D
Doctors HATE them
She/they
- Nov 16, 2022
- 91
Something that's been bothering me for a while now is the way people say "that's eugenics" as a gotcha. Basically, I don't think people who can't care for kids shouldn't have them; this includes poor people. I feel that children should not be put through the trauma of poverty and that this is an effective way to mitigate it.
Every time I or someone else online shares this opinion, the comments/replies are full of people calling it eugenics and saying it's terrible to do that to people. I don't really understand that. These people say that it's better to focus on lifting poor people out of poverty and helping them with systems to allow them to have children regardless of economic status, but I don't think these are contradictory at all. What's stopping us from helping poor people, but not letting them have kids in the meantime. It will take a while to help every poor person, but it won't take long to pass a law that helps kids. Why not just pass a law banning having children below a certain income and then get to helping those people out of poverty?
I'd also like to address the idea that this would inevitably encompass race. I think that eugenics led to that in the past due to the extremely widespread racism and classism of the time. Those who developed the ideas of eugenics thought that poor people and minorities were filthy and unfit. I think that because this "new eugenics" (for lack of a better term) comes from a place of helping children, has temporariness written into it, and exists in a world that is less racist and classist (although racism and classism are still present everywhere, I don't think they are as strong or overt) that the switch to race wouldn't happen. Is this too utopian of me to think?
Every time I or someone else online shares this opinion, the comments/replies are full of people calling it eugenics and saying it's terrible to do that to people. I don't really understand that. These people say that it's better to focus on lifting poor people out of poverty and helping them with systems to allow them to have children regardless of economic status, but I don't think these are contradictory at all. What's stopping us from helping poor people, but not letting them have kids in the meantime. It will take a while to help every poor person, but it won't take long to pass a law that helps kids. Why not just pass a law banning having children below a certain income and then get to helping those people out of poverty?
I'd also like to address the idea that this would inevitably encompass race. I think that eugenics led to that in the past due to the extremely widespread racism and classism of the time. Those who developed the ideas of eugenics thought that poor people and minorities were filthy and unfit. I think that because this "new eugenics" (for lack of a better term) comes from a place of helping children, has temporariness written into it, and exists in a world that is less racist and classist (although racism and classism are still present everywhere, I don't think they are as strong or overt) that the switch to race wouldn't happen. Is this too utopian of me to think?