Eugenics has made a comeback, now under the shiny new term reprogenics.
The supporters promise that this time they'll be good. No breeding programs, no forced sterilization, just good old fashioned common sense about who is allowed to have how many children.
Let's take them at their word. These are people of good will and we've come a long way since the Nazis turned eugenics into a weapon of genocide. We live in a better, safer world, a world without people willing to use force to inflict their view of the world on innocents. Let's take a rational look at ethical reprogenics.
The point to breeding is to create a stable population, or one that grows at a sustainable rate. The point to controlled breeding is to ensure that following generations are healthier amd smarter than the ones that came before. A reprogenic community will consist of a number of adults (A), who agree to have a number of offspring (O) at least equal to A (O=A). This will maintain a set population level, but one of the tenets of reprogenics is that population increase is good so we're more likely looking at O=A+1 or O=A+10%, rounding that percentage up because the idea of a fractional child is a bit disgusting.
The adults of these communities need to be the right people, because one of the tenets of reprogenics is that genetic defects - Diabetes, allergies, behavioural disorders - are spreading rapidly through the current population (Never mind that most of the diseases reprogenics are supposed to prevent are environmental in origin. We're taking these people at face value, remember?). The adults chosen for breeding will be free of genes that contribute to disease such as diabetes (No Native Americans), sickle-cell anemia (No Africans), Tay-Sachs disease (No Ashkenazi Jews), and other impure bloodlines. These chosen breeders will be responsible for the creation of a number of new lives. In exchange for their labour and time spent raising these pureblood children they will be supported by their larger community, because raising A+10% kids is a lot of work.
In fact, all that work is the reason people in the advanced economies aren't having more kids right now. In an agrarian or poor labour-based society, children are a family asset. Even before they can work in the fields or workshop, they can keep house, maintain the family garden, watch over small livestock, and gather firewood. In an advanced economy children are a drain on the household resources, and people only have kids for sentimental reasons. As a result, our birthrates have dropped off and our populations are aging.
To overcome this drop in birth rates our chosen breeders are going to have to be full-time parents, and we're going to have to make it worth their while. A live-in nanny receives about CAD$58 000 a year, or a bit less than $5000 a month, but she doesn't actually have to bear the children. Surrogate mothers receive $28 000 to $45 000 per child. For simplicity's sake let's call it $86 000 per year/child, over the course of at least three years (A= At least two, but possibly much more if the breeding couple is required to cover for some people who choose not to breed). Three kids will cost $285 000, not including the high-tech genetic manipulation that reprogenics advocates claim puts reprogenics on a more rational basis than old-fashioned eugenics. Of course, mom isn't going to want to have these kids one-two-three after the other, so give her some time to recover between births. She's still raising the other kids while recovering, so call it $401 000 over the course of five years. Any stay-at-home dad helping with the kids will probably be paid less, maybe $3500 per month, for $210 000 over five years. For one selected couple to have three kids, our program costs $611 000 in five years. That's just paying the adults, it doesn't take into account the cost of food, clothes, and medical care for the kids.
If you're not personally willing to have enough kids to push our declining birthrate up, how much are you willing to pay for someone else to have kids? How about taxes? Are you willing to pay a population tax, for someone else to be a stay-at-home parent and raise the kids you don't want yourself? A basic program costs over $10 000 per month per breeding pair. How much disposable income do you have? Are you going to spend your vacation at home this year? How about for the next five years, or ten, or however long the program lasts? Multiple births (Twins, triplets) would spead the program up, but fertility treatments cost a fortune and the mother's health risks go up; She's going to want more money.
Bearing and raising children still costs a fortune, even with a rational social program to support the parents. Volunteers drop out of the program, taking their funds to Hawai'i for a nice vacation. Taxpayers complain to their Members of Parlaiment, or just start cheating (Even more) on their taxes. The program is falling apart and we haven't even looked at the social controversies involved in selecting the genetically pure, the right people, to have children. We've given them tax breaks, we're paying them, we're paying taxes to support the reprogenic community, and the right people still aren't having enough children. What's to be done?
One of the problems reprogenics is meant to solve is the growing population of people with genetic disorders (Never mind that there's no evidence that this problem is real. Everybody knows that the past was a better place, that our grandparents were better people). People with poor impulse control - Drug addicts, teenagers, thrillseekers, the just plain stupid - are still having more kids than the well-off.
The wrong people are still having too many children. We can fix that problem.
Other reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/bio-ethics/bibliographylombardo.c..
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbtdag/bioethics/writings/eugenics.html
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/un_sterile_past.h...
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