Today, prenatal screening procedures have been part of standard medical practice for decades, mostly directed at the identification of disabilities and illnesses. Through the measurement and quantification of exercise routines, nutrition and even sleep patterns, we can assess whether we are living our lives in the best possible way, so why not have the best baby as well?
To Galton, and to the generations of committed eugenicists who succeeded him, eugenics was politically and morally necessary in order to prevent societal disaster due to degeneration. Eugenics' proposal of wholesale management of the population was thus made in service of a particular ideal of humanity, where the universal"best"was defined in a strikingly narrow way.
Although we may not be immortality-seeking billionaires, we are all constantly living under the relentless imperative to strive for human perfection, in our own generation and the next.