Family eugenics

Abstract

There is equivocation as to whether antenatal screening is eugenic. In part, this situation arises from the ways in which the term eugenic can be parsed and labelled as ‘strong’ or weak’, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. I argue that such analyses can be misleading and that eugenics in the ordinary sense of the term is being practised courtesy of antenatal screening. I call this form of eugenics ‘family eugenics’ because political and ethical decisions made by the state and the medical profession pass the decision to prospective parents of who gets born because deemed healthy.

Notes

* School of Social Work and Psychosocial Science, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk NR4 7TJ, UK. Email: [email protected]

1. Indeed, one may argue that its growth began with the implicit right to abort healthy embryos if it was/is deemed that ‘the time is not right’, whereupon that phrase means ‘the time is not right to maximise the physical, psychological and social prospects for the unborn child’.

2. In this claim we can see his distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ eugenics at work. The strong form is in the second clause – ‘unwillingness to bring disabled people into the world’. The weak form is in the first clause if ‘social implications’ is taken to mean (as is implied by other parts of his paper) the difficulties that such parenting brings, or if it is taken to mean that the choice to bring a disabled person into the world is seen as an antisocial or selfish act. Or the distinction may collapse if we read the claim as ‘unwillingness to bring disabled offspring into the social world of their families’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Jonathan Hampton*

* School of Social Work and Psychosocial Science, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk NR4 7TJ, UK. Email: [email protected]