Richard Lynn writes in his book Eugenics:
The first of the recent proposals for licenses for parenthood was made in 1980 by the American political scientist Hugh LaFollette (1980). He began by contending that some parents are unfit to rear children, notably those who neglect their children, ill-treat them, subject them to violent physical abuse, and even kill them. He noted that research has shown that a large proportion of the children of unfit parents become criminals. He asserted that these parents are incompetent and that they impose costs on society. To mitigate these costs, LaFollette argued that the state should take steps to prevent these children from being born. To make this proposal effective, he proposed that all couples should be required to obtain a license certifying their competence in child rearing before they are permitted to have children. This was the first use of the term license in this context.
In justification of this proposal, LaFollette pointed out that the state already requires people to acquire a license before they are permitted to undertake a number of activities that might cause social harm if performed incompetently. He gives the example of the automobile driving license. Incompetent drivers are a potential danger to the public, so the state reasonably requires people to demonstrate their driving competence and acquire a license before they are permitted to drive on the public highway. Similarly, physicians, lawyers, and pharmacists are required to obtain licenses certifying their competence. Practicing these professions without a license is illegal. The justification for this is that society would suffer if unqualified people practiced medicine, the law, or pharmacy; and steps need to be taken to ensure that this does not happen. LaFollette argued that the same case can be made for rearing children. Here, too, incompetent parenting imposes social costs; and to prevent these, parenthood should be licensed.
In a further justification of this proposal, LaFollette noted that the state already vets prospective adoptive parents for their fitness to rear children. Why, he asks, do we not allow just anyone to adopt a child? The answer is that we recognize that some people are unfit to rear children and that these people should be screened out in assessing the suitability of couples applying to adopt a child. Because society in effect requires the licensing of prospective adoptive parents, it should extend the principle to natural parents.
As regards the practical implementation of the scheme, LaFollette (1980) proposed that all prospective parents should be assessed for their child rearing competence by a psychological examination. This would consist of a personality assessment that would be designed to identify “the violence-prone, easily frustrated, or unduly self-centered” (p. 191). These are essentially the psychopathic, although he did not use that term.
LaFollette conceded that the psychological examination for fitness for parenthood would not be foolproof. No doubt some couples would be denied the parental license who would make adequate parents, while others would be granted the license who would turn out to be unsatisfactory parents. But, he argued, this is no different from the licensing of automobile drivers, physicians, lawyers, and pharmacists. No doubt a number of those who fail their tests for an automobile license and the qualifying examinations to practice medicine, the law, and pharmacy could nevertheless drive automobiles with-out having accidents and work as physicians, lawyers, and pharmacists without harming the public. Conversely, some of those who pass the automobile driving test turn out to be incompetent drivers, and some people succeed in qualifying as physicians but turn out to be incompetent doctors, and so forth. These competency tests for licensing are blunt instruments, but they unquestionably identify a number of the most incompetent thus protecting the public.
LaFollette realized he would have to consider the problem of the enforcement of his parental licensing plan. He conceded that it would be difficult to prevent unlicensed couples from producing children and suggested that this would best be dealt with by taking away the children of these parents and having them adopted or fostered.
LaFollette did not advance his parental licensing scheme on eugenic grounds. He did not point out that socially pathological behavior is transmitted genetically from parents to children, as well as environmentally, by example and poor child rearing practices. He did not mention low intelligence or mental retardation as disqualifications for obtaining the parental license, nor did he have any proposals to prevent babies being born to unlicensed parents. These are all weaknesses in his scheme. Nevertheless, his proposal was a valuable contribution to challenging the contention that everyone has a right to have children, and it stated the undoubted truth that some couples are unfit to be parents and should be prevented from having children.
Intelligence is not the only important trait now shaped by modern techniques. Medicine has a dysgenic effect on health, since weak children who would ordinarily have died young now survive to have children of their own. In the case of some heritable diseases that can now be treated, there will be a sharp increase in defective genes. In the next 30 years, hemophilia is likely to become 25 percent more common, and cystic fibrosis and phenylketonuria (PKU) will increase by 120 percent and 300 percent.
Prof. Lynn also notes that criminal propensities, which he considers separately from intelligence, are also spreading through the population. Although this is a field that has been almost completely ignored, Prof. Lynn’s own findings are that, at least in Britain, criminals and psychopaths are 77 percent more fertile than other people. Given heritability estimates for criminality derived from twin and adoption studies, Prof. Lynn finds that the excessive fertility of criminals alone probably accounted for a 52 percent crime increase in Britain in a single generation. He considers the spread of criminality a potentially greater problem than the decline of intelligence.
Perhaps the book’s most dismal assertion is that the current reproductive habits of Western populations not only ensure decline, they rule out even the theoretical possibility of genetic improvement. In an era when the most able members of society limit themselves to two or three children, even the most dramatically favorable mutation would have no way to spread through a population. Improvement requires eugenic fertility, which is no longer found in Western populations. They have reached a genetic dead end.
