Staying Alive: Genetics in the Service of the Welfare “People’s Home”

This article aims to contribute to the ongoing debate over population politics and the perceived reinvigoration of eugenic practices in “people’s home” countries. The ability of governments to subsidize genetic technologies or familial lifestyle choices also gives them the ability to choose who has access to these technologies and in so doing the ability to favor the procreation of one group over another. The authors suggest that such subsidization is used under the guise of productivist strategies by nations interested first and foremost in preserving their ethno-national identity. Although these countries, adhering to liberal democratic economics, profess to reward productivity, there seems to be more than a coincidental relationship between the “productive” and the ethnic national stock. The authors use as a case study a comparison between Israel and Sweden to show how such eugenic strategies arose over time in people’s home countries that synthesized productivism and national welfare. They suggest that genetics today is just as prone to being used for purposes of social engineering in welfare states and results in exclusion of individuals and communities. Indeed, as the authors demonstrate, welfare states provide generous benefits such as reproductive technology and child allowances to members of their national stock, at the same time hardly providing benefits to those who do not have share in ethnic membership.