2024-03-24 08:15:33
Galton, creator of the concept of eugenics, wanted to improve humanity by prohibiting procreation for the weak and sick supposedly carrying bad genes. Some countries have tried it, to their greatest shame and remorse. Nazi Germany took eugenics to its peak by directly eliminating carriers without checking their genes which it had declared harmful.
In contrast, as its prefix indicates, dysgenics involves selecting bad genes. The term was created by an American naturalist who thought that the First World War, by killing the most able-bodied men, would select the invalids who remained at home.
Medicine is accused of dysgenics since by assisting and caring for the weakest, it quite often allows them to reach sexual maturity and the age of procreation. For example, medically assisted procreation would be a way of allowing the dissemination of sterility genes. Or the practice of cesarean sections could risk favoring the reproduction of women with narrow pelvises, going against natural selection.
Less fallacious and more problematic, the care of people suffering from a monogenic disease, such as cystic fibrosis, the deleterious gene of which is known, now allows them to go well beyond the age of sexual maturity. This medical dysgenics is compensated by antenatal screening for this disease followed by a proposal to terminate the pregnancy. We can then criticize medicine for being both dysgenicist and eugenicist, but it is the price of progress that society demands from it.
There is no doubt that gene therapies, recombinant proteins or molecular scissors will allow carriers of rare genetic diseases to access adulthood and the demands of procreation that medicine will have to try to satisfy in the name of ‘equal opportunities. Antenatal screening would then become imperative, even obligatory.
Medicine has no social project, and no one asks it to. Technology doesn’t have any more. Only politics can prohibit, impose or regulate. Even if the politician understood natural selection, all his decisions would be questionable and contested for reasons of ethics or fairness.
SJ Gould well understood this political and anthropological impasse when he already said in 1995: “Why should a process which has regulated the history of living beings over 3.5 billion years without implementing of explicit ethical system provides all the answers for a species that appeared only a second ago in geological time, and then changed the rules by introducing interesting new concepts such as justice and virtue.
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