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Author Topic:   The Eugenics of Personal Choice
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1055 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 20 of 34 (766713)
08-20-2015 2:46 PM
Reply to: Message 19 by MrHambre
08-20-2015 12:54 PM


Re: Eugenics 2.0
And the most emphatic point the article is trying to make is that eugenics in our neoliberal world just reinforces the idea that we should look at problems like disease and deviance as individual issues and not in terms of social problems. The extent to which we focus on the biomedical aspects of health and quality of life and not the socioeconomic ones is a political decision:
Most of the conditions we are looking at being able to 'fix' in the near future with genetic engineering are, indeed, individual issues. An excess of trinucleotide repeats in the HTT gene isn't caused by poverty or social exclusion (unless your parents' poverty meant they lived somewhere exposed to more mutagens, which is possible, I suppose). How well you're able to cope with the effects of the disorder probably will depend on your socioeconomic condition, but that isn't a concern if the offending allele can be fixed in advance.
Now, how you make a treatment available - how it's funded and who is able to access it - is a wholly different social question, but the fact that the distribution of healthcare is a complicated problem we need to solve is no reason to stop medical advances.

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 Message 19 by MrHambre, posted 08-20-2015 12:54 PM MrHambre has seen this message but not replied

  
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