Eugenics
sastyk | February 23, 2012Note: I wrote a slightly different piece under this title on ye olde blogge back in August, but given the emphasis on discussion of contraception going on, I thought it was worth reiterating and mulling over further.
When your specialty as a foster family is taking large sibling groups, you hear a lot of stuff you'd rather not. The typical comment involves forced sterilization, and it is hard sometimes not to have a little sympathy. Of the kids we've taken or been called about, we've had three groups of five and three of four, and almost all have involved very young mothers, sometimes with…
razib | December 5, 2009Darwin's idea has cost lives:
Truths that America's founding fathers had held to be self-evident - that all men were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights - were now scorned as gross sentimentalities that had been overtaken by Darwinian science. Within a decade the self-styled "scientific racialists" had begun to classify other groups as genetically inferior. Immigrants from Spain and Italy were held to be a threat to the quality of the American gene pool and spurious scientific evidence was adduced to "prove" that Jewish immigrants were near-imbeciles whose admission in…
razib | August 10, 2009Last spring there was a false alarm about a noninvasive form of prenatal testing, in particular for Down syndrome. But if The Guardian is right then the British NHS is pushing forward on a more general program in this direction:
The early signs are so promising that the professor leading the programme says that the risk-free test could be the standard method of detecting babies with some genetic conditions inherited from the father within two to three years and those with Down's syndrome within five - and in the process save the lives of an estimated 265 mostly normal babies a year.
The life-…
emjohnson | July 14, 2009On this day 76 years ago (July 14, 1933) a sterilization law was passed in Nazi Germany, known as Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring). Any German was a target if they were found to be suffering from a range of perceived hereditary ailments, such as congenital mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, blindness, deafness, any severe hereditary deformity or even severe alcoholism. Official pronouncements insisted that these individuals were a drain on the German people, both…