New Vermont Inter-community Breeding Policies

As a geographically isolated nation with a relatively small population, New Vermont adopted a Healthy Breeding campaign, which was strictly enforced throughout most of the 21st century. Components of this campaign included:

• weekly socials to which marriageable males and females were transported so that members of the opposite sex at these events were always from different towns
• comprehensive Family Planning courses, which began when children were twelve and stressed the importance of genetic variation in choosing a mate
• extensive genealogical record-keeping adapted from the pioneering work of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), who remain a powerful religious and political force in New Vermont to this day.
  

New Vermont's efforts to encourage inter-community breeding without having to resort to restrictive laws worked reasonably well in the larger lake and river towns. However, in the more isolated inland areas of New Vermont, the incidence of first cousins marrying led there to an unfortunate narrowing of the gene pool and an above-average incidence of birth defects. By the end of the twenty-first century, extreme mental retardation was so common in some isolated New Vermont villages that frequent cruel jokes in the holosphere referred not just to the “village idiot,” but of entire “idiot villages.”

As a result, New Vermont Eugenics Authorities imposed on these towns policies similar to those the larger towns had adopted on their own. In addition, they required all fertile women in these towns to have quarterly medical checks, involving sonograms and, “if necessary,” abortions. However, violent resistance broke out in a number of these small inland communities, which were populated by Evangelical Christians who had not emigrated after the Great Change to the Evangelical states of the southern USNA. To these Evangelicals, abortion was the greatest sin imaginable, while in-breeding was looked upon as a natural way of maintaining close-knit “believer” communities in a sea of secular infidels. Ultimately, the Authorities decided that these communities weren't worth trying to save and allowed them to go their own way.