And country after country has demonstrated how relatively easy it seems to be to reduce fertility. Iran is a not so well known example. Back in the 80s Iran started to feel that their fertility was a problem. Their population was growing far faster than they had the resources to sustain, so they instituted birth control availability and mandated 'marriage classes' [1], not entirely unlike what's being suggested here. And in these classes they worked to try to reduce overall fertility.
It succeeded far beyond any expectation. Their fertility went from 6+ to 2 in less than a decade. And then it just kept dropping. Today it's down to below 1.7 and it keeps falling. They've long since tried to reverse this trend and started an equal but opposite pro fertility program, but like China also showed - it's far easier to reduce a population's fertility, than it is to bring it back up. These sort of programs work as a perfectly viable proof of concept of a practically invisible eugenics program, and that's quite dangerous.
What you described is not eugenics though.
See, for instance, the famous quote from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Interestingly enough, the ruling from that court case (Buck v Bell) was never formally overturned. It's simply that eugenics fell out of fashion, following it being taken to extremes by a certain vegetarian artist in Germany with a knack for rhetoric.
For example — we don’t particularly need to do anything to reduce birth rates of technologically advanced societies societies with human rights. That’s because women choose to study and work on their career in their 20s, while men try hard to save up to afford the sky-high real estate prices. The market does the eugenics for everyone.
If anything, the fear that uneducated populations or those in low-cost-of-living countries are going to “replace us” is a result of that simple fact. Comparing continents, Africa is expected to continue to have a ton of kids per woman compared to, say, Europe or USA.
Religion, of course plays a role. When the condoms are off, the religion doesn’t matter — you’re going to have a lot of babies. The only difference is, how early do you get married? Religions tend to frown on premarital sex.
Fertility is most strongly correlated with child mortality IIRC. The more likely your kid is to die young, the more likely you are to have lots of kids. Very low child mortality in developed nations, so very low fertility.
Other than the hard work put in to scaring would-be parents. Indeed, the birth control pill put people in control, but it it is only since the "16 and Pregnant" movement, which campaigned on demonizing having children and stressed the importance of not being saddled by a child, that we've seen below replacement levels.
As a result, the youth of today in their prime rearing years look negatively upon having children, and by the time they "snap out of it" they are into their geriatric child birthing years and biologically don't have much time left, putting tight constraint on how many children can be birthed.
> That’s because women choose to study and work on their career in their 20s
Trouble is that those who choose to have children in their 20s have to face the scorn of society. Unless you are strong-willed, you have little choice but to study and work on your career, even if children is what you truly want.
Drawing an equivalence between these two is like saying a school system that punishes mistakes with physical abuse as a matter of policy to make a smarter population is identical, morally speaking to society at large, as a school system that just rewards good and hard work as a matter of policy to make a smarter population.
It makes no sense. I can't believe anyone could actually believe rewarding parents who have demonstrated a commitment to rearing a child well is identical to enforcing undesirables not have children.
I think you could also make an argument in reverse here as well. An increasingly large chunk of Western advertising is actively seeking to push values like contravening said genetic proclivities, yet it seems to have had little to no impact on what people find attractive. That's even more telling as obesity is rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception.
[1] Historically, horrible things happened in the name of eugenics. So did in the name of medicine. Does it mean that we should forgo medicine? No.
Nobody is qualified to state whether another human being should be allowed to live on the basis of 'faults' in their person.
It is a totalitarian-authoritarian dogma that must die.
Eu-genics is literally good-birth. We already do a lot of things which are de facto eugenics (e.g. choice of mating partners, prenatal screening, good diet, social actions to reduce alcohol consumptions among women) are 100% eugenics. And most people consider them beneficial.
You are attempting to equivocate heinous racist ideology with 'natural cause'.
This is a reverse straw man argument [0]. You present your position as something easy to defend (good birth, choice of mates, good diet, etc.), even though some parts of it (forced sterilizations, genocide, etc.) are difficult or impossible to defend.
It is like saying that if I one is in favor of medicine, they are in favor of the human vivisection and lobotomy. We can (and often - need to be) selective.
I don’t argue for every kind if eugenics. Yes, a lot of it were atrocious. And I am against that as well. Yet, I guess you are in favor of things we already do (mentioned in my previous comment).
So, I don't use the word eugenics on its own. UNLESS someone says, "oh, this is eugenics" - as a catch-all argument against a thing. For example, the Polish government banned abortions in most cases, including serious fetal defects. It used to be one of a few exceptions, among the mother's health or life being in immediate danger. The government phrased it as "a ban on eugenic abortions". Yes, by all means, these abortions are eugenic - so to argue otherwise would be dishonest. Yet, this is one of the cases where the majority of the population (even in a religiously conservative country such as Poland) would be in favor.
Here's a definition from a commonly cited online dictionary of American English:
> eugenics
> : the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population's genetic composition
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics#dictiona...
Here's another definition from the Oxford Dictionary of English Third Edition:
> eugenics | juːˈdʒɛnɪks |
> plural noun [treated as singular]
> the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Developed largely by Sir Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, eugenics was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups.