“You should need a licence to breed”
And other lies.
We’ve been having one of the hottest years on record in Australia due to the spectre of climate change. In the state of Victoria where there were temperatures higher than 40°C (104°F) for a stretch, some 20 children were locked in cars while their parents shopped, drank, ate and did other horrifically selfish things without their children, putting them at serious risk of illness and death. I myself called the police in Canberra because two rather distressed dogs were locked in a car situated quite appropriately outside a pub at 11pm while it was 31°C (88°F) — and none of the many people walking past seemed to have done anything about it.
Thus this latest atrocious pattern of behaviour became yet another trigger for the ongoing catch-cry that “you should need a licence to breed”.
You should need a licence to breed.
Look, I have no problem with people saying this as a (somewhat off-colour) joke. I am a huge fan of black humour. I’m a doctor and most of our humour is (pardon the pun) gallows humour because it’s a way to cope with the bizarre and cruel world.
What I do have a problem with is the fact that I’ve had this “human breeding licence” proposed in all seriousness. By people young and middle-aged. Often by people who are otherwise progressive. And pretty much universally by the middle and upper-middle class.
I’d like to ask, as a doctor who presumably would be forced to participate in this abhorrent scheme, what this “breeding licence” would involve and how one would administer this test.
Before going into what a “breeding test” would involve, it needs to be made clear that if one is to have “breeding licences” then one must also be able to ensure that those without licences are either forcibly sterilised or punished for the crime of conceiving and giving birth.
In the first scenario, like herd animals, we would round up the teenage girls and start giving them Depo-Provera® injections or inserting an Implanon® until they had sat the test and either passed or failed. If they failed, they would either continue to have these methods or they would eventually have their tubes tied. Similarly the teenage boys would be chemically castrated and/or vasectomised.
In the second scenario, we have a system like the Chinese government’s “One Child policy”, except even more extreme- if you don’t meet government requirements, you aren’t meant to make any babies.
Thus, you would end up either in prison and with a baby or with much less money and also with a baby. Presumably, to prevent sudden economic collapse, immigration and/or incentives for more babies would also be offered, much like the Singapore government’s financial incentives for educated females to produce more children.
Fantastic!
Now, to the “breeding licence test”. Most people who propose such a thing think of this as some sort of knowledge and proficiency based test. Perhaps you need to study when to take your child to the doctor, how to change nappies, using “time out” rooms and suchlike.
There are a few problems here. Let’s start with the obvious:
A so-called knowledge and proficiency “parenting test” doesn’t test actual parenting skill.
Then there’s the other obvious point:
A so-called knowledge and proficiency “parenting test” implicitly targets the poor, the illiterate and those for whom English is a second language.
Wouldn’t correcting socioeconomic disparities via social welfare, taxation, health, family planning and education be a better and cheaper way to help children than forced sterilisation?
Oh no, wait, the point is to eliminate the unwashed masses, not to help them! Silly me!
Now here’s something which not many people know:
Rates of childhood vaccination are lowest among the most educated and affluent. In addition, rates of alcohol abuse and drinking in pregnancy are highest in the most educated and affluent despite the fact that most of these people are well aware of the risks.
Knowledge is one thing, but using the knowledge effectively and for the benefit of your child is another.
This is not to say rich and educated people are all bad parents. However they certainly can be bad parents, just as poor or illiterate people can be good parents.
There are, obviously, many factors that go into good parenting, some which are summarised here and include among other things, the personality of the parents themselves.
So, then, here’s a better idea. What about a detailed psychological profile of the parents? One which incorporates substance abuse (or risk thereof), personality disorders and mental illness? What about building an actuarial-style risk factor profile about whether this parent “should breed”. What about genetically profiling the parents to see if they’re likely to have mental illness or substance abuse and pass that onto their children?
I suppose you could make all prospective parents undergo some sort of incredibly rigorous psychiatric evaluation including the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) for psychopathy, the Personality Disorder Beliefs Questionnaire (PDBQ), the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS), evaluation for schizophrenia and psychosis and other measures. You could do a detailed evaluation for substance abuse including asking friends, family members, co-workers about nicotine and alcohol use.
But how many parents would you end up eliminating? Let’s first look at an Australian study in 2007 from the Australian Bureau of Statistics looking at anxiety, depression, substance abuse and other major Axis 1 psychiatric disorders. Among 25-34 year olds — the most reproductively fit adults — the prevalence of mental illness in the past 12 months was a whopping 25%. The lifetime prevalence of mental illness counting all age groups was 45% or almost half the population.
Now, onto slightly rarer things. Schizophrenia is estimated to affect roughly 1% of people over a lifetime. Studies estimate borderline personality disorder, a debilitating illness, to affect roughly 2% of the population. Psychopathy affects a similar proportion, at roughly 2% of the population. There are many other mental illnesses out there too.
So let’s say we — at great cost to the state — eliminate close to half of the population (if we’re feeling nasty) or closer to 20-25% of the population (if we’re feeling nice). Would we still have an effective scheme to only allow “good parents” to parent?
Well, no.
Not all bad parents are mentally ill, abuse substances, have personality disorders, are ignorant, illiterate or are poor.
There are people who fit well within the bounds of “normal” behaviour, socioeconomic privilege and high levels of education who are simply stressed, selfish, don’t get on with their children, have a poor parenting style or don’t have enough social support.
There are plenty of normal people who are bad parents.
I don’t really have to point out the similarities of such a scheme to the eugenics movement do I?
When people think of eugenics they think of Nazi Germany. Hitler was not the only one who advocated eugenics. Compulsory sterilisation programs happened in the United States, South Africa, China, India, Russia, Peru, Canada, Australia, Sweden, much of Europe. In fact in Australia, the forced sterilisation of disabled people is not completely banned. Stella Young, a disability rights campaigner of roughly my age with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic condition which does not impair her intellectual ability in the slightest, was herself almost sterilised at the age of 4 when she was admitted to hospital with a broken leg.
Requiring people to have “a licence to breed” wouldn’t just be expensive and overly bureaucratic. It wouldn’t just be a gross intrusion into privacy, the ability to make one’s own decisions and human rights. It wouldn’t just be an economic disaster. It wouldn’t just be an elitist, abhorrent exercise in bad science. It simply would not work.
(Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Northern Carolina, Charlotte (UNCC) sums up the history and many problems of eugenicist theory much better than I can, here.)
The biggest sign of the hubris of the Educated Middle Classes, both progressive and conservative, is the assumption that they personally, would definitely be the ones who the government would allow to do whatever they want. Because of course no authoritarian government that was in the business of eugenics would ever think of the academics, artists and public servants as a threat and try to discredit or eliminate them like Pol Pot did in Cambodia or Mao did during the Cultural Revolution.
If I’m shocked, it’s because I did not expect such attitudes to be shared by socially progressive, educated, left-leaning people in the 21st century. I thought my fellow tertiary educated, middle class progressives had learnt about 20th century history, biology and ethics. About the horrors of the past and about the need for vigilance and scrutiny of our personal political views.
And yet, eugenics has been pursued in the past by social progressives and proponents of social welfare. Perhaps there’s a lesson in history for me too: it’s entirely possible to have generally ethical views, the best of intentions and still advocate for terrible policy.
It’s not enough to call yourself a progressive and not stand up for human rights, just like it isn’t enough to walk straight past a car with kids or dogs trapped in it on a hot day then decry the parents when you get to your comfortable, air-conditioned home.
