[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.