When they make a test gauging finger dexterity, breath control, and embrouchure, sign me up. Except I already know my kids will play double bass or trombone, because I spent too many years as an orchestra manager with eighty thousand violinists and nary a trombone for miles.

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"DB gene?"

"Douche Bag. Yes sir, merely by taking this test you've proved to us that this child will be raised in a no-holds-barred environment where he will be forced to win no matter what the cost. He'll be a prick, but he'll be a successful prick."

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Stupid stuff. How does it feel to graduate High School at 22?

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and be too short for competitive swimming.

Only alleged sport they might have a chance?

Aside from video games, it would be cross country running.

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This is individual people making a choice to not give birth to a child with a very serious genetic defect.

It's a totally different scale. If you think that things like Down's syndrome are natural, that they are provided for us by whatever power exists in the universe, then why are we out there curing cancer, and fixing holes in baby hearts. Why don't we simply allow heart-hole babies to die?

This whole argument is silly. The whole anti-abortion argument is silly because the wording in the bible which is used to prohibit abortion is simply incompatible with the genetic explanation of how a being is created. And the catholic church simply cannot reconcile the real world reality to the existence of the soul without making a fundamental change in how they view the soul-body attachment.

Just do your own thing. The church will catch up in about 400 years.

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As usual, I will buck the IO9 commenter trend and remark that this is positively awful.

People talk ignorantly about slippery slopes all of the time. Well, guess what? *This is* a slippery slope, and we're all sliding down it.

As long as abortion is legal and endorsed, any and every reason can be used to justify its use. There's no ethical dilemma here-- Downs Syndrome diagnosis is bad, of course you can abort the pregnancy. You can have an abortion for simply feeling too bad about your morning, no medical diagnosis required.

The problem here, of course, is whether we shouldn't have children with defects. Well, who defines the defect?

I'll be the first to acknowledge that a child with Down's has it harder than most. But to claim that they "need lifelong care and supervision" is incorrect. They need to be raised by loving and dedicated parents, yes, but they are not invalids who at the age of 18 suddenly become unproductive wards of the state.

If we used "drain on resources" as the sole determinant of the value of a human being, than we might as well kill off all the poor people who pay no income taxes and collect welfare. Or immediately put to death anyone who suffers a paralyzing spinal injury, for they'll be just as much-- natch, *more*-- of a drain on society than any adult living with Down's.

As for fascist arguments, you can leave the state entirely out of this and still find yourself in any number of fascist scenarios.

Here's one easy one: in this wonderful eugenic future, how will you get health insurance for a Down's child? If there is a test to determine whether a fetus has Down's, then I can easily see many health insurers decide they won't cover children (or adults) born with Down's. After all, you could have had the test, and had the abortion-- but you made the choice, so you have to live with it.

At least here in America, we can buy our health insurance, so presumably there will still be a market for "faith baby" insurance. But what about rationed health care systems that can't pay for everything? Hell, Canada and Britain already make you suffer in line to have life-saving surgeries and don't scoff a moment-- how do you think those systems will react to genetic screening?

It won't be a "choice," folks-- it'll be a requirement. And not just for pregnancies, but for everyone alive. The only way you'll get treated is if you're tested-- but the test will tell you (and the state, and the insurers) who is liable to get what. You won't be an insurance risk any longer, you'll be an insurance *certainty*, and thus ineligble for coverage.

We treat human life as disposable at our peril. When we regard the weakest among us only as liabilities or burdens, we eradicate civilization's bulwark against totalitarianism and barbarism.

For someone, somewhere is *always* stronger than the strongest man or woman. This day you may judge people with Down's Syndrome as less deserving than you to live. Tomorrow, someone else may judge the same of you.

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For the reasons so above noted, it doesn't. However, this is also why, say, Fahrenheit 451 is a much more relevant dystopia than 1984: the question isn't whether Big Brother is watching, it's whether there's any difference from that and when everyone is watching Big Brother.

To wit, if we can get everyone to voluntarily do something that's the functional equal, is that different than state enforcement? Better than state enforcement? @Belabras' reference to Gattaca is highly relevant, because it's a SF picture of a society where this problem is realize. No one's enforcing the rules for genetic engineering, just all of us together upon ourselves.

And what scares me about that future is our criteria for selection. I don't know that impressing our criteria on top of what's already there is a grand idea. I know how fashion, fad, and fable can deeply capture the human mind. But I don't really know how to stop it.

And what really worries me, oddly, is the exact opposite. Eugenics is about creating a better - or let's say more viable - next generation, a process that is always going on naturally. This only speeds it up. But how fast? What happens when we get to the point where the next generation is uniformly just plain better than the previous generation?

I do also want to note that, for all this handwringing, I can't imagine a scenario where I didn't opt for all the testing and wouldn't terminate in such a situation.

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