I have spent twenty years married into a family where my parent in laws are firm believers of eugenics, and if there is one thing I have learned, it's that the proponents of eugenics usually see themselves as the models of humans who should be bred after, and are actually far from what any breeding program would objectively choose. Bad mothering, inflexibility and social incompetecy, all of which can be traced down several generations aren't traits you want in a blood line no matter how well educated you are or what color eyes you might have. Basically eugenics has, from the begining, been a way of controlling the people who "aren't our kind, dear". Yes, certain types of mental illness have fallen into that category.

Now to give the coin a flip, if I had a daughter who had mental handicap that would make her unable to care for herself and would leave her vulnerable to abuse or exploitation by men, I think I would definitely discuss with her some kind of contraception. I have known women in this position who have ended up having children because they have been used, and this has not been a good thing, mostly for the mother. The child has usually been fine. I realize that some people get all hot and bothered about "the mentally weak reproducing themselves" but a lot of parents are really afraid for their kids, how it would be to have parenthood forced on them when they can't handle it, to go through a pregnancy when they don't understand it. As it is, I have a boy who I have to teach to keep his hands to himself.

After having two kids go through delayed speech acquisition, hellish childhoods with ear infections that would not stop, odd sterotypical behavior that simply disappeared with my oldest when he started talking at 4 and didn't stop with my youngest, my husband and I decided to stop having children. Both of us felt that that there was some genetic combination that wasn't working, that even though we really wanted more children, there was no garantee that the results wouldn't be even worse, and that even if they weren't, our youngest needed so much time that neither he nor the oldest could get what they needed if we had a new baby in the house. It hurt, but we stopped, not for "human kind" but for our family, and because frankly, we couldn't stand to see another baby go through that. Huggs