No, eugenics really should be tainted forever. Cystic fibrosis can be heritably cured without eugenics, e.g. hopefully within a few decades via gene editing something like CRISPR. Let us not use specious arguments about curing rare Mendelian diseases as a Trojan horse to usher eugenics back into mainstream acceptability.

As a sibling comment notes, eugenics is conventionally understood to be gene selection via people selection, i.e. differential all-or-nothing biological reproduction of whole humans. And it was that sense of the idea I was critiquing.

And it is in that sense of the word that people shooting from the hip with talk of "licensing" the basic human right to reproduce are engaging in shocking historical naivety -- or worse, with facepalm-worthy apologetics like those corners of the commentariat that defend misogyny, slavery and other social aberrations that have rightfully been interred to the dustbin of history.

So you're okay with gene editing. Are you okay with editing a bunch of genes, as long as anyone is allowed to have a child that's still fundamentally a mix between them and their partner?

Because I'm pretty sure that would satisfy 90% of the historical proponents of eugenics, even if you refuse to call it such.

That is direct genetic manipulation. Eugenics is, in many people's mind, limiting people's reproduction to breed them like they were pets.

One is unfocused and hard to target genetic manipulation via reproduction incentives and force, the other is a choice for very targeted and obvious things.

It's all a blurry mess. Choosing who has children vs. financial incentives for who has children vs. paying for "high quality" sperm donors.