Just because the Nazis did something didn't make that action necessarily evil for all time. The Nazis also ate sauerkraut with sausages, drank beer, had parties and tended to go to bed when they got tired. They put gasoline in the vehicles they drove. They got haircuts. Should those activities be banned for all time as well?
Everything I just listed above is pretty non-offensive. Who argues with the goal of having lunch? Is there something wrong with the goal of making your car go?
If my method of making my car go was to kill babies to render their baby fat into fuel, chances are you'd take issue with it. And with good reason; I'd be a monster and you'd be fairly monstrous if you thought my methods were anything but repellent and evil.
Would my horrible atrocity for the furthering of my goal render driving cars evil for all time?
There was NOTHING good about the way the Nazis went about trying to 'improve' humanity. They trampled people's reproductive freedom, they trampled peoples lives into the dirt. They raped, they tortured, they killed. They were monsters.
I just don't see how anyone can relate giving a loving couple the choice to change the genetic code (or simply the choice to pick which embryo to implant) of their longed-for baby who will be loved and cherished upon birth with sterilizing 400,000 people against their will and repeatedly raping the blond haired women in forced labor camps to try to produce blond offspring which will be taken away it is born.
The idea that there's any similarity between the practices is somewhat staggering. One is a state-run, militarily enforced blight on the history of humanity that changed or ended the lives of millions of people with goals changing humanity on a tremendous scale, the other is the carefully considered choice of a couple of people who want a baby to love who isn't colorblind and might look nice with red hair.
The goals aren't even remotely similar. The methods are so dissimilar that it's hard to believe we're even discussing it this way.
So far everyone in this thread has been pretty much okay with the idea of using genetic tinkering to weed out hereditary illnesses but not with the idea of cherry-picking purely visual traits and the vast majority seem to be saying that their reasoning is that it's what the Nazis did.
But the Nazis had other things in mind than just liking blondes:
Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Nazis were also targeting hereditary illnesses. That's where that 400,000 forced sterilizations number comes from. Did it reduce the instances of hereditary illness in future generations of Germans? With a scope that large, it could hardly have failed to. Never mind that it shattered lives.
But no one should feel as though they were tricked into saying that they thought that something the Nazis did would be okay with them. We're not talking about sterilizing a population, we're talking about tripping a few genes, about selecting a single embryo for implantation in a mother who wants her baby free from some genetic disease that she might otherwise have passed on.
I seem to be writing a novel here. I don't really feel like looking for a publisher, so I'll sum up now:
What this doctor proposed to provide for his patients is utterly unlike anything the Nazis did. When you stop to think and actually compare the scale of what the Nazis tried to do and the atrocities they committed along the way with a single family's decision to lovingly consider their own child's future, it's hard to imagine that any realistic comparison could still remain in anyone's mind.
