Reproductive carrier screening

Eugenics, as Dive and Newson (2021) note, describes the political, social, and medical practices that aim to promote desirable characteristics in a species by the manipulation of heredity. In his 1947 essay ‘Eugenics and Society’, the Oxford-educated biologist, founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, and keen eugenicist Julian Huxley (1887–1975) wrote that ‘striking and rapid eugenic results can be achieved only by a virtual elimination of the few lowest and truly degenerate types and a high multiplication-rate of the few highest and truly gifted types’ (Huxley, 1947). Huxley – who was far from lacking in self-esteem – no doubt considered himself as belonging to the latter category. But Germaine Greer made the wry observation that ‘it may take a Colombian gamine more raw intelligence to survive in the barrio than it takes to gain a double first at Oxford’ (Greer, 1985).