It began with a video of a pregnant mother narrating over a sped-up video of her rearranging kitchen furniture. She explained that her family of six was becoming seven and were all living in a one-bedroom apartment. She talked about the difficulties and how all of their children sleep in the living room and kitchen on floor pallets. Overnight, the video gathered 11 million+ views on TikTok, establishing mega viral status…. What followed was outrage.
Within 24-48 hours, “hot take” (called “takes” or “POV”) content condemning the parents sprouted up with equally meteoric popularity. Even small creators reached millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes on videos dissecting the family’s conditions. Commenters chimed in, affirming these critiques, telling personal stories filled with the traumas of poverty that mirrored what was seen in the original video.
This is a typical day on socials, especially TikTok, where strong addiction-inducing algorithms and the intense infinite ability to scroll the “fyp” (for you page) prioritizes harsh, simplistic ideologies over informative or nuanced perspectives. Husband not helpful? Leave him. Friends canceled? Ghost them. Job fired you? Blast company secrets to the stratosphere. Online answers are easy and everyone has them for you, plus the people with the most followers and likes can’t be wrong…. Can they? In this new media environment, many topics quickly devolve into their most harmful forms along lines of political identity. But one thought gathers bipartisan support, woven into the trending judgment of the pregnant mother’s video while it crested across the platform: people in poverty shouldn’t have children.
For bioethicists, saying “__ shouldn’t have children” creates a rash of cringing, with much of our base training starting with eugenics. A cousin of Darwin, geographer, and explorer, Sir Francis Galton spent years consumed by the mysteries of monozygotic twins, before establishing the philosophy of eugenics in 1883. It was his belief that the human race should be augmented through selective breeding (racial improvement), which involved encouraging desirable groups (healthy, athletic, pious, British gentleman class) to procreate with one another. This was intended to eradicate illnesses, “deformities”/disabilities, poor behaviors/social conditions, and inferior racial groups.
Building off Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Mendel’s law of inheritance, Galton identified what groups were undesirable (“hereditary defectives”); those that were disabled, non-white, sex workers, drunks, and poor. The presumption that poverty was the result of lacking moral fiber and displayed a person’s limited merit in life was Puritan in origin. But eugenics had an audience and quickly became a popular theory that shifted man-made systemic disparity into individual responsibility and was punishment from the divine.
Eugenics had a golden era, nestled within the Belle Epoque period as it traveled across Europe and the United States. Eugenicists existed among anthropologists, medical practitioners, sociologists, politicians, urban planners, agriculturalists, biologists/geneticists, etc. Clubs and societies emerged, like the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the Galton Society, pushing eugenics policies into governance through Supreme Court cases such as Buck v. Bell and Skinner v. Oklahoma.
Eugenics inspired WWII atrocities where Germans, fueled to the extreme by the ideology of a racially superior group, exterminated populations deemed non-Aryan and undesirable. With these horrors revealed, so began a descent in eugenics’ overt support. Interest eroded in being intellectually chic by joining the American Eugenics Society or donating to the Race Betterment Foundation.
Eugenics became persona non grata, the term evoking dramatic condemnation from anyone accused of peddling in it. Now, the term is avoided at all costs, but this is where a failure to properly educate people on the ideology has resulted in a resurgence of belief in its core design. The mixture of short-length media content that can be quickly produced by one person (who is often popular from parasocial attraction and vibes) and the ability to broadcast to an underinformed loyal following begets reductionism toward the poor.
“Poor people shouldn’t have kids” is a slogan that circulates social media quarterly. As soon as someone’s impoverished life is presented for public consumption, creators and influencers gather to feast and regurgitate their thoughts. Going viral comes easy for those who condemn those parenting in poverty, bonding with others through demonization.
“I was raised poor, and I wish I hadn’t been born.” “My family had multiple kids living in poverty, and we suffered.”…. The comment sections of these videos are littered with the lived experiences of people damaged by poverty. These anecdotal accounts create angry threads of responses when others, rightfully so, point out that this sentiment is eugenics in its truest nature. Believing the solution to poverty is demanding poor adults not exercise autonomy in family building until they “earn” the financial right to be parents is prime to Galton’s theory of the desirable and defective.
Poverty is a childhood trauma not because of a parenting flaw, but rather the divestment from safety net systems in governance and rampant capitalism that stagnates wages for workers while driving up the cost of goods/services and housing to record levels. Neglectful and abusive parents thrive in every socioeconomic climate, but being poor allows us to generalize our scrutiny. The belief that poor people should not have kids is not a solution because it requires authoritarianism over individual agency in order to adhere. No group of people has ever received shame and criticism and just…. Listened.
But it sounds right, because poverty is trauma and children are harmed by traumatic conditions, therefore children should not be in them. A + B. Leave your husband. Quit that job. What those trading in this belief online lose amidst the deluge of shallow accolades is those children exist, and always will. This belief doesn’t address the reality that there will always be children in poverty as long as poverty persists with ever shrinking supports and resources. Telling parents their children shouldn’t be here doesn’t care for the children who are.
Social media personalities peddling this ideology lament being told their thoughts are eugenics, sharing grievances with followers (while doing some distracting, unrelated action like a face of makeup.) In order to distance themselves from being called something so craven, they hastily pull up Wikipedia, either immaturely unaware or sneakily ignoring that eugenics is not encapsulated in a singular definition like a general noun (cat, bat, rat, hat, eugenics) but instead is a philosophy that has been blended into foundational beliefs about the sociological “other”.
What becomes of a society that prioritizes hot takes from people we have developed emotional loyalties to through a screen over the complexity of concepts? What kind of damaging political fallout could we all incur from the casual repackaging of eugenics and the popularity of unempathetic dehumanization of those experiencing poverty? Who benefits from the general populace comfortably renegotiating who in community is worthy, has value, is human enough? How do we educate about dangerous ideologies as they appear in comfy clothes, casual, embedded amidst an endless scroll of visually similar material? In a time when so many of us are fixated on social apps, hunting for likes and likeability, old pseudoscience has found fertile ground to sow itself. Without reflection, education, and analysis we run the risk of revisiting a dark past, riding into it on algorithms and anti-intellectual opinions for viral reward.
Evan Thornburg, MAUB is a bioethicist, health sciences and humanities communicator and creator on TikTok, and health equity officer working in the Division of HIV Health at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health.
@(TikTok) EVN the (Bio) Ethicist