NEWS FEATURE: Biotechnology Advances Lead Some Ethicists to See `Free Market’ Eugenics

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Encouraging the “breeding” of the “fittest” babies became discredited by the crimes of Nazi Germany. Yet eugenics is resurfacing today in the advances of biotechnology, say some ethicists and theologians. The eugenics of the past originated with government, says Ted Peters, president of Pacific Lutheran Seminary and a researcher […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Encouraging the “breeding” of the “fittest” babies became discredited by the crimes of Nazi Germany. Yet eugenics is resurfacing today in the advances of biotechnology, say some ethicists and theologians.

The eugenics of the past originated with government, says Ted Peters, president of Pacific Lutheran Seminary and a researcher at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. “We’re going to see free market eugenics. Families are going to plan the genetic makeup of their children.”


Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin’s, coined the term “eugenics” in 1886. His idea was to “improve the human race through better breeding,” says Christine Rosen, author of “Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement” (Oxford University Press). To achieve this goal, Galton and other adherents of eugenics encouraged “the production of the fittest specimens,” she says.

The urge to produce “the fittest” is still with us, say some bioethicists. Now parents have begun to use genetic screening and engineering to keep their children free from diseases, Peters says.

He cites the use of amniocentesis _ the procedure used to predict whether a baby will have Down syndrome _ as one example of this.

But in the near future, he says, biotechnology will permit parents to move beyond “therapy” _ preventing or treating disease. “Designer babies” could be on the horizon within five years, Peters says.

This technology, which Peters and other bioethicists consider to be “enhancement” rather than “therapy,” would allow parents to use genetic selection and modification to enhance traits of their children such as intelligence and musical ability. This could be Garrison Keillor’s “better than average” Lake Wobegone children, run amuck, Peters says.

“Only the wealthy could afford it. A `gene-rich’ class could develop,” he says.

Gilbert Meilaender, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, says that though the biotechnology of the present is different from that of Galton’s time, it doesn’t make the resurfacing of eugenics any less significant or troubling. Some of the new biotechnologies “invite us to think of ourselves as the makers rather than the begetters of our children,” says Meilaender, a theologian at Valparaiso University. This makes parents think of their offspring as “products” _ to view themselves in a God-like role, he says.

Meilaender is sympathetic to the desire of parents to protect the health and improve the lives of their children. But “we must ask whether the goal justifies the means,” he says.


Contrary to popular perception, eugenics didn’t begin in Nazi Germany, Rosen says. The eugenics movement flourished in the United States from the early years of the 20th century through the 1930s, she says. Despite the conflict that often exists between science and religion, “eugenics flourished in the liberal Protestant, Catholic and Jewish mainstream,” Rosen says.

A significant number of clergy preached sermons praising eugenics, joined eugenics societies and supported eugenics legislation, she says. The Rev. Endecott Osgood of Minneapolis was representative of the clergy who supported eugenics, Rosen says. In a Mother’s Day sermon in 1926, Osgood told his congregation at St. Mark’s Church, “We see that the less fit members of society seem to breed fastest and that the right types are less prolific.”

Eugenicists supported efforts to restrict immigration from countries “whose citizens might pollute the American melting pot” and “compulsory state sterilization laws,” Rosen says.

The early 20th century was a time of vast social upheaval in the United States, she says. “There was poverty, overcrowding and disease in the cities.”

From the present vantage point, it’s hard to understand why clergy who were compassionate and championed social justice supported eugenics, Rosen says. But science (and eugenics in particular) offered religious leaders a solution to these complex social problems, she says.

More than 30 states passed sterilization laws between 1907 and the 1970s, says Paul Lombardo, a historian at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia.


During this time, more than 60,000 people were involuntarily sterilized, he says. Since 2001, several states, including Virginia, California, North Carolina, South Carolina and Oregon, have apologized for the sterilizations and the human rights abuses of the eugenics movement, he says.

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“Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” an exhibit on display at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., through Oct. 16, 2005, shows how Nazi Germany took the ideas of eugenics to excess.

“More than 400,000 sterilizations were recorded in Nazi Germany,” says exhibition curator Susan Bachrach. The Nazi vision of eugenics expanded to include murder, she says. Between 1939 and 1945 some 200,000 people with mental and physical disabilities were killed under Nazi “euthanasia” programs, Bachrach says. There were major differences in the ways in which eugenics flourished in the United States and under the Nazis, she says.

“In the United States, individual states passed sterilization laws,” Bachrach says. In Nazi Germany, the national government passed sterilization laws, and eugenics “was part of a much larger population policy.”

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Bioethicists and theologians today aren’t comparing the United States to Nazi Germany. But they say the specter of eugenics hovers over our culture.

Unlike the early 20th century, religious leaders aren’t playing a key role in bioethics debates today, Rosen says. “I’d like to see them in the debates,” she says. “Not to impose a theocratic view” on science, but because religious leaders of all faiths would bring a valuable moral perspective to the discussion.


“Nobody in religious groups is thinking about eugenics now,” Peters says. But it will be on their radar screen when people in church pews begin asking clergy about the ethical and theological implications of advances in biotechnology, he says.

DEA/PH END RNS

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