8:39pm January 10, 2015

“

Current forms of eugenics are complementary to, if not the product of, neoliberal ideologies and policies. These complementarities include:

Concepts of burden – Competitive capitalism has long required rationales for why people are poor and expendable. Under neoliberalism, the shrinking of the welfare state (which never truly existed in the U.S. in any case) casts more and more people as drains on the economy and the state — not just the poor and people of color, but also elderly people and people with disabilities. It is not surprising then that one can hear echoes of negative eugenics in population control measures and technologies targeted at poor women (welfare ‘reform’ family caps, the Project Prevention organization that gives incentives to drug users to use long-term contraception or be sterilized, recent FDA approval of quinacrine chemical sterilization trials) and in genetic screening for fetal disability.

Consumer choice – Just as the concept of burden is intrinsic to negative eugenics, so is the concept of individual choice to ‘positive’ eugenics and new reproductive technologies. These technologies are often promoted to well-off women in terms of consumer choice and ‘designer babies.’ In a sense, burden and choice are two sides of the same coin as both impose reproductive duties on women. (See Dorothy Roberts.) Eugenics, past and present, is also intricately linked to industrial mass production through the design and marketing of ever more standardized ‘ideal’ consumer goods and the associated rise in social expectations and conformity, faith in technological progress, and belief in consumer rights as the foundation of free enterprise and democracy. (See Christina Cogdell.)

Globalization – Here we need to look more carefully at both ideologies and practices of global out-sourcing when it comes to genetic engineering and assisted reproduction. In addition, stem cell and cloning research is becoming the latest marker of which country is ‘out front’ in the competitive race to the new technological frontier.

Efficiency – Linked to all of the above is the heightened focus on ‘efficiency’ as privatization, competition, the information technology speed-up and the time/space compression of globalization put ever more demands on the human body and body politic to make more ‘efficient’ use of resources. Just as at the beginning of the last century, eugenics is linked to the mad drive for efficiency. Nowhere is this clearer than in health policy where the priority given to finding, treating and preventing the genetic causes of both physical and mental disease is touted as more efficient than, for example, identifying and ameliorating environmental and social causes. Most disorders are blamed on genes today, and the quick-fix solution is pharmaceutical. Genetic screening, meanwhile, threatens to become a means by which health insurance companies, in their ‘efficient’ search for higher profits, can deny people coverage.

”

406 notes