Ableism for reasonable people.

There's a specific form of ableism that "reasonable" people talk themselves into. It goes something like this:

So *Siegfried, who was about to die without issue, and Adolf, who would eventually become the common sire of the entire human race, had both, for admirably unselfish reasons [potentially having huntington's chorea], declined to engage in biologically significant copulation a million years ago.

Thanks for demonstrating, Kurt. The basic idea is that for many people, there is a line when it comes to disability. If you have a disability that crosses that line, they will think of it as "admirably unselfish" of you to decline to have children.

if she had found any advantages in blindness, she could have passed them on.
the Captain luckily turned out not to be a carrier.

If you write a story about genes, and state that certain people's genes are inferior to others, that it's "lucky" they weren't passed on, that they're disadvantageous, what you're doing is eugenics.

I'm a little sensitive to this kind of thing, because I have a disability that crosses the above-mentioned line. When I was diagnosed, my father talked openly about informing other members of the family so they could get tested before deciding to have kids. When I got sterilized, the disability short-circuited the usual "are you sure" discussion, because there was no reason to talk about why I didn't want to have kids; I was being Admirably Unselfish.

The frustrating part of Galapagos for me was that I couldn't decide if Vonnegut was doing it on purpose. I'd love to pitch this at book club, but I have to miss it this month. I lean towards no, because the blind girl referred to in the quote above has my blindness, except he misrepresented it to make it worse for her. I don't know. If it was on purpose as a dig at eugenics, it's too subtle; I'm far too ready to believe he was simply doing the resonable person's eugenics.