The Return of Eugenics?

May 7, 2020

In this short extract from the forthcoming Christianity and the New Eugenics, Calum MacKellar unpacks why Christians should be concerned about the return of some ideas...

It was through the success of the breeding of farm animals, and the suggestion that human beings should not be considered differently from other animals, that modern eugenic ideas were developed. These became relatively popular at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. A number of prominent figures supported eugenic selection, including Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), the wartime prime minister of the UK, who was openly disappointed, on the grounds of civil liberties, when Britain resisted positive eugenic action. In 1910 Churchill wrote to the then prime minister Herbert Asquith (1852–1928) to express his support for a bill that proposed to introduce a compulsory sterilization programme in Britain, indicating:

The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate . . . I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.5

However, despite the many benefits eugenic proposals seemed to promise humanity, eugenics remained on the margins of serious scientific disciplines because a number of subjective elements were believed to be at the centre of many of its proposals. These included positions that could lead to a form of discrimination between certain categories of individuals – something that eventually culminated in the atrocities of Nazi Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Because of these crimes, eugenic proposals were then condemned as coercive, restrictive or genocidal after the Second World War, resulting in many societies completely rejecting any resemblance to such policies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the old eugenic dreams are beginning to resurface, with an increasing number of new selective reproductive procedures being developed. For example, children are already being born who have been selected for good genetic endowments through careful screening programmes of embryos, sperm and eggs. Some scientists have even predicted that in the near future it will become common for parents to select specific characteristics in their offspring. Thus, a new eugenic impetus has begun in society, even though many still believe that past eugenic activities were unacceptable. The Danish ethicist Lene Koch, in 2009, put it well:

Today eugenics is something few would want to see realised, but  we should appreciate that it was originally a focus of a widely held hope for a better and healthier population. The definition of ‘better and healthier’ may no longer embrace the elimination of socially, morally, and genetically undesirable elements as defined by the early eugenicists, but the hope for better health still underpins  the rationale for genetic applications.

This is also something that American scientist James Watson, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), developed when he argued in 1995 that:

Our growing ability to unscramble human genetic destinies will  increasingly have an impact on how humans view themselves  and justify their behaviour toward others. Our children will more be seen not as expressions of God’s will, but as the results of the  uncontrollable throw of genetic dice that do not always give us  the results we want. At the same time, we will increasingly have the power, through prenatal diagnosis to spot the good throws and to consider discarding through abortion the bad ones. But to so proceed flies in the face of the long-cherished idea that all human life is sacred and intrinsically worthwhile. So there is bound to be deep conflict between those persons who want to maintain revered values of the past and those individuals who wish to have their moral values reflect the world as now revealed by observations and experiments of modern science. In particular, we are increasingly going to be accused of unwisely ‘playing God’ when we use genetics to improve the quality of either current or future human life.

In this context Christians need to consider carefully whether such eugenic developments should be welcomed, rejected or considered neutral. For example, they will need to ask whether it would be acceptable, from a Christian perspective, to choose to have only healthy children and, if so, what arguments should be used. They would also have to examine, as a matter of urgency, the potential advantages as well as the risks for society of such choices. In 1922 the English Christian writer and philosopher Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874–1936), who was opposed to eugenic ideology, published his prescient Eugenics and Other Evils, where he indicated:

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late…

Christianity and the New Eugenics: Should We Choose to have only healthy or enhanced children? is one of IVP's May 2020 releases and publishes on the 20th of May. You can order your copy in ebook or paperback now!