You're not wrong, that is the dictionary definition of eugenics. However painting "aborting a fetus with CF" and "sterilizing the 'undesirable' races" as equivalent is a pretty massive leap in my opinion.
There's historic context to eugenics and a nexus with racism, nationalism, fascism, and physiognomy that makes it a harmful ideology.
I don't think those factors are present in the case where people doing the eugenics are the parents and the phenotype being selected against is dying a slow, painful death in the absence of lifelong exotic drug therapy.
There are really good questions about where to draw the line here though. What if it's type-1 diabetes?
> However painting "aborting a fetus with CF" and "sterilizing the 'undesirable' races" as equivalent is a pretty massive leap in my opinion.
I didn’t make that leap. I was just saying that this is eugenics, because that seems like a factually accurate description to me.
I would agree that not all eugenic systems are created equal, and that while you could debate whether aborting a child with a hereditary condition might be a bad thing to do, it’s at least not bad for all the same reasons as sterilizing populations to achieve some sort of racial purity would be.
I’ve never been confronted with these sorts of decisions, so I can’t be entirely certain how I’d react. But this seems like an important topic to debate as these technologies mature. However one way I can imagine that debate being undermined is if the people developing and advocating for this technology were to succeed in reframing it as somehow being not-eugenics, which to me it seems as though it clearly is. While it might be far less problematic than the Nazi eugenics programs, it’s not clear to me how you could put this technology to use without eventually creating some sort of Gattaca-like situation, which is also deeply problematic, just for different reasons.
it also gets into pretty uncomfy territory when you consider hereditary diseases that have a 40-60% percent curable rate in 5 years and most likely 90% rate in 10. Do you still abort under such circumstances?
There's historic context to eugenics and a nexus with racism, nationalism, fascism, and physiognomy that makes it a harmful ideology.
I don't think those factors are present in the case where people doing the eugenics are the parents and the phenotype being selected against is dying a slow, painful death in the absence of lifelong exotic drug therapy.
There are really good questions about where to draw the line here though. What if it's type-1 diabetes?