Bred for Quality

Over the years we have bred animals for their best qualities. We breed cows to give the most or best milk and meat, dogs to look funny at dog shows, horses to win races and pull heavy things. We don't give it a second thought. We don't breed the runts of the litters; we discard them. We breed  for desired characteristics. Just like Mother Nature does in the wild. Survival of the fittest, death to the weak and infirm. Same with plants. Some people still get patents for new roses and orchids. And our food? Practically all corn is "hybrid" nowadays. I suppose seeds in general. Bred for beauty or production or resistance to disease.

Humans? Not so much anymore. We still practice eugenics through abortion, of course, including the desired sex of the child. We abort those we know will be deformed, prone to diseases, feeble mindedness. Abortion is so much more than poor teenaged girls not having to have back alley abortions, isn't it? Abortion has become everything the silly moralists of the 1950s and 1960s warned it would become. Or soon will be.

Abortion is used for ethnic cleansing in our society as well, just like eugenics was used in the 1930s, only much more so. MANY more black children are aborted each year, proportionately, than any other flavor. Mostly by white doctors. Not ethnic cleansing, you say? Not eugenics? Ok.

And yet we are appalled when we read about what happened in the 1920s - 1960s. The alcoholics and feeble-minded and retarded (words of that era) not allowed to have babies, sterilize by court order or sometimes only by the order of the warden of an "asylum" somewhere. It is a sad story, even though I try not to judge people from times other than my own.

I want to tell some of those stories in the coming posts. Do you know any?