Not really any more than “Mao agreed with you about collective farms” should be.
Hitler’s mass murders were inseperable from his beliefs in eugenics, correct. That doesn’t mean that the converse is true: that is to say, it doesn’t mean that eugenics (in the most purely general sense of “desiring to exert conscious control of the future genetic makeup of the human species”) has to end up with mass murders. There are lots of ways to accomplish eugenic ends without mass murder and even without forced sterilization. Paying people to have or not to have children is one route, regulating who can marry or reproduce with each other is another (not that I’d support that either), and most recently gene editing makes whole new methods of controlling human genetics possible.
There are many reasons; biological, physiological, and social, that help explain why body weights that are below or above average impact negatively on reproductive success (not just fertility).
If they were responsible you wouldn’t be worried about them irresponsibly fathering children, now would you? You’re expecting responsible research from people you categorize as irresponsible, is that really ethical?
So… 50/50 reversal chances at best within 3 years of vasectomy? I don’t consider that good odds. And 10 years out my statement “most are not reversible” is backed up by your cite, because 30% success is pretty poor.
I expect them to make irresponsible decisions, no matter what you or I or society does. Allowing them to make irresponsible decisions that are more productive towards moving towards the goals we are looking for (and keep in mind, I do not feel we have a population problem, and have no reason to advocate for mass sterilization, forced or voluntary) is better then encouraging them to make irresponsible decisions that move us away from those goals.
I was thinking it was a bit better than that when I first made my counter proposal to the OP’s proposal of mass sterilizations of undesirables, so a bit of responsible research disabused me of that.
It did say better than 50%. And I did acknowledge that the odds went down over time, which is why I said “but goes on to say…”
Point is, if we desire to limit our population, there are ways of doing so that are not quite so oppressive and invasive as the OP’s idea.
UHC countries tend to provide those for everybody, although which exact services are covered will vary from country to country. The cost to the individual depends on their income bracket, inasmuch as the tax or fee paid for the UHC system depends on it.
I will accept as granted that Hitler was a fan of Eugenics. It was a core idea of his.
He was also a fan of tanks and advanced military weapons. Also a core idea of his.
We all agree that tanks and advanced military weapons are a good idea. Attacking your enemies before they can properly mobilize are good military strategies. (not every military decision made by hitler was a bad one)
So can’t we at least discuss whether Eugenics might be a good idea or not without bringing Hitler into it?
I mean, the basic premise of Eugenics - that traits that cause serious flaws in people are heritable, thus those who carry the genes shouldn’t have children - is correct. I mean correct in terms of :
World A, no restriction on kids, flawed people reproduce and make more flawed people.
World B, restrictions, less flawed people, healthier overall population.
You can’t be intellectually honest and somehow claim that world A is better. The problem with Eugenics isn’t the basic premise, it’s that in practice, government institutions are themselves hugely flawed and have done some really terrible stuff in the past, and probably would fuck up eugenics if they had that power today. More than fuck up - essentially bureaucrats would now have the ability to cause the people they don’t like to be sterilized.
So, yeah, I’m not voting for implementation of Eugenics, either, but I’m at least honest that the basic premise is sensible.
The thing is, parents (sane ones, at least) prefer not to produce flawed kids. Of course, they’ll also take care of their problem children, but given a choice they’re going to choose “healthy” and “functional”.
So… educate parents. There are people with inheritable problems who choose not to reproduce biologically because they don’t want to burden others with their problem(s). We now have technologies that allow people with inheritable problems to have children that don’t have those problems although some of those are a bit costly (pre-implantation genetic screening, for example). Even a lot of messed up people recognize basic things like pregnant women need good food, and some foods in our society are supplemented routinely to prevent dietary problems that lead to birth defects. We should make birth control available to all at low or no cost.
There are a lot of ways to encourage good reproduction without resorting to coercion. More carrot, less stick.
The problem is NOT ALL BIRTH DEFECTS ARE GENETIC. There are many “flaws” that are NOT based on genetic inheritance.
My husband was sterilized due to a birth defect that is NOT GENETIC. It’s linked to poor diet in pregnant women and indeed his mother was both underweight and malnourished at the time of his conception and throughout her pregnancy. His problem might have been avoided with three nutritious, square meals a day for his mom and indeed since the government has started supplementing many foods and through programs like WIC and SNAP the incidence of that birth defect has gone down. Sterilizing people didn’t decrease the problem, proper diet did.
The problem historically with eugenics in practice is the tendency to blame ALL problems on genes when a significant number of them are environmental in origin. So all manner of people with nutrition-based birth defects, blindness, deafness, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and so forth were sterilized, sometimes without their knowledge much less consent. This level of ignorance is still present today and I still hear it in people arguing for eugenic measures. That is why we can not have “eugenics laws” because they would replicate the wrongs of the past.
Yes, I get it - it’s easier to strap a man down to a table and snip his sperm-tubes than to change society so we have fewer uneducated, unemployed, irresponsible low-lives. That doesn’t make it the right answer. Apparently there are some people more willing to strap a woman to a gurney and dig out her ovaries without asking than to provide birth control to the poor, which line of reasoning I can’t follow.
That is providing birth control to the poor. But, instead of letting the promiscuous woman get away with her behavior using simple and non-invasive forms of temporary birth control, they need to make sure the punishment for her sinful behavior is made in advance.
What promiscuous woman? A lot of unwanted sterilizations were done on women who weren’t promiscuous at all, just not to the sterilizer’s liking. A lot of women who’ve had lots of kids, or a kid at a horribly-inconvenient time, those kids were the husband’s. Is having sex with your husband now considered promiscuous behavior?
We already have a system to discard unwanted babies. heck there’s even money in it. We can harvest their stem cells and then flush em down the toilet. The only social concern is that we use a 1.6 gallon toilet.
What would be helpful is to stop the systematic program of breeding poor people. go back to the days where we took children away from parents who couldn’t afford them instead of paying them to teach generational poverty.
But go back and look at the OP: the subject is fundamentally not about eugenics (specific trait selection/rejection) but economics. What the OP suggests does not involve making society better by cutting off genetically messed-up people from breeding; rather, it seeks to reduce overcrowding by cutting off irresponsible people.
Classic eugenics has not really been shown to work, in the sense of making society better. I recall that in the '70s and '80s, the Germans were winning quite a lot of Olympic medals, but they were not particularly smarter or more well behaved, on average, than any other society. Einstein did not come from especially remarkable parents, and Mao Tsedong did not spawn especially remarkable offspring.
Normal people can have unusual children (great or messed up) and unusual people can have normal children (two midgets often have a full-size child). Genetics is a major crapshoot that is very difficult to improve upon – the kinds of results that selective animal breeding gives us involve the kind of culling that most societies would find deplorable.
I think that our population has over-run the sustainability of the planet’s ecosystem, but how to deal with that problem in a fair, effective and humane way is beyond me. It is looking like the ecosystem may well end up resolving it for us.
East German Olympic athletes, especially the medalists, married each other in numbers that didn’t seem to exist in nature, and sure enough, they didn’t; the marriages were arranged by the East German government in an attempt to produce future generations of super-athletes. After the Berlin Wall fell, the vast majority of those marriages were dissolved; most were childless (with each other, anyway; many of them had children with the person they loved but continued to live with their “spouse”) and not a small number were never even consummated.
My sister is a foster mother and some of the children who have come through her house often make me think that forced sterilization wouldn’t be a bad program and most of the kids have multiple siblings. I’m in agreement that we can’t have the government decide that some people must be sterilized but what about the idea of making sterilization a punishment for a crime against one’s children? The punishment can only be given after a trial by jury, just like any other major crime.
We take children away from their parents, usually without any kind of due process. We also put people in prison for life (after a trial). Is it that much different to sterilize someone instead (after a trial)?
Sterilizing criminals was a major feature of the early 20th Century eugenics movement and is tarred by the same brush. No, we can’t do that because it was done in the past in a really screwed up, abusive manner.