Yes, I know the meaning of the word eugenics. And in the future, if have a problem with my posts, say what it is rather than sarcastically questioning my intelligence.

Eugenics is the attempt to create a superior human race through various methods, ranging from selective breeding to abortion to murdering handicapped or deformed individuals. The practice had substantial support in the US (including from Planned Parenthood) until WWII, when the Nazis adopted eugenics to serve their ideology by justifying mass murder.

I was reminded of eugenics by Hirshman's lament that not enough Americans would allow women "to decide whether to abort—even in face of a physical or mental defect in the prospective child."

I'm sympathetic to a woman who would rather not raise a severely disabled child. But I found Hirshman's article creepy because she doesn't justify abortion as a necessary evil that a woman with a horrible decision might face, but as an expression of a larger ideology that seeks, in some vague, undefined sense, to increase the value of women's lives. The notion of abortion in the service of ideology is analogous to the worst fascist excesses of eugenics.