Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my ninety fifth episode. In this episode I want to talk about eugenics. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. The earliest reference to this practice can be found in Plato’s Republic, which dates back approximately 2,400 years. The actual term eugenics was coined by British scholar Sir Francis Galton in 1883. It’s worth noting that Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin. Eugenics was widely embraced in America during the turn of the twentieth century. Organizations like the Race Betterment Foundation, the American Breeder’s Association, and the Eugenics Record Office aspired to prevent the reproduction of individuals they determined to be genetically unfit. This included people with epilepsy, cognitive disorders, immigrants, minorities, and the poor. The obvious problem with this early form of American eugenics is that the parameters for determining fitness were established on racism, economics, and social views – not on genetic science.
Most Christians would recoil at the concept of eugenics and condemn it as being strictly unbiblical. They are correct in the final analysis – but it’s worth trying to figure out why they are correct and it’s also worth trying to see if there is anything in eugenics worthy of consideration. The main argument of those who support eugenics is the claim that it can prevent unnecessary suffering and social ills by controlling the characteristics of the population. The problem is it never actually does this when it’s deployed. Like Marxism, eugenics is a variant of human engineering to produce a utopia – or perfect society. And like Marxism, it fails to account for the fact that corrupt individuals are fundamentally incapable of producing such societies. Both Marxism and eugenics are famously difficult to argue against because promoters immediately recourse to saying: Well, you must not care about poverty, or, you must not care about disease. Then when you reference multiple historical precedents of 100% rate of failure, advocates declare that these failures weren’t genuine Marxism or genuine eugenics. They claim that if those historical people had been like us, then the experiment would have worked. The flawed reasoning here is apparent, but like all points of disagreement I’m going to do my best to see things from their perspective.
First we need to lay out the most solid position for eugenics that we can and then show why it is still not tenable. We should also do what we can to provide alternative solutions to the problems eugenics seeks to solve. I think the most prominent arguments for eugenics can be reduced to four major categories: the financial cost, the human cost, the societal cost, and the environmental cost.
Let’s begin with the financial cost. The United States government spends anywhere from 80-180 billion dollars each year on the prison system. The cost of welfare is estimated to be 1.1 trillion dollars annually. It’s worth noting that this figure is often disputed – but the split is supposed to be 650 billion dollars for Medicaid and 467 billion dollars on other social programs. Advocates for eugenics claim that these spending obligations could be greatly reduced if unfit people were prevented from reproducing. So we could limit the production of individuals who are net negatives on society and use the extra capital to further our advancement in science and technology. This combination of reducing the negatives and increasing the positives would allow us to engineer progress faster than we would otherwise be able to.
Next is the human cost. Let’s look at 5 common genetic disorders: Down Syndrome, Thalassemia, Cystic Fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, and Sickle Cell Anemia. Down Syndrome occurs when an individual has a full or partial extra copy of chromosome 21. People born with Down Syndrome have cognitive delays that result in mild to moderate issues with thinking, reasoning, and understanding. Thalassemia is a hereditary genetic condition that limits the amount of hemoglobin an individual can naturally produce. People with this condition suffer severe anemia and require regular blood transfusions as well as chelation therapy. Cystic Fibrosis is a condition that causes individuals to produce mucus that inhibits their respiratory, digestive, and reproductive systems. Patients suffering Cystic Fibrosis have a median survival age of 33 years. Early-onset Tay-Sachs disease gradually destroys the nervous system usually resulting in death by age 5. Late-onset Tay-Sachs disease causes a manageable level of diminished cognitive ability. Sickle Cell Anemia causes red blood cells to change from their normal donut shape to a sickle shape. Sickle cells clump together causing severe pain, infections, organ damage, and acute respiratory syndrome. Advocates for eugenics suggest that proper application could successfully eradicate all of these conditions.
Next is the societal cost. Proponents of eugenics claim that individuals who have a family history of violence and criminal behavior are likely to become offenders themselves. While the data does suggest that individuals who come from dysfunctional families are at higher risk for criminal behavior – it’s not clear whether these effects are natural or circumstantial. On average, there are 2.5 million burglaries, 435,000 sexual assaults, and 16,000 murders each year in the United States. If aggressive personality traits and proclivities for deviant behavior are genetic, then eugenicists could significantly minimize the amount of violent crime and thus produce a more stable society.
Finally let’s consider the environmental cost. The majority of scientists agree that human-caused climate change is resulting in increased global temperatures, glacial retreat, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and extreme weather events. The genetic problems we already discussed work together to put quite a strain on the environment. This is because people suffering from abject poverty or other serious problems are far less likely to care about issues like global warming or pollution. While the global population is projected to peak at 9 billion, environmentalists maintain that one of the most efficient ways of restoring the natural world is by controlling the number of people who live in it. With the proper application of eugenics, advocates claim that many if not all of these environmental problems could be solved or greatly relieved.
Okay so that’s my attempt at making the best case I can in support of eugenics. Any of you who have experience in steel manning a position you disagree with know how difficult that is. But there are two reasons why you should still try to do it if you find yourself in an argument. First is that it allows your opponent to see that you understand where they are coming from and are not trying to misrepresent what they believe. This is highly effective in debates as well as in intimate relationships. Your ability to persuade or communicate with a person is basically nullified if you start the conversation by attacking them and failing to take them seriously. The second reason you should steel man your opponents is because you might be wrong about some things. Even if your conclusions are correct, it’s probable that the person who is wrong still has something to teach you. You’ll never be able to make your own arguments stronger if you continuously straw man the opposition and fail to contend with what they actually believe.
Now that I’ve explored what the eugenicists believe, it’s time for me to lay out my own perspective. I mentioned earlier that America dabbled in eugenics at the turn of the century. It turns out that these efforts would dramatically increase as the years rolled on. Throughout the twentieth century, state-operated psychiatric wards sterilized thousands of their patients by claiming to protect society from the progeny of individuals who suffered mental illness. Thirty three states passed legislation that allowed involuntary sterilization of any person law makers determined unworthy to reproduce. Victims of forced sterilization often included handicapped people, minorities, women in Puerto Rico, and Native Americans. In some cases, health care was withheld from children until their mothers agreed to undergo sterilization procedures.
But the practice of eugenics in America is not what shocked the world into sobriety regarding the matter – for that we look to Nazi Germany. Interestingly, Hitler’s obsession with creating an Aryan master-race was at least in part inspired by American eugenics. He mentioned it in his book, Mein Kampf. Hitler and his followers regarded non-Aryans as inferior and believed that Germany was justified in committing genocide if it meant maintaining the purity of their genetic pool. In 1933, the Nazis ratified the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring which resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations. By 1940, Hitler’s derangement caused the slippery slope to begin including Germans themselves. Those who were blind, deaf, or otherwise mentally or physically disabled were sent to the gas chambers.
The Nazi mania for eugenics wasn’t limited to genocide. In the darkest corners of Auschwitz lurked a man named Dr. Josef Mengele. Mengele was an SS doctor who performed a battery of experiments on prisoners. Twins were his favorite because he thought that any differences could be isolated to environment and not genetics. He assembled hundreds of pairs of twins. His experiments included injecting one twin with diseased substances then monitoring the effects. When that twin died, he executed the other one by injecting chloroform to the heart and then he would dissect both of them. He also applied clamps to children’s limbs so that he could induce gangrene. Some patients had dye injected into their eyes in an effort to turn them blue. Others were given spinal taps and surgeries without anaesthesia. Most of his patients couldn’t survive the gruesome operations, and Mengele earned the nickname Angel of Death.
The horrific nature of the eugenics programs in Nazi Germany brought the world to a standstill on the topic. Suddenly everyone could see the nightmare this path inevitably ended in. So eugenics lost its momentum throughout most of the developed world – until recently. The name for eugenics has changed to human genetic engineering. I want to make the case that not all of it is bad, although some of it is very bad. The areas of human genetic engineering that I support include altering genetic code to prevent and cure diseases. So if you know that your baby is going to be born with a genetic disorder – I see nothing wrong with curing that baby by way of human gene therapy. I view this practice as no different than getting a flu vaccination or any other form of preventative or restorative care. For those who suggest gene therapy is like playing God, I would return by saying that plights like genetic disorders and cancers are not part of God’s perfect created order – rather they are consequences of the Fall – which we are explicitly charged with resisting and relieving.
Another form of eugenics that I support is contraception. Most people don’t think of contraception as part of eugenics but I believe it falls under the umbrella technically. There are many Christians who do not support contraception – they cite Genesis where God commands humanity to be fruitful and multiply, as well as Psalm 127 which says children are a gift from God. I don’t think these references provide stable ground though, because Proverbs 18 says a wife is a gift from God and yet 1 Corinthians 7 says it is fine if you remain single. So just because children are a gift from God does not mean that you are required to have them. The quote from Genesis telling humanity to be fruitful and multiply also includes a command to be wise stewards over the creation. Part of being a wise steward is knowing how many children you can handle and picking a wise time to have them. That’s my reasoning in support of contraception.
Now let’s look at a couple forms of eugenics that I find reprehensible. The first and most obvious is abortion. Iceland has nearly eradicated Down Syndrome in their country by way of abortion. Nearly 100% of women who received prenatal screening tests that came back positive for Down Syndrome terminated the pregnancy. In the U.S., Planned Parenthood has focused its abortion services on young women, low-income women, and women of color. You can call this coincidence if you want, but Planned Parenthood’s founder – Margaret Sanger – wrote about how she was against the reckless breeding of the unfit and how she desired a race of human thoroughbreds. She wrote these things in the 1920s when eugenics was on the rise in the United States – but does her legacy live on today?
You might say: Well, isn’t it better to abort a person with disorders than to let them live with the struggle? I have two things to say to that. The first is that everyone who has ever lived, including you, is struggling. Life is brutal and hard – there’s no correcting that with selective breeding. The second thing is that just because we find something to be undesirable doesn’t mean God views it that way. Listen to John chapter 9 when Jesus and His followers come across a blind man:
9 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.
That’s bona fide Scriptural proof that God uses birth defects to bring glory to Himself. If you think I’m being stupid by saying that, listen to this list of people who were born with birth defects or predispositions to genetic disorder: Elizabeth Taylor, Stephen Hawking, Agatha Christie, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Leonardo Da Vinci, James Madison, Charles Dickens, Socrates, Aristotle, Martin Luther, Michelangelo, Theodore Roosevelt, General George Patton, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell. Truthfully I could go on and on. The fact is that sometimes it is the person’s disability that inspires them to work so hard and to contribute so much to the world. As Jesus said, the works of God might be displayed in them. If the eugenicists had their way of it – none of these people would have been deemed fit to live.
The second form of eugenics I oppose is selective reproduction. Selective reproduction is when the authorities only permit individuals who meet their minimum requirement of fitness to reproduce. There’s two major problems with selective reproduction. The first is that the parameters for fitness are inevitably corrupted by individuals who have designs on power. The censoring of hate speech suffers from this same dilemma. Who is going to define hate speech? Who is going to define which characteristics are desirable for reproduction? The answer is the people who you would least want to define them. The individuals who ascend to power in authoritarian regimes like these tend to have psychopathic and narcissistic personality constructs. So if you’re a political inconvenience to the leader and you happen to have red hair, then red hair ends up on the list of undesirable characteristics to be eradicated.
The second major problem with selective reproduction is the assumption that a person’s value is bound to characteristics like intelligence, ethnicity, or physical health. We already went over a list of names of individuals whose physical health was sub-optimal and yet they made monumental contributions to society. Intelligence is important for the advancement of society, but it can’t get very far without other vital human characteristics. For example, characteristics like compassion, generosity, and work ethic have little if anything to do with intelligence. You might be a world-class thinker, but you can’t escape the wilderness long enough to use your mind without the factories, power plants, and road crews putting in extra hours to bring you electricity, automobiles, and infrastructure. Everything is connected and the intellectuals as well as the artists are very much dependent on the strong backs of the working class.
So where does our value come from? God greatly values all life, but He especially values human life because human beings carry with them a spark of divinity that is made in the likeness of God Himself. Listen to Jesus explain how much God values life in Matthew 10:29-31:
29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?[i] And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.
These verses show us that even animals which we commonly disregard are still greatly valued by God. Not one creature on this earth passes away without God knowing it. I suspect that God loves animal life even more than we do – and yet He loves us still more than He loves His creation. The value of our lives does not originate in us – it originates in God. This idea is at the heart of our justice system which is why we afford even the most heinous criminals due process. If we begin to divorce the value of human life from that spark of divinity and instead associate it with things like skin color, intelligence, or creative talent, then we are walking the same road that ends at the eugenics lab in Auschwitz.
Classical eugenics and some forms of human genetic engineering would aim for us to cull the weak out of our population. But God commands us to do the opposite. God commands us to defend the cause of widows and orphans and to defend the weak. In Matthew chapter 25 Jesus says that whatever you do to the least of human beings – you do to God Himself. So instead of dismissing and trying to eradicate individuals who fail to fit our desired mode of being – we should help them and influence them. Perhaps we could put an end to the generational propagation of poverty and malfeasance if we taught individuals how to build effective families and helped them to do so. I see this helping process as one of the fundamental purposes of the church. Help must be voluntary and not coerced by governments because it it’s not voluntary then there is no love in it. God is love and so if there is no love in it then God’s not in it. If God’s not in it, it’s doomed to fail.
Any human attempt at utopia – whether it’s the engineering of eugenics or the social constructions of Marxism – carries with it the massively arrogant assumption that we ourselves understand the grand narrative of life and why we are here. For us to decide which lives are valuable is for us to make declarations of certainty about a future we cannot see and know nothing about. Where will you be tomorrow? Perhaps you’ll be where you think you’ll be. Or perhaps you’ll get hit by a bus. You just don’t know. In the same way, you don’t know whether that baby is going to grow up to become a criminal or to become a leader who saves the entire species. Our job isn’t to pretend like we know who is going to do what, our job is to have faith in Him who does know.
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