Eugenics Equals Murder and Death
India has discovered grisly evidence of what happens when eugenics consciousness takes hold. In this case (as in China), it is a belief that boys are better than girls. As a consequence, female infanticide and abortion based on sex is rampant in India.
Now, a mass grave of murdered girl infants and aborted fetuses has been found behind a hospital. From the story in the Times of London: "Police in central India have found 390 body parts from foetuses and newborn babies--thought to be unwanted girls--buried in the backyard of a Christian missionary hospital.
"Separately, the Government said that it was setting up a network of girls' homes--dubbed the 'cradle scheme'--in an effort to stop poor Indians from killing their daughters. Both announcements threw a spotlight on female infanticide and foeticide in India, where an estimated ten million baby girls have been killed by their parents in the past twenty years."
Ten million! This is a holocaust caused by the kind of laisez faire eugenics thinking that the new eugenicists and transhumanists seem to think will not be a problem, not being state sponsored and all of that. (The government of India is trying to fight these atrocities, apparently with little success.) But the problem isn't the sponsors. It is eugenics.
The warning signs are everywhere in large, blazing letters, if we will but heed. Either human life has ultimate value simply and merely because it is human (sanctity/equality of human life ethic) or the devalued become fodder for murder, exploitation, and oppression--perhaps even commoditization.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:43 PM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
Is any of this really a surprise ?
Though I find this part potentially very disturbing
"buried in the backyard of a Christian missionary hospital."
The strange part of all this is its short sightedness ?
What do people expect to happen in 50 years if they keep doing this ?
It isn't like the preference for a boy will be viable indefinitely. Eventually age old customs are going to be turned on their head because girls will be in short supply. Of course at that point I suspect you'll end up with even greater evils.
Jason:
"Eventually age old customs are going to be turned on their head because girls will be in short supply."
That's when the black market for illicit females will go on the rise - kidnapping and smuggling and selling girls and young women both for pleasure purposes and reproductive purposes. Only those with enough money will be able to have "wives," and most of those will be little more than slaves. The economy will turn upside down because the agricultural segment of society will suffer greatly from the inability to provide a bigger work force, and ag is what all economies are based on, no matter how much you think otherwise - how many "poor" countries are poor because they have no surplus of food? They don't have enough for themselves for the moment, let alone for later on. So, you ruin the economy, you ruin the livelihood of the country, and people start feeling expansional because they need more than they can provide for themselves... and things just go down hill until someone has to step in.
Or maybe they'll wise up by then. But I'm not putting money on it.
A couple of commenters over at the article suggested outlawing dowrys as a way to curb infanticide and sex-selection abortions.
It can't hurt to try.
Female infanticide is a centuries-old custom that has absolutely nothing to do with eugenics. A real eugenicist would be appalled at this, since it does nothing to improve the fitness of the gene pool. So pinning this on "eugenics consciousness" is ridiculous.
I will grant you that these societies could be much improved by an ethic that values individual human life more. However I think the solution will have to be in the form of valuing ADULT female lives more, ie by trying to eliminate the dowry customs and other factors that lead people to prefer boys to girls.
I consider it eugenic in the meaning of the term "good in birth," which in this case means boys over girls. And of course, the answer is to create a culture in which females are valued equally to males, through some of the suggestions mentioned and other ways as may be appropriate.
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