Eugenics?

[Colossal Spoons]

How do you Hypsters feel about the topic of Eugenics. I'm studying for a genetics test right now so it was on my mind. I'll post a link to the wiki article about it for those who don't know what it is. Even if the word may be new to you, I'm sure you've thought about or discussed the topic before.

It's basically the alteration of a fetus' genes for the purpose of gaining desirable attributes. Best case scenario: parents have more intelligent or athletic babies. Worst case scenario: we use it to make jacked up soldiers or the next super-villain.

Discuss suckas!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

 

[terry78]

It's like making designer children. They're not accessories. Well, to Paris and Lohan they would be.

 

[X-Chick]

I'm against it. I think its ridiculous to be able to design your children. We'd end up having two different sets of people, the average humans and the advanced humans because not everyone could afford it and it'd only drive a deeper gap between the rich and the poor.

 

[Immortalfire]

Children are blessings, not a new toy. Completely ridiculous, but then so is any attempt to play God.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

Thing is, it would only make your child predisposed for athletics or intelligence or even evil lol. If they sat around like a lard-butt; they'd end just up just like most of America.

Also, you can alter a gene that runs in your family that causes a hereditary illness. What parent wouldn't wanna reduce their child's risk for developing some horrible disease?

 

[Movies205]

How about the oppisite, what if you could rid the world of mental ******ation, handicaps, etc? I'm against the designer baby idea, however the idea of getting rid of such handicaps is a tantalizing proposition that one would have to ruminate on quite seriously before passing any real judgement.

 

[CyberFaust]

can you say Gattaca?

good luck on the test though, genetics is a b1tch if you really get into the real stuff and not just general information

 

[Speedball]

Didn't the NAZI's base some of their ideas off of eugenics.
At first it wasn't the alteration of genes, but the selection of people with the most ideal traits. Now, I guess it has evolved to include the alteration of genes.
I can see some alteration being good (if you know your child has a risk of being deformed or having a congenital disease, then I'm all for that. But if you're going to pick eye color, height, hair color, that's just taking it too far).

 

[BRUTAL]

Think about the childhood obesity problem or the growing number of kids with ADD, if those truly are medical problems then they could virtually be eliminated from birth. Not to mention that should you do this, you could all but assure your child has a great life.

I'm for it.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

can you say Gattaca?

good luck on the test though, genetics is a b1tch if you really get into the real stuff and not just general information

I still need to see that movie.

Thanks, it's molecular genetics and very in-depth. But I love the stuff :heart:

 

[thedeadite]

such a touchy topic, but i feel that the way society works today that far more bad would come of it. eugenics would just further cement caste systems and segregation between them (as well as oppression of lower caste people). actually i just watched Gattaca again last night...such a good movie.

 

[X-Chick]

Think about the childhood obesity problem or the growing number of kids with ADD, if those truly are medical problems then they could virtually be eliminated from birth. Not to mention that should you do this, you could all but assure your child has a great life.

I'm for it.

Obesity and ADD aren't typically caused by genetics, they're usually caused by environmental factors.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

such a touchy topic, but i feel that the way society works today that far more bad would come of it. eugenics would just further cement caste systems and segregation between them (as well as oppression of lower caste people). actually i just watched Gattaca again last night...such a good movie.

That's a sad thing to be able to admit.

 

[Movies205]

Think about the childhood obesity problem or the growing number of kids with ADD, if those truly are medical problems then they could virtually be eliminated from birth. Not to mention that should you do this, you could all but assure your child has a great life.

I'm for it.

You realize how general the diagnosis is for ADD? You know how many kids just go to the doctor, tell them what they want hear so they can get the pills and sell them...

 

[Memphis Slim]

Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger loved Eugenics. One of the reasons she started that organization was to stop people of color from bringing more babies into the world.

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular](This article first appeared in the January 20, 1992 edition of Citizen magazine)[/FONT]

How Planned Parenthood Duped America
At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.

Sanger's other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists. One, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy. Stoddard was something of a Nazi enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as "scientific" and "humanitarian." And Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger associate and board member for her group, spoke of purifying America's human "breeding stock" and purging America's "bad strains." These "strains" included the "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South."

Not to be outdone by her followers, Margaret Sanger spoke of sterilizing those she designated as "unfit," a plan she said would be the "salvation of American civilization.: And she also spike of those who were "irresponsible and reckless," among whom she included those " whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers." She further contended that "there is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped." That many Americans of African origin constituted a segment of Sanger considered "unfit" cannot be easily refuted.

While Planned Parenthood's current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. The eugenic theme figured prominently in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded in 1917. She published such articles as "Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics" (June 1920), "The Eugenic Conscience" (February 1921), "The purpose of Eugenics" (December 1924), "Birth Control and Positive Eugenics" (July 1925), "Birth Control: The True Eugenics" (August 1928), and many others.

These eugenic and racial origins are hardly what most people associate with the modern Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which gave its Margaret Sanger award to the late Dr. Martin Luther King in 1966, and whose current president, Faye Wattleton, is black, a former nurse, and attractive.

Though once a social pariah group, routinely castigated by religious and government leaders, the PPFA is now an established, high-profile, well-funded organization with ample organizational and ideological support in high places of American society and government. Its statistics are accepted by major media and public health officials as "gospel"; its full-page ads appear in major newspapers; its spokespeople are called upon to give authoritative analyses of what America's family policies should be and to prescribe official answers that congressmen, state legislator and Supreme Court justiices all accept as "social orthodoxy."

Blaming Families

Sanger's obsession with eugenics can be traced back to her own family. One of 11 children, she wrote in the autobiographical book, My Fight for Birth Control, that "I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jails with large families." Just as important was the impression in her childhood of an inferior family status, exacerbated by the iconoclastic, "free-thinking" views of her father, whose "anti-Catholic attitudes did not make for his popularity" in a predominantly Irish community.

The fact that the wealthy families in her hometown of Corning, N.Y., had relatively few children, Sanger took as prima facie evidence of the impoverishing effect of larger families. The personal impact of this belief was heightened 1899, at the age of 48. Sanger was convinced that the "ordeals of motherhood" had caused the death of her mother. The lingering consumption (tuberculosis) that took her mother's life visited Sanger at the birth of her own first child on Nov. 18, 1905. The diagnosis forced her to seek refuge in the Adirondacks to strengthen her for the impending birth. Despite the precautions, the birth of baby Grant was "agonizing," the mere memory of which Sanger described as "mental torture" more than 25 years later. She once described the experience as a factor "to be reckoned with" in her zealous campaign for birth control.

From the beginning, Sanger advocacy of sex education reflected her interest in population control and birth prevention among the "unfit." Her first handbook, published for adolescents in 1915 and entitled, What Every Boy and Girl Should Know, featured a jarring afterword:

It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stoop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them.

To Sanger, the ebbing away of moral and religious codes over sexual conduct was a natural consequence of the worthlessness of such codes in the individual's search for self-fulfillment. "Instead of laying down hard and fast rules of sexual conduct," Sanger wrote in her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, "sex can be rendered effective and valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands of the pupil himself." Her attitude is appropriately described as libertinism, but sex knowledge was not the same as individual liberty, as her writings on procreation emphasized.

The second edition of Sanger's life story, An Autobiography, appeared in 1938. There Sanger described her first cross-country lecture tour in 1916. Her standard speech asserted seven conditions of life that "mandated" the use of birth control: the third was "when parents, though normal, had subnormal children"; the fourth, "when husband and wife were adolescent"; the fifth, "when the earning capacity of the father was inadequate." No right existed to exercise sex knowledge to advance procreation. Sanger described the fact that "anyone, no matter how ignorant, how diseased mentally or physically, how lacking in all knowledge of children, seemed to consider he or she had the right to become a parent."

Religious Bigotry

In the 1910's and 1920's, the entire social order–religion, law, politics, medicine, and the media–was arrayed against the idea and practice of birth control. This opposition began in 1873 when an overwhelmingly Protestant Congress passed, and a Protestant president signed into law, a bill that became known as the Comstock Law, named after its main proponent, Anthony Comstock. The U.S. Congress classified obscene writing, along with drugs, and devices and articles that prevented conception or caused abortion, under the same net of criminality and forbade their importation or mailing.

Sanger set out to have such legislation abolished or amended. Her initial efforts were directed at the Congress with the opening of a Washington, D.C., office of her American Birth Control League in 1926. Sanger wanted to amend section 211 of the U.S. criminal code to allow the interstate shipment and mailing of contraceptives among physicians, druggists and drug manufacturers.

 

[BRUTAL]

EDIT: My post is in regards to the responses to my mentioning ADD and Obesity and has nothing to do with MS bringing race-related issues into yet another topic....

Those are just examples, bad ones, but examples none the less. You could eliminate the predisposition for laziness and substitute drive or athleticism. All I am getting at is the fact that you could have the opportunity to lessen the chance that your kid never has to endure a childhood of self consciousness because of poor self-image, of never has to fail due to laziness. To me this seems like a great way to give your kid a the chance at a better life right out of the gate.

 

[X-Chick]

Those are just examples, bad ones, but examples none the less. You could eliminate the predisposition for laziness and substitute drive or athleticism. All I am getting at is the fact that you could have the opportunity to lessen the chance that your kid never has to endure a childhood of self consciousness because of poor self-image, of never has to fail due to laziness. To me this seems like a great way to give your kid a the chance at a better life right out of the gate.

You could do that by the way you raise your children also. This will give parents more of a reason to ignore their children because they believe their child is already set for life. And no matter what genetics are, a child also becomes who they are because of how they are raised. And if every person was born to be talented and attractive, then those things would mean nothing anymore. People who are great at football are accepted as being great because its a rarity. If everyone can do it, it stops being special and becomes useless.

 

[Speedball]

You realize how general the diagnosis is for ADD? You know how many kids just go to the doctor, tell them what they want hear so they can get the pills and sell them...

Yep.
When I was 5, my teacher tried to convince my parents that I had ADD because I didn't like doing the stuff they wanted me to do. That was the only time my father has ever screamed at another human being that wasn't related to him.
I definantly don't have ADD, but they wanted to give me the pills because I wasn't like everyone else. They did actually make me take ritalin, but it had not effect at all.
ADD is not a genetic disorder, obesity can be, but usually it isn't. Congenital diseases are more like diabetes, malformations and other birth defects. Heart disease is also congenital, and could be eliminated if we did mess with a childs genes.

 

[CyberFaust]

I still need to see that movie.

Thanks, it's molecular genetics and very in-depth. But I love the stuff :heart:

i used to love the stuff, but after a time, i decided i want to be Spider Jerusalem, so starting from this fall, journalism for me no more genetics

 

[Speedball]

EDIT: My post is in regards to the responses to my mentioning ADD and Obesity and has nothing to do with MS bringing race-related issues into yet another topic....

Those are just examples, bad ones, but examples none the less. You could eliminate the predisposition for laziness and substitute drive or athleticism. All I am getting at is the fact that you could have the opportunity to lessen the chance that your kid never has to endure a childhood of self consciousness because of poor self-image, of never has to fail due to laziness. To me this seems like a great way to give your kid a the chance at a better life right out of the gate.

Genes don't cause this though, a persons behavior and how they were raised affect this.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

i used to love the stuff, but after a time, i decided i want to be Spider Jerusalem, so starting from this fall, journalism for me no more genetics

You've gone to the dark side....English

 

[Lord Valumart]

if it makes babies more interesting that what we have now yeh....give them like big rhino horns or a tail...or make them totaly orange thus no need for fake tan. EVER!!

 

[thedeadite]

That's a sad thing to be able to admit.

it is sad..but unfortunatly true (as i see it anyway)

 

[CyberFaust]

You've gone to the dark side....English

nope, not really, english is my second language

 

[AllThingsComic]

This isn't cool at all, we should cherish whatever God decides to Bless us with.