> Everyone who tried it thought they were doing their victims a favor.
No, not everyone who did it thought that they were doing their victims a favor. Quite a lot saw their victims as people who ought to be sacrificed for the good of others, and if they thought they were doing them a favor it was only in not murdering them outright as well as preventing them from reproducing.
Of course, some eugenics practitioners didn't bother avoiding outright murder, e.g., the Nazis.
This is a bit of a tangent off me pointing out someone's suggestion was eugenics. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this comment. We obviously can't read the minds of eugenics pushers, and very few openly admit their True Aims, so there's not any point trying to litigate it here.
Not just Israel - most Jews everywhere will use the screening. If two people are both carriers they suggest they don't marry, normally the screening is checked after the first date.
And regarding eugenics they only screen for diseases that require two carriers, because such a person can marry someone who is not a carrier. Diseases that manifest with a single copy of the gene are specifically not screened for because there's nothing the person can do in that case.
Apologies then just your reply seemed to indicate that you were agreeing with these screenings and the termination that follows them being eugenics.
My litmus test for eugenics requires an ideological and social engineering component.
Simply telling parents well if you bring a child to the world they’ll die within 2 years and suffer greatly isn’t that. Neither is offering them other tools such as using a sperm or egg donor or adoption.
The OP to which I declined to reply says: No one should be born with Tay-Sachs, a genetic disease.
I agreed with a reply to that suggesting such an extreme and unnuanced statement amounted to eugenics since the only means to actually ensure that no child will ever be born with X genetic disease would require rather extreme measures that go far beyond providing testing and options.
> Just calling every genetic screening designed to prevent actual suffering eugenics is pretty nonsensical.
It’s also not wrong, if we’re being totally honest.
Things are either eu (beneficial) or dys (harmful) genic.
The bottom 75% of the IQ curve has been poisoned against the word “eugenics” to the point that they can’t even have a basic conversation about things as sane as “genetic screening for debilitating illness” without completely breaking down.
The bottom 75% of the IQ curve has been poisoned against the word “eugenics” to the point that they can’t even have a basic conversation about things as sane as “genetic screening for debilitating illness” without completely breaking down.
This is a really not good way to engage with this topic. I'm not happy seeing this kind of framing on HN of what is an extremely sensitive topic for many people and with good reason.
Agreed. I think some people in the pro-eugenics crowd mistake a broad anti-eugenics stance as an ignorant denial of possible benefits. I think it could be good and fine, but I don't trust humans to make those decisions. I don't trust myself to make that call.
I had no idea. I just used my "wait, no, that's eugenics" heuristic. Now I know!
One day it's "we should save these kids from a difficult life," the next it's "we need symbols to tell undesirables apart," the next it's "we have too many people in camps and nowhere to send them." People like me ended up in those camps next to the Jews, so I'm not keen on the noise that starts the landslide.
There's an unfortunate truth that proponents of equality are going to have to deal with at some point: we are biologically different, to greater or lesser degrees.
That's a fact. And it's only going to be more of a fact the deeper we dig into our genetic code.
But it's how we respond to and deal with that that determines whether we commit good or evil.
1. Tay-Sachs is not limited to a single ethnicity. Carriers exist in the population in general.
2. Assuming you’re referring to the fact that being a carrier is more common in Ashkenazi Jews, you’re aware that there are a number of genetic screening programs run by Jewish organizations, right?
Dude, there are people who have children with Tay-Sachs, who are NOT ethnically Jewish at all. 1 in 250 people in the general population is a carrier for Tay-Sachs.
Also, literally everyone is a carrier of mutations for extremely devastating diseases. You just do not know which ones.
“While anyone can be a carrier of Tay-Sachs, the incidence of the disease is significantly higher among people of eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jewish descent. Approximately one in every 27 Jews in the United States is a carrier of the Tay-Sachs disease gene. Non-Jewish French Canadians living near the St. Lawrence River and in the Cajun community of Louisiana also have a higher incidence of Tay-Sachs. For the general population, about one in 250 people are carriers.”
I don't understand, the parent said nothing about Jews at all. Nonetheless, given the incidence among them, they also happen to be pioneers in prescreening for this very genetic defect.
Yeah, that's weird. Either the association is so strong with some people that they can't see Tay-Sachs without immediately thinking Ashkenazi, or there was a stealth edit to the comment.
You're right, but socially and organizationally it's more practical to fix the problem via gene therapy rather than institute compulsory abortions after a genetic test. Unfortunately due to the barbarity of Nazi Germany even rational eugenics programs are taboo in the West, and trying to fight that is a losing battle.
Um, US has its own sad history of eugenics (predating Nazi germany) that was unfortunately tied very closely to the mainstream scientific establishment.
https://www.cshl.edu/archives/institutional-collections/euge...
This included advocating for "sterilization of defectives".
And of course we mustn't forget the reaction to He Jiankui, who claims to have created the first permanently modified humans, and the response in China was to jail him and fine him. It's not just the West.
Gene therapy done in a medical setting where society has had a chance to understand what's going on isn't really eugenics, or is a form that isn't "bad". It's different from "sterilize the defectives" and "X people are Yer then Z people", especially because the people doing this have consulted extensively with bioethical experts and have also subjected their plans to scrutiny by the larger society.
Voluntary screening of prospective parents for genetic disorders doesn’t seem malicious to me. Especially if they already know they are at high risk. If my partner and I realized we would have a child with an inherited burden, we’d probably adopt instead.
You could say this counts as Eugenics, but maybe people just need a different word since Eugenics is so tainted.
Then you get into more difficult discussions. Like what constitutes a "inherited burden? Down syndrome? Is it okay to develop policies where few to no people with down syndrome will exist? How about autism? Can we get rid of people who might be liable to get depression, or just be really short? There is so much to screening for genetics, and not simply because the word eugenics is tainted.
I'd leave these questions to the biomedical community, as they have the ability to deal with nuanced questions like this. Given the amount of different behavior covered by autism, it doesn't seem useful to use that as an example.
I think if there was a test for Down's syndrome and a gene therapy cure, that would almost certainly be deployed, and advocates for people with Down's aren't going to have a big problem with that. People learned from the autism speaks debacle.