June 26, 2012
Eugenics is a system of controlling life through sterilization of unwelcome members of a species or through the destruction of those unwelcome members. In modern parlance, the species is generally considered to be the human race. In the last century eugenics had some heady supporters. The Nazis, as most people know, practiced eugenics via the Holocaust and other methods. Other people, whose names are not normally associated with totalitarianism, supported eugenics too: Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells, among others.
Almost no one objects to eugenics practiced for agricultural or horticultural purposes. The selective breeding of livestock and of grains, vegetables and fruits — and even the cross-breeding of these forms of life — has been a significant method of advancing human prosperity and health. Dog shows, state fair competitions, and garden shows all incorporate the best breeding of pets, pigs, and petunias.
Human eugenics, however, is a different process entirely. It implies that some of us are able to judge into extinction less worthy members of our species. One of the most odious chapters of government intervention in human life during our nation’s history was the period in which poor blacks were sterilized, often without their knowledge, as a means of diminishing the numbers of "undesirable" Americans. When Hitler began his campaign to judge life worthy of perpetuation, he chose what seemed to him to be the types of life best to snip off at the bud: retarded people, the congenitally handicapped, and human carriers of genetically transmitted diseases. Today in Europe eugenics is back in vogue, although using different methods and new technology. Ultrasound examinations of unborn babies can reveal much about the child, and other tests provide more information. It is fairly easy, for example, to determine the sex of a child, so to families in China and India, where boys are much more welcome than girls, prenatal infanticide can prevent the baby girl from ever entering the world.
Now as CyberNewsSystem reports, in Europe, the killing of unborn children with health problems is becoming a major political issue. Anita Kruzmane of Latvia gave birth in June 2002 to a girl with Down syndrome and she is arguing that the failure to detect that illness, which would have given her enough information to choose to abort the child, was a failure in the health care system to provide adequate “prenatal care.” In France, where that sort of screening is routine, 96 percent of all babies in the womb with Down syndrome are aborted.
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