Prenatal diagnosis and eugenic ideology

The new techniques of prenatal diagnosis confront women with choices that are constrained by the social and economic realities of the societies in which we live. These societies take little, if any, responsibility for meeting the special needs of people with disabilities and, in fact, discriminate against them. Prejudices against people with disabilities, poor people, and immigrants during the nineteenth century generated a science of ‘race improvement’, called eugenics. In the United States, a number of eugenic measures were enacted early in this century, but it was in Nazi Germany that eugenics or ‘racial hygiene’ flourished. In the guise of furthering the health of the German people (the Volk), German scientists and physicians designed programs of ‘selection and eradication’ (Auslese und Ausmerze) that were initially implemented by sterilizing people who were judged unfit to have children. Next came euthanasia and finally mass extermination of ‘lives not worth living’ (lebensunwerte Leben). Present-day German women, looking at this history, are opposing the ideology that underlies the new technical developments in prenatal diagnosis and some feminists outside Germany share their misgivings. This paper tries to place the new technologies in the context of eugenics and to point out some of the ways in which the new,supposedly liberating, choices in fact limit women's control over our lives.