We’re All Eugenicists Now, Part II

The question of negative eugenics.

This video is available on Rumble, Bitchute, Odysee, Telegram, and X.

Last week, I talked about the growing acceptance of what is called “liberal eugenics.” That’s when parents use various methods to improve the genetic chances for their children. An obvious example is the care with which infertile couples choose sperm or egg donors. Parents know traits are heritable, so they want a lot of information, including height, eye-color, race, education, etc.

Here’s a typical teaser sperm donor profile, including a childhood photo.

Establish an account and you get more photos and a lot more information, even profiles of grandparents.

If you want donor eggs, this website explains that women who donate usually get $5 to $10 thousand, but Ivy League graduates may get $20 to $50,000, or more.

People pay for what they think is better quality.

Genes matter. And if you care about emphasizing the good and avoiding the bad, like it or not, you’re a eugenicist. Part of what gives eugenics a bad name is the idea of government making decisions about reproduction. But it already does.

Brother/sister sexual intercourse is a crime in every American state—up to life in prison in some places—because inbreeding is bad. So that’s coerced eugenics. The government has an interest in preventing certain genetic outcomes. However, I know of no ban on intercourse between non-related people with dangerous genetic conditions, nor is there any limit on sex between low-IQ people, so long as both are thought to be capable of giving consent.

In the 20th century, many countries forcibly sterilized people to prevent deterioration of the nation’s population. In 1907, Indiana was the first American state to do so. Its sterilization law was “to prevent the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.”

The US Supreme Court found these laws constitutional in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck, her mother, and her daughter were all considered feebleminded.

It was an eight-to-one decision, and Oliver Wendel Holmes wrote the ruling:

“It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

That case, by the way, has never been overturned.

By 1931, 30 American states had eugenic sterilization laws. Nine European countries passed them, too, as did Canada, Mexico, Korea, China, and Australia. Sweden didn’t stop compulsory sterilization until 1976, and Japan didn’t repeal its eugenic sterilization law until 1996.

We are now expected to think these laws were barbaric. Many people associate them with the Holocaust. However, as this excellent article explains, the Nazis’ Jewish policy was entirely separate from eugenics, which was meant to improve Aryan Germans.

Intelligence evolved in humans, because it helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, but in Western countries today, smart people generally have fewer children than stupid people. This 2018 article about “parental general cognitive ability and number of offspring” found a negative correlation of 0.11 between parents’ IQ and family size. This works out to a decrease of a little over a half point of average IQ per generation.

There are stronger negative correlations for blacks and Hispanics than for whites, and the correlation is increasing as time goes on.

This is especially tragic for black women. They are twice as likely as black men to get college degrees, and many never find a suitable husband.

And even small declines in average IQ are associated with substantial rises in undesirable outcomes, such as poverty, crime, illegitimacy, etc.

Is this something we should care about or not? What’s your reaction to this headline: “Tennessee’s deadbeat dads: The three men who have fathered 78 children with 46 different women . . . and they’re not paying child support to any of them.”

Desmond Hatchett had 30 children with 11 different women.

“I had four kids in the same year,” he says. “Twice.”

If Dad can’t be made to pay child support, you do, and there is no legal way to prevent these people from having more children. Should there be?

I suspect that at the privacy of the voting booth, a lot of Americans would vote to require woman on welfare to take implantable contraceptives—and might even require vasectomies for men who had more than a certain number of children they don’t support. It’s not just a question of paying the bills. How much will the 78 children in that article contribute to society?

In the 1970s, William Shockley, who invented the transistor, proposed what he called the “voluntary sterilization bonus plan.” It would offer people $1,000 per IQ point below the average of 100, in exchange for voluntary sterilization.

A person with an IQ of 90—10 points below average—would have got $10,000—or 70,000 in today’s dollars. Some people might say that people with low IQs can’t be trusted to make decisions like that. Well, they vote.

Here is what appears to be a crowd-funded site to support voluntary sterilization.

Childfree by Choice has hundreds of profiles of people who don’t want to have children but can’t afford the procedure. You can make a general contribution to the site or choose specific people to help on the road to childlessness.

The world is getting more complicated, not simpler. Jobs that below-average people used to do are automated. The very least society should do is promote an understanding of the social and genetic consequences of child-bearing rather than pretend there aren’t any.

Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous Huxley, was the first director of UNESCO, and he wrote its declaration of purpose and philosophy. He said it was “important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.” He hoped there would someday be “radical eugenic policies.”

Too many people brush aside questions like these with nonsense like “all life is equally valuable.”

It’s not. Hillary Clinton gets Secret Service protection because the US government says her life is more valuable than yours or mine.

Our genetic future matters. I care about who will be alive 100 years from now – 500 years from now.

And don’t forget: It’s not up to us alone. The Chinese aren’t squeamish about improving people—assuming they can get them to have babies. The Beijing Genomics Institute or BGI is hard at work trying to find the genes that code for intelligence and won’t hesitate to use embryo screening for higher IQs.

What you just saw were rows and rows of sequencers at BGI’s China National Genebank.

Here are some of its specialists: Global Talent Recruitment, Precision Health, Bio-intelligence, Bio-informatics, Super Cells.

We have a choice. Degenerate or improve. Whatever we do, some people won’t be leaving things to chance.