The Right Kind of Eugenics

Eugenics, broadly defined, is the use of selective breeding to improve the human race. Most people imagine it as government control of reproduction intended to improve the population’s genetics by encouraging reproduction by those with good genes, discouraging or banning reproduction by those with bad; what policies qualify depends on what you count as improvement. Getting parents more nearly the children they want is in my view a better definition of “improvement” than giving them more nearly the children the government wants them to have.

Getting parents the children they want, like getting other people what they want, is best done by leaving the choice up to them. If making it easier for parents to affect the genetics of their children seems to you an odd form of eugenics, consider the equivalent issue in economics. Some people imagine that the way to improve an economy is by having the government decide how much of what is produced and invested and how, but they are wrong, as demonstrated by the countries that tried it.

My favorite example of what I refer to as libertarian eugenics is in Beyond This Horizon, an early Heinlein novel. The fictional technology lets a couple separately select on egg and sperm, combine an egg that has my wife’s musical ability but not her bad circulation with a sperm that contains my memory for poetry but not my APOE4 gene or bad heart, and implant it in my wife’s womb¹.

We do not have that technology but we can and do have libertarian eugenics. Sperm and ova are sold; the price is higher if the source has characteristics the buyers want for their child. Couples produce multiple embryos and choose which to implant. Men and women choose mates based in part on the children they expect them to produce. These are all eugenic decisions made by parents, not governments.

A government can make it easier, mostly (as in most other contexts) by getting out of the way.

Legal rules effect what decisions are legal and on what terms. A law banning gestational surrogacy means that a couple who want their own child and cannot produce it has to try to adopt instead. A law making it illegal to test for genetic defects and if found abort result in fewer parents having the children they prefer. Legal restrictions on producing multiple embryos and selecting the best have the same effect at an earlier stage of the process.

One of the constraints on egg and sperm donation is the risk of being held liable for child support. Donors in the US can protect themselves by a contract with the parents signed in advance; that is one of the things those governments get right. Some others, such as the German, do not; the mother can waive her rights but not the child’s. Similar issues arise with other forms of assisted reproduction such as surrogacy, gestational or traditional.

Legalizing the Adoption Market

My previous post raised the possibility of legalizing the adoption market, permitting adoptive parents to pay a woman for the right to adopt her baby. An issue I did not raise there was the possibility of women going into the baby business, becoming pregnant in order to be paid to give the child up.

The price will depend on the baby. The competition from women who would otherwise have aborted should drive the payment for the right to adopt a random baby down to a level at which it covers the cost to the mother of bringing a baby to term but not much more, not enough to be an incentive to get pregnant. But not all babies are random.

If the cost to adopt a random baby is twenty thousand dollars I would expect some couples to be willing to pay a hundred thousand or more to adopt the child of parents with a list of desirable characteristics: healthy (no APOE4 genes), intelligent (signaled by graduation from a top college, tall (people have odd tastes).

Consider a woman who has those characteristics and wants to avoid the rat race of professional or corporate employment. Perhaps her ambitions lie along less remunerative lines: music, art, writing. If she is good at bearing children, as some women are, and has a husband or lover with a similar list of characteristics who does not mind having children of his adopted, she could make a comfortable living producing a baby a year, a somewhat less comfortable living producing one every two years. If no suitable husband or lover is available there are always sperm banks.

This has a eugenic effect not only in my sense, giving (adoptive) parents more nearly the children they want, but also in the sense imagined by the original supporters of eugenics since the result is to increase the number of people descended from parents who were smart and healthy (unfortunately also tall).

Legalizing the adoption market might have a dysgenic effect as well from that standpoint, however, since the children who are adopted instead of aborted will be children of mothers who got pregnant and didn’t want to be and fathers unwilling or unable to support them.

Eugenics vs Eugenics

Eugenics broadly defined is the use of selective breeding to improve the human race. I have been discussing it with “improvement” defined in terms of giving parents the children they want. Most people think of it in terms of a broader and fuzzier definition, as giving humans the characteristics we want them to have. Most of them assume that if it is to be done, the way to do it is to have governments encourage the reproduction of the sort of people we want more of, subsidize, or in the extreme mandate, it, discourage or ban the reproduction of the sorts of people we want fewer of.

I agree with the objective, would like to live in a world where more people were smart, honest, kind. Not only are the means largely, in my view, immoral, violations of individual rights, they are employed by governments likely to use them to do more harm than good. My observation of population policy fifty-some years ago and climate policy more recently left me with a low opinion of the ability of the political mechanism to deal with complicated issues.

That raises the question of to what extent eugenics in my sense, libertarian eugenics, can achieve the objective of eugenics more broadly defined. In some cases, as we have just seen, they might be in conflict, with a policy that promotes the former hindering the latter. But, as a general rule, the characteristics that people want for their children are ones I want for my neighbors and fellow citizens. So while libertarian eugenics may not be a perfect way of achieving the broader objective it may be the best available.

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1. Or possibly an artificial womb; I read the book a long time ago.