Jane is an emergency room physician. She helps deliver a preterm infant whose addicted mother comes into the hospital totally high, in severe pain, and unaware she’s in labor.
Even though Jane acts heroically to save the lives of mother and baby, the situation weighs on her. She’s overworked, just over thirty years old, in an uncertain relationship with Vincent, and hopes to have a baby of her own someday.
Here’s the problematic passage in my upcoming novel, Still Life. Jane is talking with Vincent about her feelings:
It seems like too many of the wrong people are having children and not enough of the right people. At this rate the human stock will degenerate; we’ll become a weakened, vulnerable species. She says this as a scientist with knowledge of genetics, not to be mean or hurtful.
Jane, of course, is the right people. She has talked about having a child—in general terms, nothing concrete.
Publishers hire sensitivity readers to review unpublished manuscripts to spot cultural inaccuracies, offensive content, bias, stereotypes, or problematic language—and to suggest edits. Key advantages of sensitivity readers are that authors might become aware of issues in their work they were blind to, and diverse characters can be represented accurately without resorting to stereotypes. But some in the industry see sensitivity editing as censorship, and that changing language and removing biases or offensive behaviors can flatten characters, dilute the writing voice, and create other authenticity issues.
I’m in favor of having a sensitivity reader for my manuscripts because I’m always looking for ways to make my work better. And in the end, I must decide what words appear on the page. This is even more the case now that Random House is not my publisher, and I am responsible for all writing, editing, and publishing decisions.
My sensitivity reader is Owen; he volunteered for that position. He does excellent work. He spotted the passage in Still Life about the wrong people having babies and the human stock degenerating. He pointed out that if this is Jane’s position, she’s entering eugenics territory.
Wikipedia has a good definition of eugenics: “an ideology that human populations should be “improved” through social policies, such as selective breeding – encouraging people with “desirable” traits to have children while discouraging those with “undesirable” traits. It’s a coercive ideology. It involves people in positions of power making value judgements about which traits are desirable or not, and so who is deserving of reproduction or not, and it inevitably leads to human rights abuses.”
The concept of eugenics is grounded in the belief that some people are superior and others are inferior. It gained in popularity during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Nazi Germany aggressively promoted eugenics. It performed sterilizations on hundreds of thousands of people and exterminated millions of others—mostly Jews, but also others they considered inferior— while encouraging “pure” Germans to reproduce with the goal of building a master race.
In the US, by the early twentieth century, dozens of states had passed eugenics laws allowing forced sterilizations of disabled and incarcerated individuals, under the pretext that criminality and mental illnesses were inherited. Some of these laws are still on the books. Other laws, such as those that banned interracial marriage, were based on the position that a natural hierarchy of races exists.
Today, the MAGA movement encourages the belief that whites rule and other colors and cultures are “garbage” (said DJT). Our friend Elon Musk is a proponent of the “pronatalist” movement, which claims higher-income populations are at imminent risk of population collapse because of declining fertility rates. Their solution is to get involved in people’s reproductive processes, encouraging the traditional family with lots of children (white families, white children).
While eugenics has been largely discredited, some researchers and scientists claim that today’s gene testing and editing technology is ableist and offers a backdoor to eugenics or at least a slippery slope towards it. Consider the termination of fetuses with genetic malformations:
. . . it is neither forced nor part of an overall cultural vision of a biologically perfect society. Instead, such abortions are best understood as deliberate blindness to the humanity of the unborn child with Down syndrome, a blindness that is caused by misperceptions of happiness levels of people with disabilities, the presence of widespread ableism in society, and the lack of a strong social safety net for children and adults with mental and physical disabilities.
(America—The Jesuit Review)
Instead of a society forcing eugenics policies on a population, we now have technology allowing parents and individuals to make informed choices about wanted and unwanted genetic attributes in their children. The startup company Orchid Health performs whole genome screening of embryos during IVF, allowing prospective parents who can afford the service to choose the “best” embryo for implantation.
It’s not eugenics, but it’s definitely casting nets for certain types of babies.
Eugenics has often been the subject of literature and film. In the 1931 dystopian novel, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, citizens are factory-produced and engineered to fulfill a role in a social hierarchy. In the Star Trek franchise, genetically engineered humans, the most notable one being Khan, play a significant role as antagonists. And the secret Bene Gesserit sisterhood in Frank Herbert’s sci-fi series Dune engages in selective breeding in their quest to produce a supernormal male. Controversial topics, such as eugenics, lend themselves well to storytelling, as they are rich in conflict and moral implications.
Back to Still Life. I deleted the offending passage that my sensitivity reader flagged. It didn’t belong in the novel.
I would have left it in if Jane really believed she’s the right kind of person to have babies, while other people are not. But I don’t see that in her. She’s kinder, more empathetic than that. It was a characterization mishap on my part, and I’m grateful Owen caught it for me.
