[cm2187]

The problem is "eugenics" has two meanings which is unhelpful for this discussion.

1) criminal practices of forced sterilisations, ethnic cleansing and mass assassinations to phase out undesired genes

2) the more generic practice of trying to improve the genetic characteristics of your children.

I don't think there is much point in debating 1). But we would be naive to think we are not already doing 2). What else is a prenatal test for down syndrome? What else is selecting your mating partner for desirable characteristics? In animals it's called breeding and it works pretty well. And if you can patch the DNA of your kids to remove potential risks of cancers or other deficiencies, why wouldn't you? Is it better to let cancer take its toll?

[arghwhat]

A problem is that some see 2 as a subset of 1, upset at the idea that parents would wish to terminate pregnancies early that have strong indications of defects. I do imagine a good chunk of those people are of the horribly broken belief that abortions should be outlawed altogether, so not sure how many specifically go against such "filtering".

Granted, if everyone were sequenced and had access to that information it probably wouldn't take too long before certain categorizations became a requirement on the dating profiles, and that's a slippery slope...

(Regardless, nature filters us all by genetics in several stages, and our entire concept of sexual attraction and social groupings are based on the most direct form of priliminary selection for genetics that evolution could achieve with our limited available senses.)

[vlian2088]

>I do imagine a good chunk of those people are of the horribly broken belief that abortions should be outlawed altogether, so not sure how many specifically go against such "filtering".

no, it is quite quite bafflingly the other way around. those who are against abortions non-religiously almost always make exceptions for rape, risk to the woman's life or health, and things like Down's.

[Avicebron]

The issue is where do you draw the line with 2)? What does "improve the genetic characteristics of your children" mean in practice?

Everyone starts with 2) and then it creeps into 1).

[RobotToaster]

> The issue is where do you draw the line with 2)? What does "improve the genetic characteristics of your children" mean in practice?

That should be entirely down to the parents.

Someone having a genetically engineered baby doesn't affect anyone else.

[dbspin]

> That should be entirely down to the parents.

When making decisions that will affect (in planned and unpredictable ways) the phenotype of a person over their entire life course - society / medical experts and researchers etc necessarily need to have a say.

We can't beat or euthanise our children, neither should we have carte blanche over their genetic makeup.

Note - I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't employ gene modification to ameliorate health issues or even to improve other metrics. However this is absolutely not just 'down to the parents'.

[sometimelurker]

But there's still some really major issues with 2).

Do you think it would be fair to have the children of billionares to be much much more intelligent than normal people, let along the children of poor people? I'm not sure what the answer is, but its very worth thinking about. If you could grow an Einstein in a lab, imagine if all the Einsteins that were grown ended up being biased to Musk-adjacent worldviews.

This is really not simple

[arghwhat]

There is no path that turns "I would like to terminate my pregnancy if the outcome is unfavorable" into "I would like to commit genocide on everyone whose genetics I do not like".

Granted, someone who already wishes for or aligns with the idea of ethnic cleansing might start by only publicly sharing their wish for the former to begin with, but I don't see a sensible argument for it being a natural extension of the former.

[laszlokorte]

"I would like my child to not be deaf" -> "Many (most?) people would prefer their child to not be deaf" -> (3) "Deaf community shrinks" -> "Social support for deaf people is reduced/seen as not necessary" -> "Parents of deaf children are blamed for carrying out the child" -> "Parents are nudged (forced) to terminate the pregnancy" -> goto (3)

In a some way this is already happening (eg Judges forcing cochlea implants on babies while denying the parents support in learning/teaching sign language to the child)

Many people see this as an attack on the deaf community and their culture - and I have to agree.

[nedruod]

In terms of slippery slopes, this argument is climbing atop one. Where does that end? Should we ban doctors from performing surgeries that would save someone's hearing? Should we ban protective gear that might diminish the size of the deaf community?

It's simply a horrible argument to suggest that you have to protect a disadvantaged community by making sure they don't shrink. There's much better ways to be respectful of the great human beings these people are.

[laszlokorte]

I said nothing about banning performing surgeries or forcing parents to carry out a deaf child just for keeping some community alive.

I just wanted to point out that there is a path from "would like to prevent" to "stop everybody who does not match the profile from living".

The other responses in this thread already show in which bad light people look at deaf people. Maybe start talking to some of them.

[bonoboTP]

Who shows them in "bad light"? Sane people see the condition itself in "bad light" not the people affected, who deserve compassion, help, accommodations etc.

Twisting things around to make people seem bigoted for saying that disability is bad (not that disabled people are bad) is just evil.

It has to be turned around 180 and we have to point out that this push is moral corruption and evil. Even if it comes in part from deaf people it is evil. It doesn't matter what mental acrobatics is developed around this, to wish for other people to become disabled is evil and morally outrageous.

It's the same with the "obesity is actually not unhealthy" crowd, all part of the same ideological matrix.

But then the same enlightened crowd turns around and pushes to legalize euthanasia for depressed people in their 20s...

[arghwhat]

A shrinking deaf community has nothing at all to do with ethnic cleansing, and social support does not shrink for less common diseases - it's usually the opposite, with support proportional to how rare and inconvenient the disability is.

Let's try a small thought experiment: Some birth defects stem from dietary issues in the mother during pregnancy, like folic acid deficiency or alcohol consumption.

Let's imagine that we discover that deaf children are primarily caused by a particular vitamin deficiency during pregnancy. We can then either spread the information so parents can supplement, or even fortify foods and cause the community to massively decline or even disappear - or we could withold the information on the vitamins to artificially maintain the population of the deaf community.

You could even extend it to a scenario where we end up relying more and more on artificial insemination or other early processing - the impact of many dietary deficiencies happen extremely early, so to maintain the community we would then have to artificially cause said deficiency to maintain the population of the deaf community.

Heck, we can always just make people deaf later if you wanted to maintain their community. We could also make more people get into "accidents" so that the quadriplegic community is maintained. Sounds absolutely insane when you start to discuss maintaining the population of disabled communities, doesn't it?

Back to the topic, cleansing of the deaf in this context implies a hatred for deaf people in general and wanting to remove all deaf people, which is an emotion entirely unrelated to sympethesizing with the disability of being deaf and wanting to avoid causing more such disability.

[inglor_cz]

Many people see the deaf community as something that should ideally disappear by curing them.

I wonder if 100 years ago, the same activists would fight for survival of the leprosy community and its specific culture.

I can understand glorifying pathology if nothing can be done about it. It is a form of coping, similar to the coping that we usually engage in with regard to death. But once the underlying condition starts being curable and the glorifiers attempt to block treatment of children in the name of maintaining the pathology for future generations, they IMHO cross the line to outright evil.

[pibaker]

Should "many people" get to decide what the deaf community, whatever that means, should do, even when the people affected do not agree?

We are not even a hundred years away from when they tried to make Jews disappear forever.

[boxed]

Deafness is a huge handicap, in many ways significantly worse than blindness. That the victims of this horrible ailment start to self identify with it isn't a reason to subject new humans to it.

[arghwhat]

I have previously had to install simple things like doorbells for deaf people, which is done through a very strobe light that can be seen from almost the entire apartment... if you're not behind a closed door at least.

The idea of it being genuinely difficult for a person to be warned or notified is terrifying. Put your phone in your bag and you might as well have left it at home. Honking, people yelling or screaming for you to move out of harms way, even air sirens... You'll have no idea.

[laszlokorte]

Then maybe install the strobe lights in all important rooms? Most people have there phone on silent/vibration anyway and recently everybody uses noise-canceling headphones outside to not be bothered by other people...

All the infrastructure that would support deaf people (like additional signal lights, vibration signals, subtitles...) are also very helpful for everybody else in specific situations.

Everybody is handicapped part of the time

[cm2187]

I agree, though one could make the argument that our modern nanny states have been pretty brutal at enforcing health policies during covid, and if they convince themselves that they can eradicate certain diseases by mandating DNA patching or pregnancy terminations, them doing so "for our own good" is in the realm of the possible.

But we are in coercion territory. What I am saying that we already practice eugenics without coercion, we just don't call it that.

[eru]

As far as I can tell, our modern nanny states haven't been 'pretty brutal at enforce health policies during covid'.

I agree that there were pretty strong restrictions, many of them unnecessary. But in most places the population was pretty compliant or otherwise ignored the demands. I don't remember much brutality.

What's your evidence for brutality?

[mschuster91]

Vaccine mandates are an entirely different game than "this kind of life has no right to existence".

[cm2187]

Well if you mandate DNA patching, how do you enforce it?

[sometimelurker]

There's definitely a sane debate needed on this. I think there's a lot of things here people wouldn't be against, but at the same time more thought needs to be put into this. Like what if you could GMO your kids to be smarter, but it costs a lot. Should this be illegal, or should the govt pay for it for poorer people, and it just gets better and better.

I doubt that there'll be a sane debate about this and I would love to be proven wrong.

[eru]

> 1) criminal practices of forced sterilisations, ethnic cleansing and mass assassinations to phase out undesired genes

Whether it's criminal or not depends on the jurisdiction in question.

Even abhorrent things can be perfectly legal, and many good things are criminalised.

[croes]

The people who do 1) claim do to it for 2)