Labour's new eugenics

Jock — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 17:59:21 +0100

BBC Scotland reports that Labour in addicts' children plan:

Labour MSP Duncan McNeil has proposed that addicts sign a "social contract", obliging them not to have children until they have beaten their habit.

...which begins to sound like Sweden's infamous eugenics program of sterilising young women they felt oughtn't to have children.

Now, whilst we should of course do everything we can to ensure that we don't inflict on children a home-life from hell, how on earth would withdrawing benefits from women who "slip up" and breach their "contract" and pop out a sprog (and we should always remember that it takes two to make a baby, as I understand it), going to make that resultant child's life any less hellish?

Further, there is the crass assumption that people with addiction problems are bound to be bad parents which listeners to Professor Jo Neale's recent public lecture here at Oxford Brookes University will have learned was an erroneous assumption for the most part. Whilst I did not agree with some of what Jo had to say - most notably that I am firmly in favour of decrminalising, nay legalising and being able to regulate, illicit drugs - she made a poignant case for treating drug users as fully human, deserving of compassion and respect, and acknowledging that the vast majority of them actually crave no more than a "normal life" beyond the drugs.

Labour's invasion of our private lives goes on apace. Pigeon-holing people into convenient categories to make taboos of them. It is, as the Scottish Drugs Forum has apparently described it, "vicious" and "deeply disquieting". We'll take no lectures on public morals from the likes of Prescott and Blair thank you very much.

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Labour's new eugenics