Modern Eugenics

There is a discussion at Catholic Answers about comments that Richard Dawkins has made about eugenics. Dawkins has a point. We have a eugenic culture which only differs from Nazi Germany by degree and subtlety. Remember, for the Nazis, eugenics was seen as a medical program. Not all aspects of their eugenic doctrine were racial, especially in regards to children. These days, the proposed solution for many genetic illness has been eugenic abortions. I appreciate opponents like Dawkins and Singer because they don’t hide the implications of modern secular philosophies. The following is from an article earlier this year in American Spectator about our quiet eugenics.

The New Eugenics
Medical researchers estimate that 80 percent or more of babies now prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. (They estimate that since 1989 70 percent of Down-syndrome fetuses have been aborted.) A high percentage of fetuses with cystic fibrosis are aborted, as evident in Kaiser Permanente's admission to the New York Times that 95 percent of its patients in Northern California choose abortion after they find out through prenatal screening that their fetus will have the disease.

"I THINK OF IT AS COMMERCIAL EUGENICS," says Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the International Center for Technology Assessment. "Whenever anybody thinks of eugenics, they think of Adolf Hitler. This is a commercial eugenics. But the result is the same, an intolerance for those who don't fit the norm. It is less open and more subtle. Try to get any numbers on reproductive issues. Try to get actual numbers on sex-selection abortions. They are always difficult to get. If you are involved in that commerce, do you really want people to go: So you aborted how many disabled children? That's the last piece of information people want out there."