“Here’s a word about the wonders of eugenics!”
With the rise of prenatal screening tests across Europe and the United States, the number of babies born with Down syndrome has significantly decreased, but few countries have come as close to eradicating Down syndrome births as Iceland.
Since prenatal screening tests were introduced in Iceland in the early 2000s, the vast majority of women — close to 100 percent — who received a positive test for Down syndrome terminated their pregnancy.
And so it has not proven necessary to make it mandatory.
Alright, I work with genetics so I’ll stick my nose in here and quibble a bit:
Eugenics refers to “improving the breed” through higher rates of reproduction among those with desired traits and/or lowered rates among those with undesirable traits. So basically animal husbandry with humans. The idea is that each generation gets more “desirable”.
Down syndrome isn’t heritable. It happens when something goes wrong on the assembly line. Certain things make that more likely, such age (old “assembly lines”?) Technically though, lowering the number of Down syndrome people born into the world does nothing to change to change the chance of individuals occurring in future generations. Therefore, the term “eugenics” doesn’t really apply.
Of course anything to do with terminating a pregnancy has all sorts of controversies and I’ll not touch those. Just thought I’d clarify a bit because “eugenics” has become the Godwin’s-law-based death of any discussion involving genetics and it mostly stems from confusion.
I am reminded how Heinlein once wrote, “The way to cure hemophilia is to stop breeding hemophiliacs.”
Bmq215- eugenics boiled down to its essence is the perfection of man via the elimination of undesirables, and proliferation of desirables. Jewishness isn’t exactly genetic, either, but that didn’t stop Eugenecists from attempting to remove Jews from the gene pool.
The “textbook” definition of eugenics doesn’t apply, as it’s never actually been used that way. Case in point, downs children have always been targets of eugenecists. Since day one. Genetic heritability has rarely had a damn thing to do with it.