Author: ‘Medical genetics is not eugenics’
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
From the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required):
Author Ruth Schwartz Cowan defends prenatal genetic screening against claims of eugenics, rejecting claims by disability activists that it is a form of discrimination against people with disabilities. She says academics and journalists should stop making good people feel unnecessarily guilty about prenatal genetic screening.
Genetic screening was developed by medical geneticists to help the genetically “unfit,” precisely the people the eugenicists would have sterilized, have as many children as they wanted.
… Disability activists claim that genetic screening is a form of discrimination against the disabled — but it seems unlikely that the parents who banded together to form associations like the National Tay-Sachs Disease Association or the Cyprus AntiAnaemic Society or the National Association of Retarded Citizens would agree. (more…)


