as in over 90%) people who get confirmation of something like Down’s choose to abort their babies. Morally, this turns out to be a lot more acceptable than allowing the baby to live and sterilising it – for reasons I don’t entirely understand.
Why exactly does a prospective parent choose to do that? I’ve understood it’s because they feel that having the baby would cause both their lives and the life of the baby to be more unpleasant than is desirable. That’s understandable. Down’s causes a variety of health problems – but I suspect only one of them is at issue here. Wikipedia says “most individuals with [Down’s] syndrome have mental retardation in the mild (IQ 50–70) to moderate (IQ 35–50) range”. That really is problematic. Nobody cares that people with Down’s look different, and I’m pretty sure parents could take the general health problems (increased risk of heart problems, hearing problems, low fertility) in a baby with normal intelligence. But the thought of having a child that will never be much good at anything, who one couldn’t have a conversation with, who will be determined to be inferior on sight by almost everyone he ever meets is heartbreaking.
So we as a society have determined that fetuses that can be identified in the womb as having sufficiently low intelligence are ok to abort. That’s a kind of eugenics, although it’s really done more for our general comfort – institutionalised retarded people don’t procreate very much anyway (then again, that’s a specific goal of the institutions). What about the heavy-duty stuff, like Nobel-winner William Shockley’s suggestion that people with low IQ’s (he suggested < 100) would be paid money in exchange for getting sterilised? People have a far stronger negative response to that idea, but I'm not sure why. After all, it would be totally voluntary. If there were a law that offered just me, personally, money for getting sterilised, that would just be a bonus. If I ever wanted it, it'd be there. But people are more offended by some group they identify with being targetted than by personal targetting. (Sidenote: someone recently told me that there are private abortion clinics in the US that you can donate money to to be used specifically for aborting fetuses of a certain race, typically blacks. Pretty sick, but curiously something we all seemed to think should not be illegal.) People who I've mentioned the Shockley idea to have tended to reject it on grounds of social justice: rich stupid people wouldn't need the money, so this would be biased against poor people having children. (Interestingly, they don't bring along the supporting argument that poverty and stupidity are strongly correlated, but such are the requirements of political correctness.) But there's already a strong disincentive against poor people procreating. If a billionaire has children, the effect on the wealth he can spend on himself is unchanged. If a wealthy person has children, it will be the most significant drain on his financial resources during his entire life. If a poor person in a country without social benefits has children, he's pretty much accepting that he'll be poor forever and that this way he'll have someone to feed him gruel when he's senile. Actually, the implications of this are known also to people who aren't Nazi zombies: one of the stated aims of most aid programmes in the poorest parts of the world is to reduce fertility by educating the women, and sometimes by other means. A couple of generations on, the poor of the world would do well to focus on improving their lives and societies instead of having lots of children as a kind of pension system. We're currently waging an existence war against the poor - the eugenicists want to wage one against the stupid. Then again, as I said earlier, we are already waging one against the stupid, just with a rather low lower bound for intelligence. The Down’s situation suggests that we don’t want people with IQ’s lower than about 70. It’s chilling, but it’s also true. Or do you feel moral outrage against the pregnant couples who make these choices? It’ll be interesting to see what “feels” moral with genetic engineering and another five billion people on the planet.
