[nootropicat]

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.

[dekhn]

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.

[tasha0663]

> Unfortunately... rational eugenics programs are taboo in the West

Fortunate! That's very fortunate!

> rational eugenics

No such thing unless your basis for it is incomplete or corrupted.

[BuyMyBitcoins]

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.

[tsol]

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.

[dekhn]

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.