{"id":4834,"date":"2025-06-10T15:50:27","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T15:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.geneticsupportfoundation.org\/?p=4834"},"modified":"2025-06-12T13:47:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T13:47:06","slug":"part-1-the-threads-of-20th-century-eugenics-interwoven-with-modern-pronatalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.geneticsupportfoundation.org\/index.php\/2025\/06\/10\/part-1-the-threads-of-20th-century-eugenics-interwoven-with-modern-pronatalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rebirth of Eugenics: Tech Bros and Pronatalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Part 1: The Threads of 20th Century Eugenics Interwoven with Modern Pronatalism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Follow this upcoming series of blog posts to track the rise of the pronatalism movement in Silicon Valley, the threads of eugenics woven into the fabric of that movement, and the snags of humanity that may yet unravel a carefully stitched path toward a dystopian future.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At the turn of the 20th century, the US and Europe were ablaze with theories about how genetics could be used to cultivate a \u201cbetter breed\u201d of humans: smarter, stronger, more successful, and more beautiful. Genetic engineering hadn\u2019t been conceived yet (pun intended), so these pioneers in eugenics<\/a> advocated for the old-fashioned method of encouraging the \u201cright people\u201d to breed and sterilizing the \u201cwrong people.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Fair Use Image<\/a><\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

They catalogued what they viewed as degeneracy in families and equated moral or social problems to genetic weakness, as though these human frailties like alcoholism and criminality could be linked to a single gene rather than a complex array of social forces like poverty, education, nurture, and, yes, genetics (though far more complicated than their single gene theories). They created sterilization laws to prohibit the \u201cfeeble-minded\u201d from procreating\u2014with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously saying in the Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell<\/em> that \u201cthree generations of imbeciles is enough.<\/a>\u201d And the Eugenics Society of North America promoted \u201cFitter Families\u201d contests<\/a> at state fairs to identify the families with the \u201cbest stock.\u201d Spoiler alert: they were always white and never included people with disabilities. In fact, a fundamental premise of eugenics was that some races were inherently better than others, with the Nordic (or Aryan) race ranked at the top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the most famous and influential people<\/a> of the early 20th century were ardent fans of eugenics: President Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger, Henry Ford, and John Harvey Kellog (co-inventor of Corn Flakes). Immigration laws in the US were even changed in the 1920s (the Johnson-Reed Act<\/a>) based on eugenic theories of racial superiority to ban or limit certain kinds of people from entering the US such as Asians and Eastern and Southern Europeans (quickly curtailing Jewish immigration). According to eugenicists, the movement was progressing along quite well until the 1930s when Adolf Hitler\u2014inspired by the eugenicists in the US and UK\u2014took the idea to a gruesome and horrific new level. Beyond preventing the births of \u2018unfit people,\u2019 he moved forward with murdering whole classes of people the Nazis deemed unfit: Jewish, disabled, Romani, and LGBTQ people, finally culminating in the horror and tragedy of the concentration camps of World War II. It was only then that everyone realized how utterly misguided and terrible eugenics is when it is taken to its inevitable conclusion. Or did they?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Elon Musk speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Please attribute to Gage Skidmore if used elsewhere.<\/sup><\/sub><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Over the past two decades, the new \u201cpronatalism\u201d movement rising in popularity in Silicon Valley and among some of our current politicians and inventors has echoed the messages of the eugenics supporters of the early 20th century. Famous adherents include tech giants, like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel<\/a>, and Pavel Durov<\/a>; policymakers, like JD Vance; and reprotech entrepreneurs like Noor Siddiqui and Stephen Hsu. Pronatalists generally claim that reproduction among the best and brightest is a social imperative to \u201cmaintain population levels, support economic growth, and preserve cultural and national identities.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

However, they don\u2019t usually espouse that everyone<\/em> should have more babies; they advocate for certain kinds of people<\/em> to have more babies and to use reproductive technology that screens embryos for disability and \u201coptimizes\u201d for intelligence. Indeed, reproductive technology companies like Orchid<\/a> and Genomic Prediction<\/a> claim they can and should screen embryos for genetic variations to select against embryos that have a greater likelihood<\/a> of obesity, intellectual disability, and a myriad of other conditions.  These companies base value on their interpretation of a child\u2019s DNA while the nuances of multifactorial genetics and nurture take a back seat. It\u2019s like these people never watched GATTACA or read <\/em>A Brave New World<\/em><\/a> in high school with its hatcheries based on genetics in a manufactured society.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Evidence of this trend in the news:<\/p>\n\n\n\n