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by SecretDreams 457 days ago
You've gotta think bigger.

How about generic profiling by a future malicious government that only wants certain types of genomes to proceed to the next generation?

3 comments

Sounds complicated. Why not just figure out which genomes are simply correlated with people who don't support you and then pay off a bunch of scientists to write a bunch of garbage so that the medical industry doesn't care for them properly.

You do that kind of stuff across enough axis and the people who ought to be leaving your supporters dangling from the overpass will be too marginalized and preoccupied to do much of anything.

You don't even need "high tech" to do this sort of stuff. Depostic regimes have been doing it for centuries.

The government can just run the tests themselves in that case. I think people will resist coercive sterilization more than coercive genetic testing.
Blood is drawn from basically every infant born in the US and then genetically tested for various diseases. And the health departments retain these cards with the blood draws, although I’m not sure how usable they are decades later.

If you have a baby at home with a lay midwife, the health departments retain will hound you endlessly to get this done, although legally you can choose to decline as a parent. Barely anyone does, since most parents want to know if their newborn will have a serious genetic disorder that can be easily avoided by (for example) avoiding artificial sweeteners.

You'd think so, but the government of California was performing involuntary sterilizations until 2014. An ICE facility in Georgia performed them until at least 2020. It's legal under state law in over half the country.

What's different today that would create a massive outcry that there wasn't 4 years ago?