Author John Daniel Davidson profileMost people are familiar with eugenics as a disturbing and morally repugnant artifact from the past, something we associate with Nazi experiments and racial pseudo-science. But it’s making a comeback in our time thanks to new branding and new technology. Call it neo-eugenics, coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.

The old eugenics was of course the study and practice of shaping a population through selective breeding based on heritable traits deemed desirable, and the sterilization or prohibition on reproduction for those deemed undesirable. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenics produced a nasty set of policies, both in the United States and Europe. These policies were eventually discredited and discarded in part because Nazi Germany was big on eugenics. It was official Nazi policy, for example, to identify various groups of German citizens deemed “unfit” and then systematically kill them with poison gas — a practice that turned out to be a precursor to the Holocaust. …

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