The neo-liberal eugenic society
A new biography has just been published of the Huxleys — Thomas, the great Victorian man of science, and his grandson Julian, the great 20th-century public scientist. The book, by Professor Alison Bashford, is quite sympathetic to Julian, who would be cancelled today for his lifelong support for eugenics, if anything besides a Wetherspoons pub had been named after him. Bashford suggests Julian’s eugenics have actually become normalized rather than rejected. She writes:
Much as we might wish away Julian’s eugenics from the twenty-first century, the fact is that many of his generation’s reproductive or ‘transhuman’ dreams are part of everyday lives, everyday decisions, ‘fulfilment’ that has been normalized, dreams have been de-exceptionalized, for better and for worse….The foetal diagnosis of not a few of Julian Huxley’s 1920s list of the ‘unfit’, followed by legal abortion, became standard in many parts of the world decades ago. At the now low-tech end, semen is actively selected every day by individuals and couples, and like it or not these decisions are made straight out of presumptions about race, class, intelligence, education, height or ‘fitness’. Less fit humans are every day diagnosed and made unviable, in utero…A neo-liberal, choice-oriented eugenics has become more or less normalized…much as we like to imagine that we live in a refusal of it.
Professor Bashford is right: eugenics never went away. We live today not in the top-down statist illiberal eugenic regimes of the 1920s and 30s, but in a neo-liberal eugenic society that enshrines and monetizes people’s right to control their reproduction as much as possible, by choosing when they have babies and what they have, according to their own and doctors’ definition of fitness.
Consider the biggest part of the reproduction market: abortion. Abortions have been happening for millennia, as has infanticide, but abortion was only legalized in the UK in 1967, and in the US in 1973. Today, there are 40–50 million abortions every year, although 45% of them are still unsafe, according to the World Health Organisation, leading to around 68,000 preventable maternal deaths each year.
Abortions give women the right to choose whether they have a child or not, and what sort of child they have. The 1967 UK Abortion Act allowed parents to abort foetuses if they suffer from ‘congenital ailments’, including Down Syndrome, haemophilia, Tay Sachs, spina bifida and even cleft lips and clubbed feet. Mothers are actively encouraged to have abortions in these cases, and most follow doctors’ advice — 90% of foetuses with Down syndrome are aborted in the UK.
Anti-abortion activists in the US (and, increasingly, the UK) call this eugenics. Nonsense, say pro-choice activists, it is the woman’s sacred right to control her own body, as well as to prevent needless suffering of a human who would be born with a terrible congenital defect.
The argument depends on the definition of ‘eugenics’. Eugenics does not mean ‘forced sterilizations’, although that it is what’s it’s usually taken to mean. It has historically meant a scientific intervention in human reproduction to encourage the creation of genetically fitter humans, via ‘negative eugenics’ (preventing the birth of those deemed ‘less fit’) and / or ‘positive eugenics’ (encouraging the birth of those deemed ‘more fit’). By this definition, we still live in a eugenic society, and abortion is one part of that.
It is true, historically, that some of the most prominent supporters of the legalization of abortion were eugenicists, who argued that legal abortion would reduce the number of genetically ‘unfit’ humans in existence (see this article, and this, and this book). Take Dr Dugald Baird, a doctor who figured prominently in the successful British campaign to legalize abortion. He was a fellow of the Eugenics Society, and published papers arguing that poor women with low IQs and poor genetic health were having lots of children in the UK and around the world. Legalizing abortion was important to protect the genetic quality of the human race, he argued. He hasn’t been cancelled — in fact, he is still celebrated in Aberdeen for establishing the first free family planning clinic and improving the rate of healthy births in that city.
Another important supporter of the UK Abortion Act was the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) founded by feminists like Stella Browne and Janet Chance in the 1930s. The leaders of the ALRA made various arguments for the legalization of abortion, but one of them was eugenic — it would be good not just for individual women, but for the species as a whole, if women were given control over their reproduction. Janet Chance wrote in 1938:
In short, it is in the name of racial amelioration, and as one of the bases on which a eugenic and hygienic education of our race may be built that we ask a revision of the abortion laws.
Anti-abortion activists today seize on this as proof that abortion was an evil elitist eugenic plot against working class women and women of colour. No. Women have always used abortion, infanticide and baby-abandonment to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and legalizing abortion simply makes the situation safer for women and less cruel to new-born babies (by preventing them from ever being born).
But it’s also true that doctors today actively encourage parents to end pregnancies if the resulting human would be what doctors classify as ‘unfit’. That includes not just foetuses who would suffer terribly if born, but foetuses with Down syndrome — 99% of humans with Down syndrome say they are happy with their existence.
I support women’s right to choose, while also accepting the awkward fact that abortion is sometimes a form of eugenics (ie the scientific control of reproduction to ensure the birth of genetically healthy children). It is not top-down statist authoritarian eugenics, it is neo-liberal, technocratic-medical eugenics, which gives power to the woman — but also to the doctor.
Then there is the booming market in assisted fertility, which today is worth $22 billion a year. This neoliberal market is designed to give individuals maximum freedom and choice over their reproduction, choosing when they have children and what sort of children they have.
For those wannabe-parents who need fertility assistance, there is an online market for sperm and eggs. You can choose your donor based on their height, ethnicity, education, personality type and genetic profile.
The first birth by artificial insemination happened in 1884 — a couple who were struggling to conceive visited one Dr Pancoast in Philadelphia, who discovered the problem was the infertility of the father. Dr Pancoast selected his best-looking medical student, requested a sperm sample, and artificially inseminated the mother. The father was, apparently, delighted, the mother never knew, the boy went on to be a leading businessman. The case was written up by one of the medical students 25 years later, Dr A.D Ward, who argued that such a procedure should become more widely used on eugenic grounds, to create ‘children of wonderful mental endowments, in place of half-witted, evil-inclined, disease-disposed offspring’ made from ‘Satanic germs’.
In the 1930s, one of Julian Huxley’s students, HJ Muller, proposed a ‘genius sperm bank’ to artificially create superior children. Many scientists of the day supported the scheme, including Julian Huxley and JBS Haldane. Aldous Huxley used Muller’s idea in his last utopian novel, Island. Muller’s dream finally became reality in 1980, when a eugenicist businessman called Robert Klark Graham set up the Repository for Germinal Choice in Esposito, California. Graham advertised his company as a ‘Nobel Prize Sperm Bank’, but only one Nobel prize winner publicly agreed to donate his sperm — William Shockley, the racist eugenicist inventor of semi-conductors. In fact, there wasn’t strong consumer demand for genius sperm. Prospective mothers preferred the sperm of cheerful, sporty businessmen over genius scientists.
Eugenicists of the 1920s and 30s, like Madison Grant or Adolf Hitler, argued for laws to ensure the reproductive supremacy of the ‘Nordic master-race’. Well, free market forces still nudge in that direction — the biggest sperm and egg donor company in the world is Cryos International in Denmark. Customers from all over the world are choosing Viking genes for their baby, like Holly Ryan from London, who told the Mirror: ‘The Danes are a superior race and I want my child to be a part of that race.’
An illustration from this Metro article
Meanwhile, new embryonic testing companies like Genomic Prediction, founded by the physicist Steve Hsu, offer parents the ability to test embryos for polygenic scores on things like psychopathology or even intelligence. Parents can’t yet select embryos who are likely to have higher IQs, but it looks probable that consumer option will be offered soon (whether it actually works is another question). If the UK makes genomic selection of ‘smarter’ embryos illegal, Hsu says, then another country like Singapore will allow it and the rich will simply travel there.
Of course, this global fertility market is still quite Wild West. Sometimes sperm-buyers don’t get what they paid for. One of the most popular sperm donors in California in the 1980s was Donor 150, a beautiful, yoga-practicing stud called Jeffrey Harrison. He fathered at least 36 children (apparently he chanted oms while the mothers inseminated themselves with turkey basters). But, as a memoir by one of his children recounts, Jeffrey turned out to be a conspiracy theorist who thought he was the Messiah.
Donor 150, the yoga dreamboat with conspiritualist tendencies
Donor 9623, meanwhile, was marketed by the Xytex Corporation as a polymath with a face like Tom Cruise, an IQ of 160, and a doctorate in neuroscience engineering. His sperm was a best-seller with consumers. It turned out he had dropped out of school, been in and out of prison, and suffered from schizophrenia. Some customers are now suing the Xytex Corporation for failing to do proper checks on their donors. ‘This is not who / what we paid for’, the parents are in effect arguing, not just of the donor, but also of their children.
And then there are the countless cases of ‘fertility fraud’, as it is now called in legal cases, where a woman or couple go to a fertility clinic for IVF, and the doctor surreptitiously uses their own sperm. Cases of doctors secretly using their own sperm go back to the birth of artificial insemination in the 1940s. One of the pioneers was Dr Bertold Wiesner, who ran a fertility clinic in London. He was a friend of Julian Huxley’s — they shared an interest in eugenics and parapsychology. Wiesner used his own sperm to father some 600 children. Wiesner told the would-be parents they would conceive from an anonymous donor, he just didn’t say the donor was him. But in many other cases, fertility doctors have flat-out lied to parents when they used their own sperm.
New cases of fertility fraud appear every few months — a fertility doctor in Rotterdam who is thought to have fathered 200 children; another doctor in Amsterdam who fathered at least 17 children; 8 other cases so far in Holland; over 50 such cases in the US, including Dr Cecil Jacobson, a Virginia doctor thought to have fathered at least 75 children; and Dr Donald Cline, who fathered 94 children in his fertility clinic. This is a major, widespread, global abuse of medical power, prompting several US states to pass laws against the practice.
What motivates the doctors to do it? Professor Jody Madeira has studied these cases, and has said:
They tend to be white male doctors, practicing in the ’70s and ’80s. They tend to be community leaders, religious figures. Doctor after doctor falls into this pattern. Some are well-meaning. Then there are darker reasons, the doctors believe they have great genetics and the world would be better if there were more of their children in it. Or more narcissistic, not just an ego, a pathological condition.
One can compare their actions to prolific sperm donors, like Ed Houben, who claims to have fathered over 1000 children. If a narrow version of Darwinism is right, they have won the game of life. Houben is ‘the UK’s most virile man’ as one profile puts it.
Did Julian Huxley ever donate his sperm to expand the tribe of Huxley geniuses? Certainly he travelled around universities promoting positive eugenics, and telling smart students they owed it to their species to donate their sperm. He also received at least one letter from a couple requesting his sperm for their offspring. After his death, his son Francis claimed to receive letters from people who thought they were Julian’s children via artificial insemination. Were they really? We don’t yet know — Francis never replied.
You can listen to Rupert Sheldrake talk about Julian Huxley’s support for positive eugenics, and Francis Huxley’s receipt of letters from supposed children of Julian’s, in this interview, 30 mins in.
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A reader, Liz Murphy, responded:
Why is that you refer pretty much exclusively to abortion due to foetal anomaly as a woman’s decision or right etc? I am working with a group of women who have taken this terribly difficult decision and are suffering greatly as a result (sponsored by the charity ARC). They are mostly in partnerships as I understand it and I’m quite sure they weren’t alone in their decisions to terminate. What about the men who lost children that were never born? This grieving process is awful because it is taboo to speak about. There is almost no support for these people who are struggling with bodies they no longer feel at home in, an overwhelming sadness, ongoing nightmares and extreme emotions in the midst of a normal working day. All they want is to connect again with a lightness and an optimism that was there before the loss of their unborn child.
I am using sophrology techniques to help them to feel their bodies again (mostly deliberately numbed) and to give them some tools for emotional regulation to hopefully make it safe and bearable enough to contact more of their grief to keep moving through it. And in that process to hopefully discover/reveal more inner resources to build a way forward. I hope too that the men (and even other current and future children) that are part of this experience will feel some benefit.
I responded:
Dear Liz,
What did I miss out or get wrong or not sufficiently take into account?
Perhaps I wrote too glibly of a decision which men and women come to but not without agonising and a lot of difficult emotions afterwards? Do you support the right to abortion, but think there should be more support for people after it?
Thanks and all best wishes
Jules
To which Liz replied:
Thanks Jules.
There were two impressions I had that made me uncomfortable. One was the point you mention below — it felt a rather cold and calculating decision of parents to terminate a pregnancy due to a genetic condition or anomaly. It is a terribly difficult decision to make sometimes in great uncertainty.
The second was perhaps more my own reading than the words you actually wrote. In these cases there are often two patents involved, so it is not ‘women choosing what sort of child they have’ but both men and women trying to make these agonising decisions together. I felt men were a little left out of the picture.
Yes I do support the right to abortion and I wish we had more and better ways in our society today to process grief and loss in general. I have an intuition that our inability to do this is at the root of much unnecessary suffering.
Warmly
Liz