Talk:Abortion for boutique eugenics

Midian said

Margaret Sanger was a known proponent of negative eugenics. Negative eugenics is aimed at lowering fertility among the genetically disadvantaged. This includes abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning.

By promoting abortion as the best alternative to the poor, uneducated, masses, Margaret Sanger, through her organization Planned Parenthood, hoped to prevent the breeding of "morons" by killing as many as she could in the womb. "The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind." As long as the state sponsors abortion by funding such organizations, it promotes such behavior.

I'm all for freedom of abortion, I'm not in favor of the government promoting and paying for it with my tax dollars.

Woozle said

First, negative eugenics:

I don't see anything inherently wrong with negative eugenics; the only kind of eugenics that seems wrong to me is when it's coercive, whether the eugenics approach is positive or negative.

If you were poor and knew you couldn't afford to raise a lot of kids, wouldn't you want to have access to the resources to make sure you didn't end up with a lot of kids to raise? Or, in other words, wouldn't you at least want to be able to make that choice? Non-coercive negative eugenics basically equates, as I understand it, to providing those resources; non-coercive negative eugenics for the genetically disadvantaged, then, equates to a focus on making those resources available to poor people and people with known genetically-transmitted weaknesses.

People who are better off financially either have access to those resources via other means or else can afford to have those kids, so this policy seems like exactly the right thing. Any expenditure of government funds towards this end is further offset by the reduction of the social burden of all those unwanted kids and their unwanted (as determined by the potential parents, mind you) genes.

So... remind me again, how is non-coercive "negative eugenics for the genetically disadvantaged" a bad thing, either for society or for the genetically disadvantaged? How is it not a good use of taxpayer money? What alternative solutions would you prefer to see taxpayer money spent on? (I can guess, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.)

Now, on Margaret Sanger...

It's not clear to me to what degree she advocated coercion, although she may well have done so. To the extent that she did, I agree that this is not morally defensible, however logical or rational a solution it might seem. Forcing poor people to have sterilizations or abortions or even to take contraceptives, as a precondition (say) for receiving government aid, strikes me as being on a par morally with the Bush administration's revocation of habeas corpus, i.e. morally reprehensible: both actions take away important, life-and-death decisions from the individual and place them in the hands of the government, which has a historically terrible record at making such decisions.

Do you have evidence that Planned Parenthood is supportive of coercive measures? If so, I would think that this would be a serious indictment of their efforts. Please feel free to post (preferably with links to original sources) any such information you may have about them.