Earl Appleby reports that a Danish eugenicist is proposing that government prevent the “lower classes” from reproducing while encouraging the elites to have more kids.
“Intelligence is hereditary,” says Prof. Helmuth Nyborg, dean of the Psychology Institute at Aarhus University. “The 15 to 20 per cent of those at the lower levels of society—those who are not able to manage even the simplest tasks and often not their children—should be dissuaded from having children.
He is aware that his eugenic superiority is an echo of Hitler, but he doesn’t see it as a direct connection. Of course, whenever you make a value judgment about the worthiness of the lives of others, you are trampling upon the dignity of the human person. And showing your own shortsightedness. How many great and brilliant men and women were born to lower-class parents? How stupid and vain men and women were born to the upper class?
But again apart from that, a child who wil grow up to be a ditch-digger with a low IQ and bad manners is still a child of God, loved by Him as much as He loves the doctoral candidate.
You know, Nyborg’s comments don’t just echo Hitler, they echo Margaret Sanger. His proposals could have lifted out of one of the Planned Parenthood founder’s early 20th century pamphlets that proposed to keep the “mongrel” classes and races from breeding. What’s old is new again.
