May 16, 2008

Medical Genetics Is Not Eugenics

By RUTH SCHWARTZ COWAN

Parents shouldn't feel guilty about prenatal screening

The connection that critics make between medical genetics and eugenics is historically fallacious. Activists on the political right are as mistaken as activists on the political left: Genetic screening was not eugenics in the past, is not eugenics in the present, and, unless its technological systems become radically transformed, will not be eugenics in the future. The technologies of medical genetics were not constructed with

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