Thehistory of eugenics is the study of development and advocacy of ideas related toeugenics around the world. Early eugenic ideas were discussed inAncient Greece andRome. The height of the modern eugenics movement came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
According toPlutarch, inSparta every proper citizen's child was inspected by the council of elders, theGerousia, which determined whether or not the child was fit to live.[1] If the child was deemed unfit, the child was thrown into a chasm.[2][3] Plutarch is the sole historical source for the Spartan practice of systemic infanticide motivated by eugenics.[4] Whileinfanticide was practiced by Greeks, no contemporary sources support Plutarch's claims of mass infanticide motivated by eugenics.[5] In 2007 the suggestion that infants were dumped nearMount Taygete was called into question due to a lack of physical evidence. Anthropologist Theodoros Pitsios' research found only bodies from adolescents up to the age of approximately 35.[6][7]
Plato's political philosophy included the belief that human reproduction should be cautiously monitored and controlled by the state throughselective breeding.[8][9]
According toTacitus (c. 56 –c. 120), a Roman of theImperial Period, theGermanic tribes of his day killed any member of their community they deemed cowardly, unwarlike or "stained with abominable vices", usually by drowning them in swamps.[10][11] Modern historians see Tacitus' ethnographic writing as unreliable in such details.[12][13]
Another question entirely is why eugenics rose, and did so in ways whose complexity still grounds a highly active field of study inintellectual history today.
In 1798,Thomas Malthus proposed his hypothesis inAn Essay on the Principle of Population.
He argued that although human populations tend to increase, the happiness of a nation requires a like increase in food production. "The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty, or its riches, upon its youth, or its age, upon its being thinly, or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted population."[14]
However, the propensity for population increase also leads to a natural cycle of abundance and shortages:
We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population...increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions, must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of labourers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease; while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great, that population is at a stand. In the mean time the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land; to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage; till ultimately the means of subsistence become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the labourer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened; and the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated.
— Thomas Malthus, 1798.An Essay on the Principle of Population, Chapter II.
Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
— Thomas Malthus, 1798.An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter VII, p. 61[15]
The idea of progress was at once a social, political and scientific theory. The theory of evolution, as described in Darwin'sThe Origin of Species, provided for many social theorists the necessary scientific foundation for the idea of social and political progress. The termsevolution andprogress were often used interchangeably in the 19th century.[19]
According to the theory of degeneration, a host of individual and social pathologies in a finite network of diseases, disorders and moral habits could be explained by a biologically based affliction. The primary symptoms of the affliction were thought to be a weakening of the vital forces and willpower of its victim. In this way, a wide range of social and medical deviations, including crime, violence, alcoholism, prostitution, gambling, and pornography, could be explained by reference to a biological defect within the individual. The theory of degeneration was therefore predicated on evolutionary theory. The forces of degeneration opposed those of evolution, and those afflicted with degeneration were thought to represent a return to an earlier evolutionary stage.Dysgenics refers to any decrease in the prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or generally adaptive to their environment due toselective pressure disfavouring their reproduction.[20]
In 1915 the term was used byDavid Starr Jordan to describe the supposed deleterious effects of modern warfare on group-level genetic fitness because of its tendency to kill physically healthy men while preserving the disabled at home.[21][22] Similar concerns had been raised by early eugenicists andsocial Darwinists during the 19th century, and continued to play a role in scientific and public policy debates throughout the 20th century.[23]
More recent concerns about supposed dysgenic effects in human populations were advanced by the controversial psychologist and self-described "scientific racist"[24]Richard Lynn, notably in his 1996 bookDysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, which argued that changes inselection pressures and decreasedinfant mortality since theIndustrial Revolution have resulted in an increased propagation of deleterious traits andgenetic disorders.[25][26]
Despite these concerns, genetic studies have shown no evidence for dysgenic effects in human populations.[25][27][28][29] Reviewing Lynn's book, the scholar John R. Wilmoth notes: "Overall, the most puzzling aspect of Lynn's alarmist position is that the deterioration of average intelligence predicted by the eugenicists has not occurred."[30]
SirFrancis Galton (1822–1911) systematized these ideas and practices according to new knowledge about the evolution of man and animals provided by the theory of his half-cousinCharles Darwin during the 1860s and 1870s. After reading Darwin'sOrigin of Species, Galton built upon Darwin's ideas whereby the mechanisms ofnatural selection were potentially thwarted by humancivilization. He reasoned that, since many human societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, those societies were at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest, and only by changing these social policies could society be saved from a "reversion towards mediocrity", a phrase he first coined in statistics and which later changed to the now-common "regression towards the mean".[31] (Incidentally, Galton also coined the phrase "nature versus nurture".)
Galton first sketched out his theory in the 1865 article "Hereditary Talent and Character", then elaborated further in his 1869 bookHereditary Genius.[32] He began by studying the way in which human intellectual, moral, and personality traits tended to run in families. Galton's basic argument was that"genius" and "talent" were hereditary traits in humans, although neither he nor Darwin yet had a working model of this type of heredity. He concluded that, since one could useartificial selection to exaggerate traits in other animals, one could expect similar results when applying such models to humans. As he wrote in the introduction toHereditary Genius:
I propose to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.[33]
Galton claimed that the less intelligent were more fertile than the more intelligent of his time. Galton did not propose any selection methods; rather, he hoped a solution would be found if socialmores changed in a way that encouraged people to see the importance of breeding. He first used the wordeugenic in his 1883Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development,[34] a book in which he meant "to touch on various topics more or less connected with that of the cultivation of race, or, as we might call it, with 'eugenic' questions". He included a footnote to the word "eugenic" which read:
That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek,eugenes namely, good in stock, hereditary endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words,eugeneia, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The wordeugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one thanviriculture which I once ventured to use.[35]
In 1908, inMemories of my Life, Galton defined eugenics as "the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally",[36] a definition agreed in consultation with a committee that included thebiometricianKarl Pearson. It was slightly at odds with Galton's preferred definition, given in a lecture to the newly formed Sociological Society at theLondon School of Economics in 1904: "the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage".[37] The latter definition, which encompassed nurture and environment as well as heredity, was favoured by broadly left-wing, liberal elements of the ensuing ideological divide.[38]
Galton's formulation of eugenics was based on a strongstatistical approach, influenced heavily byAdolphe Quetelet's "social physics". Unlike Quetelet, Galton did not exalt the "average man" but decried him as mediocre. Galton and his statistical heirKarl Pearson developed what was called thebiometrical approach to eugenics, which developed new and complex statistical models (later exported to wholly different fields) to describe the heredity of traits. However, with the rediscovery ofGregor Mendel's laws of heredity, two separate camps of eugenics advocates emerged, one of statisticians, the other of biologists. Statisticians thought the biologists had exceptionally crude mathematical models, while biologists thought the statisticians knew little about biology.[39]
Eugenics eventually referred to human selective reproduction with an intent to create children with desirable traits, generally through the approach of influencingdifferential birth rates. These policies were mostly divided into two categories:positive eugenics, the increased reproduction of those seen to have advantageous hereditary traits; andnegative eugenics, the discouragement of reproduction by those with hereditary traits perceived as poor. Negative eugenic policies in the past have ranged from paying those deemed to have bad genes to voluntarily undergo sterilization, attempts atsegregation,compulsory sterilization, and evengenocide. Positive eugenic policies have typically taken the form of awards or bonuses for "fit" parents who have another child. Relatively innocuous practices such asmarriage counseling had early links with eugenic ideology. Eugenics is superficially related to what later became known asSocial Darwinism. While both claimed intelligence was hereditary, eugenics asserted new policies were needed to actively change the status quo towards a more "eugenic" state, while the Social Darwinists argued that society itself would naturally "check" the problem of "dysgenics" if no welfare policies were in place—for example, the poor might reproduce more but would have higher mortality rates.[40]
Charles Davenport (1866-1944), a scientist from the United States, stands out as one of history's leading eugenicists. He took eugenics from a scientific idea to a worldwide movement implemented in many countries.[41] Davenport obtained funding from the Carnegie Institution, to establish theStation for Experimental Evolution atCold Spring Harbor in 1904[42] and the Eugenics Records Office in 1910, which provided the scientific basis for later Eugenic policies such asenforced sterilization.[43] He was instrumental in building theInternational Federation of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO) in 1925, and became its first president.[44] While Davenport was located at Cold Spring Harbor and received money from theCarnegie Institute of Washington, the organization known as theEugenics Record Office (ERO) started to become an embarrassment after the well-known debates between Davenport andFranz Boas. Davenport continued to occupy the same office and the same address at Cold Spring Harbor, but his organization now became known as the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, which currently retains the archives of the Eugenics Record Office.[45] However, Davenport's racist[clarification needed] views were not supported by all geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor, includingH. J. Muller,Bentley Glass, andEsther Lederberg.[46]
In 1932, Davenport welcomedErnst Rüdin, a prominent Swiss eugenicist and race scientist, as his successor in the position of President of the IFEO.[47] Rüdin, director of theDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Institute for Psychiatry), aKaiser Wilhelm Institute located in Munich,[48] was a co-founder (with his brother-in-lawAlfred Ploetz) of theGerman Society for Racial Hygiene.[49] Ploetz recommended a "racial hygiene" system in which panels of physicians decided whether to grant individualscitizenship oreuthanasia.[50] Other prominent figures in eugenics who were associated with Davenport includedHarry Laughlin (United States),Havelock Ellis (United Kingdom),Irving Fischer (United States),Eugen Fischer (Germany),Madison Grant (United States),Lucien Howe (United States), andMargaret Sanger (United States, founder of aNew York health clinic that later becamePlanned Parenthood). Later Sanger commissioned the firstbirth control pill.[51]
In September 1903, an "Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration" chaired byAlmeric W. FitzRoy was appointed by the government "to make a preliminary enquiry into the allegations concerning the deterioration of certain classes of the population as shown by the large percentage of rejections for physical causes of recruits for theArmy", and gave its Report to both houses of parliament in the following year.[52] Among its recommendations, originating from professorDaniel John Cunningham, were an anthropometric survey of the British population. TheCatholic church was opposed to eugenics, as illustrated in the writings of FatherThomas John Gerrard.[53]
Eugenics was supported by many prominent figures of different political persuasions beforeWorld War I (and aspositive eugenics after the War), including:Liberal economistsWilliam Beveridge andJohn Maynard Keynes;Fabian socialists such as the Irish authorGeorge Bernard Shaw,H. G. Wells,Havelock Ellis,Beatrice Webb andSidney Webb and other literary figures such asD. H. Lawrence; andConservatives such as the future Prime MinisterWinston Churchill andArthur Balfour.[54] The influential economistJohn Maynard Keynes was a prominent supporter of eugenics, serving as Director of theBritish Eugenics Society, and writing that eugenics is "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists".[55]
Francis Galton explained during a lecture in 1901 the groupings which are shown in the opening figure and indicated the proportion of society falling into each group, along with their perceived genetic worth. Galton suggested that negative eugenics (i.e. an attempt to prevent them from bearing offspring) should be applied only to those in the lowest social group (the "Undesirables"), while positive eugenics applied to the higher classes. However, he appreciated the worth of the higher working classes to society and industry.[citation needed]
The1913 Mental Deficiency Act proposed the mass segregation of the "feeble minded" from the rest of society.[56]Sterilisation programmes were never legalised, although some were carried out in private upon the mentally ill by clinicians who were in favour of a more widespread eugenics plan.[57] The Act, however, enabled the formation of residential schools for the "feeble minded" by social workers such asMary Dendy.[58]
Those in support of eugenics shifted their lobbying ofParliament from enforced tovoluntary sterilization, in the hope of achieving more legal recognition.[57] In 1931,Labour PartyMember of ParliamentMajor A. G. Church, proposed aPrivate Member's Bill to legalise the operation for voluntary sterilization. This was rejected by 167 votes to 89.[59] In 1934, theBrock Report of the Departmental Committee on Sterilisation recommended sterilisation of disabled people but the Report's recommendations were not followed by changes to the law.[60]
Two universities (University College London andLiverpool University) established courses on eugenics. TheGalton Institute, affiliated to UCL, was headed by Galton's protégé,Karl Pearson.[61]
In 2008, theBritish Parliament passed a law prohibiting couples from choosingdeaf and disabledembryos for implantation.[62]
One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenics (before it was labeled as such) wasAlexander Graham Bell. In 1881 Bell investigated the rate ofdeafness on Martha's Vineyard,Massachusetts. From this he concluded thatdeafness was hereditary in nature and, through noting that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children, tentatively suggested that couples where both were deaf should not marry, in his lectureMemoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race presented to theNational Academy of Sciences on 13 November 1883.[63][64] However, it was his hobby of livestock breeding which led to his appointment to biologistDavid Starr Jordan's Committee on Eugenics, under the auspices of theAmerican Breeders' Association (ABA). The committee unequivocally extended the principle to humans.[65]
Another scientist considered the "father of the American eugenics movement" wasCharles Benedict Davenport.[66] In 1904 he secured funding for the Station for Experimental Evolution, later renamed the Carnegie Department of Genetics. It was also around that time that Davenport became actively involved with the ABA. This led to Davenport's first eugenics text, "The science of human improvement by better breeding", one of the first papers to connect agriculture and human heredity.[66] Davenport later went on to set up a Eugenics Record Office (ERO), collecting hundreds of thousands of medical histories from Americans, which many considered to have a racist and anti-immigration agenda.[66] Davenport and his views were supported atCold Spring Harbor Laboratory as late as 1963, when his views began to be de-emphasized.
As the science continued in the 20th century, researchers interested in familial mental disorders conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of such illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Their findings were used by the eugenics movement as proof for its cause. State laws were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and were not abolished until the mid-20th century. All in all, 60,000 Americans were sterilized.[67]
Michigan became the first state to introduce acompulsory sterilization bill on May 16, 1897. However, the law did not pass. The proposed law, which called for the mandatory castration of defined types of criminals and "degenerates," fails to pass in the legislature but sets a precedent for similar laws.[68] In 1907Indiana became the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed atcompulsory sterilization of certain individuals.[69] Although the law was overturned by theIndiana Supreme Court in 1921,[70] theU.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of aVirginia law allowing for thecompulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.[71]
Beginning withConnecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic,imbecile orfeeble-minded" from marrying. In 1898Charles B. Davenport, a prominent Americanbiologist, began as director of a biological research station based inCold Spring Harbor where he experimented with evolution in plants and animals. In 1904 Davenport received funds from theCarnegie Institution to found the Station for Experimental Evolution. TheEugenics Record Office (ERO) opened in 1910 while Davenport andHarry H. Laughlin began to promote eugenics.[72]
W. E. B. Du Bois maintained the basic principle of eugenics: that different persons have different inborn characteristics that make them more or less suited for specific kinds of employment, and that by encouraging the most talented members of all races to procreate would better the "stocks" of humanity.[73][74]
TheImmigration Restriction League (founded in 1894) was the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. The League sought to bar what it considered dysgenic members of certain races from entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American racial stock through procreation. They lobbied for aliteracy test forimmigrants, based on the belief that literacy rates were low among "inferior races". Literacy test bills were vetoed by PresidentWilliam McKinley in 1897 and by PresidentWoodrow Wilson in 1913 and 1915; eventually, President Wilson's second veto was overruled by Congress in 1917. Membership in the League included:A. Lawrence Lowell, president ofHarvard University,William DeWitt Hyde, president ofBowdoin College, James T. Young, director ofWharton School, andDavid Starr Jordan, president ofStanford University. The League allied themselves with the American Breeder's Association to gain influence and further its goals and in 1909 established a eugenics committee chaired by David Starr Jordan with members Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell,Vernon Kellogg,Luther Burbank,William Earnest Castle,Adolf Meyer, H. J. Webber and Friedrich Woods.[75] The ABA's immigration legislation committee, formed in 1911 and headed by League's founder Prescott F. Hall, formalized the committee's already strong relationship with the Immigration Restriction League.[75]
In years to come, the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, thepsychologistHenry H. Goddard and the conservationistMadison Grant (all well respected in their time) began to lobby for various solutions to the problem of the "unfit". (Davenport favoredimmigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods; Goddard favored segregation in hisThe Kallikak Family; Grant favored all of the above and more, even entertaining the idea of extermination.)[76] Though their methodology and research methods are now understood as highly flawed, at the time this was seen as legitimate scientific research.[77] It did, however, have scientific detractors (notably,Thomas Hunt Morgan, one of the few Mendelians to explicitly criticize eugenics), though most of these focused more on what they considered the crude methodology of eugenicists, and the characterization of almost every human characteristic as being hereditary, rather than the idea of eugenics itself.[78]
Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. TheU.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1927Buck v. Bell case that the state ofVirginia could sterilize individuals under theVirginia Sterilization Act of 1924. The most significant era ofeugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenics legislation in the United States.[79] A favorable report on the results of sterilization inCalifornia, the state with the most sterilizations by far, was published in book form by the biologistPaul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane.
Such legislation was passed in the U.S. because of widespread public acceptance of the eugenics movement, spearheaded by efforts of progressive reformers.[80] Over 19 million people attended thePanama-Pacific International Exposition inSan Francisco, open for 10 months from February 20 to December 4, 1915.[81] The PPIE was a fair devoted to extolling the virtues of a rapidly progressing nation, featuring new developments in science, agriculture, manufacturing and technology. A subject that received a large amount of time and space was that of the developments concerning health and disease, particularly the areas oftropical medicine and race betterment (tropical medicine being the combined study ofbacteriology,parasitology andentomology while racial betterment being the promotion of eugenic studies). Having these areas so closely intertwined, it seemed that they were both categorized in the main theme of the fair, the advancement of civilization. Thus in the public eye, the seemingly contradictory areas of study were both represented under progressive banners of improvement and were made to seem like plausible courses of action to better American society.[82]
The state of California was at the vanguard of the American eugenics movement, performing about 20,000 sterilizations or one-third of the 60,000 nationwide from 1909 up until the 1960s.[81] By 1910, there was a large and dynamic network of scientists, reformers and professionals engaged in national eugenics projects and actively promoting eugenic legislation. The American Breeder's Association was the first eugenic body in the U.S., established in 1906 under the direction of biologist Charles B. Davenport. The ABA was formed specifically to "investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood". Membership included Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford president David Starr Jordan and Luther Burbank.[83]
When Nazi administrators went on trial forwar crimes inNuremberg afterWorld War II, they attempted to justify the mass sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration.[67] The Nazis had claimed American eugenicists inspired and supported Hitler's racial purification laws, and failed to understand the connection between those policies and the eventual genocide of theHolocaust.[84]
The idea of "genius" and "talent" is also considered byWilliam Graham Sumner, a founder of the American Sociological Society (now called theAmerican Sociological Association). He maintained that if the government did not meddle with the social policy oflaissez-faire, a class of genius would rise to the top of the system ofsocial stratification, followed by a class of talent. Most of the rest of society would fit into the class of mediocrity. Those who were considered to be defective (mentally delayed,handicapped, etc.) had a negative effect on social progress by draining off necessary resources. They should be left on their own to sink or swim. But those in the class of delinquent (criminals, deviants, etc.) should be eliminated from society ("Folkways", 1907).
However, methods of eugenics were applied to reformulate more restrictive definitions of white racial purity in existing state laws banninginterracial marriage: the so-calledanti-miscegenation laws. The most famous example of the influence of eugenics and its emphasis on strict racial segregation on such "anti-miscegenation" legislation was Virginia'sRacial Integrity Act of 1924.[citation needed] TheU.S. Supreme Court overturned this law in 1967 inLoving v. Virginia, and declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
With the passage of theImmigration Act of 1924, eugenicists for the first time played an important role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe.[85] While eugenicists did support the act, they were also backed by many labor unions.[86] The new act, inspired by the eugenic belief in the racial superiority of "old stock" white Americans as members of the "Nordic race" (a form ofwhite supremacy), strengthened the position of existing laws prohibiting race-mixing.[87] Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption ofincest laws in much of the U.S. and were used to justify manyanti-miscegenation laws.[88]
Stephen Jay Gould asserted that restrictions onimmigration passed in the United States during the 1920s (and overhauled in 1965 with theImmigration and Nationality Act) were motivated by the goals of eugenics. During the early 20th century, the United States and Canada began to receive far higher numbers of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. It has been argued that this stirred both Canada and the United States into passing laws creating a hierarchy of nationalities, rating them from the most desirableAnglo-Saxon andNordic peoples to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who were almost completely banned from entering the country.[89] Others, however, argued that Congress gave virtually no consideration to these factors, and claim the restrictions were motivated primarily by a desire to maintain the country's cultural integrity against the heavy influx of foreigners.[90]
In the US, eugenics supporters includedTheodore Roosevelt.[91] Research was funded by distinguished philanthropies and carried out at prestigious universities.[92] It was taught in college and high school classrooms.[93] In its time eugenics was touted by some as scientific and progressive;[80] the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life. Before the realization ofdeath camps inWorld War II, the idea that eugenics would lead togenocide was not taken seriously by the average American.
The policy of removing mixed-raceAboriginal children from their parents emerged from an opinion based on Eugenics theory in late 19th and early 20th centuryAustralia that the 'full-blood'tribal Aborigine would be unable to sustain itself, and was doomed to inevitable extinction, as at the time huge numbers of aborigines were in fact dying out, from diseases caught from European settlers.[94] Anideology at the time held that mankind could be divided into a civilizational hierarchy. This notion supposed that NorthernEuropeans were superior in civilization and that Aborigines were inferior. According to this view, the increasing numbers of mixed-descent children in Australia, labeled as "half-castes" (or alternatively "crossbreeds", "quadroons", and "octoroons") should develop within their respective communities, white or aboriginal, according to their dominant parentage.[95]
In the first half of the 20th century, this led to policies and legislation that resulted in the removal of children from their tribe.[96]The stated aim was toculturally assimilatemixed-descent people into contemporary Australian society. In all states and territories legislation was passed in the early years of the 20th century which gave Aboriginal protectors guardianship rights over Aborigines up to the age of sixteen or twenty-one. Policemen or other agents of the state (such as Aboriginal Protection Officers), were given the power to locate and transfer babies and children of mixed descent from their communities into institutions. In these Australian states and territories, half-caste institutions (both government ormissionary) were established in the early decades of the 20th century for the reception of these separated children.[97][98] The 2002 movieRabbit-Proof Fence portrays a true story about this system and the harrowing consequences of attempting to overcome it.
In 1922,A.O. Neville was appointed the secondWestern Australia StateChief Protector of Aborigines. During the next quarter-century, he presided over the now notorious 'Assimilation' policy of removing mixed-raceAboriginal children from their parents.
Neville believed that biological absorption was the key to 'uplifting the Native race'. Speaking before theMoseley Royal Commission, which investigated the administration of Aboriginals in 1934, he defended the policies offorced settlement, removing children from parents, surveillance, discipline and punishment, arguing that "they have to be protected against themselves whether they like it or not. They cannot remain as they are. The sore spot requires the application of the surgeon's knife for the good of the patient, and probably against the patient's will". In his twilight years, Neville continued to actively promote his policy. Towards the end of his career, Neville publishedAustralia's Coloured Minority, a text outlining his plan for the biological absorption of aboriginal people into white Australia.[99][100]
The idea of Social Darwinism was widespread amongBrazil's leading scientists, educators, social thinkers, as well as many elected officials, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This led to the "Politica de Branqueamento" (Whitening Policies) set in practice in Brazil in the early part of the 20th century. This series of laws intended to enlarge the numbers of thewhite race inBrazil throughmiscegenation with European immigrants.
The first official organized movement of eugenics inSouth America was a Eugenics Conference in April 1917, which was followed in January 1918 by the founding of the São Paulo Society of Eugenics. This society worked with health agencies and psychiatric offices to promote their ideas. The year 1931 saw the foundation of the "Comitê Central de Eugenismo" (Central Committee on Eugenics) presided by Renato Kehl. Among its suggestions were an end to the immigration of non-whites to Brazil, and the spread of policies against miscegenation.[102]
The ideas of the Central Committee on Eugenics clashed with the Whitening Policies of the beginning of the 20th century. While the Whitening Policies advocated miscegenation in order to reduce the numbers of pure Africans in Brazil in favor of mulattos, who were expected to then produce white off-spring – a policy very similar to the "uplifting the Native race" in Australia – the Central Committee on Eugenics advocated no miscegenation at all and separation between the whites and non-whites in Brazil. When it became obvious that the future of Brazil was inindustrialization (just as it was for other countries around the world), Brazil had to face whether they had a working force capable of being absorbed by an industrial society.[dubious –discuss][citation needed]
A new ideology was needed to counter such racialist claims. This ideology, known asLusotropicalism, was associated withGilberto Freyre, and became popular throughout thePortuguese Empire: specifically,Brazil andAngola. Lusotropicalism claimed that its large population of mixed-race people made Brazil the most capable country in tropical climates to carry out a program of industrialization.[dubious –discuss] Its mixed-race population had the cultural and intellectual capabilities provided by the white race,[citation needed] which could not work in tropical climates, combined with the physical ability to work in tropical climates, provided by the African black race. This excluded the fact that white prisoners, working under penal servitude inPuerto Rico, seemed quite capable of working in a tropical environment.[citation needed]
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the work of theRockefeller Foundation was decisive for the implementation of public health initiatives in Brazil, especially in the so-called public health movement. At that time, Brazilian eugenics was the same as public health, as expressed in the maxim "to sanitize is to eugenize".[103]
In Canada, the eugenics movement gained support early in the 20th century as prominent physicians drew a direct link between heredity and public health.[104] Eugenics was enforced by law in two Canadian provinces. InAlberta, theSexual Sterilization Act was enacted in 1928, focusing the movement on the sterilization ofmentally deficient individuals, as determined by theAlberta Eugenics Board.[105] The campaign to enforce this action was backed by groups such as the United Farm Women's Group, including key memberEmily Murphy.[106]
As in many other formerBritish Empire colonies, eugenic policies were linked to racist (and racialist) agendas pursued by various levels of government, such as theforced sterilization of Canada's indigenous peoples and specific provincial government initiatives, such asAlberta's eugenics program. As a brief illustration, in 1928 the province of Alberta started an initiative, "…allowing any inmate of a native residential school to be sterilized upon the approval of the school Principal. At least 3,500 Indian women are sterilized under this law."[107] As of 2011, research into extant archival records ofsterilization and direct killing ofFirst Nations youth (through intentional transmission of disease and other means) under the residential school program is ongoing.[108]
Individuals were assessed usingIQ tests like theStanford-Binet. This posed a problem to newimmigrants arriving in Canada, as many had not mastered theEnglish language, and often their scores denoted them as having impaired intellectual functioning. As a result, many of those sterilized under theSexual Sterilization Act were immigrants who were unfairly categorized.[109] The province ofBritish Columbia enacted its ownSexual Sterilization Act in 1933. As in Alberta, the British Columbia Eugenics Board could recommend the sterilization of those it considered to be suffering from "mental disease or mental deficiency".[110]
Although not enforced by laws as it was inCanada's western provinces, an obscenity trial inDepression-eraOntario, can be seen as an example of the influence of eugenics in Ontario.Dorothea Palmer, a nurse working for the Parents Information Bureau – a privately funded birth control organization based out ofKitchener, Ontario – was arrested in the predominantly Catholic community ofEastview, Ontario in 1936. She was accused of illegally providing birth control materials and knowledge to her clients, primarily poor women. The defense at her trial was mounted by an industrialist and influential eugenicist from Kitchener,A.R. Kaufman. Palmer was acquitted in early 1937. The trial lasted less than a year, and later became known asThe Eastview Birth Control Trial, demonstrating the influence of the eugenics lobby in Ontario.
The popularity of the eugenics movement peaked during theDepression when sterilization was widely seen as a way of relieving society of the financial burdens imposed by defective individuals.[111] Although the eugenics excesses ofNazi Germany diminished the popularity of the eugenics movement, theSexual Sterilization Acts of Alberta and British Columbia were not repealed until 1972.[112]
Nazi Germany underAdolf Hitler was well known for eugenics programs which attempted to maintain a "pure"Aryan race through a series of programs that ran under the banner ofracial hygiene. Among other activities, the Nazis performed extensive experimentation on live human beings to test their genetic theories, ranging from simple measurement of physical characteristics to the research forOtmar von Verschuer carried out byKarin Magnussen using "human material" gathered byJosef Mengele on twins and others atAuschwitz death camp.[113] During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazi regime usedforced sterilization on hundreds of thousands of people whom they viewed as mentally ill, an estimated 400,000 between 1934 and 1937. The scale of the Nazi program prompted one American eugenics advocate to seek an expansion of their program, with one complaining that "the Germans are beating us at our own game."[114]
The Nazis went further, however, murdering tens of thousands of the institutionalized disabled through compulsory "euthanasia" programs such asAktion T4. They usedgas chambers and lethal injections to murder their victims.[115]
They also implemented a number of "positive" eugenics policies, giving awards toAryan women who had large numbers of children and encouraged a service in which "racially pure" single women could deliver illegitimate children. Allegations that such women were also impregnated bySS officers in theLebensborn were not proven at the Nuremberg trials, but new evidence (and the testimony of Lebensborn children) has established more details about Lebensborn practices.[116] Also, "racially valuable" children from occupied countries were forcibly removed from their parents and adopted by German people. Many of their concerns for eugenics and racial hygiene were also explicitly present in their systematic murder of millions of "undesirable" people, especiallyJews who were singled out for theFinal Solution, this policy led to the horrors seen in theHolocaust.[117]
The scope and coercion involved in the German eugenics programs along with a strong use of the rhetoric of eugenics and so-called "racial science" throughout the regime created an indelible cultural association between eugenics and theThird Reich in the post-war years.[118]
The ideas of eugenics and race were used, in part, as justification for German colonial expansion throughout the world. Germany, as well as Great Britain, sought to seize the colonial territories of other 'dying' empires which could no longer protect their possessions. Examples included China, the Portuguese Empire, theSpanish Empire, theDutch Empire and theDanish Empire.
Thus the colonies Germany required for her bursting population, as markets for her overproductive industries and sources of vital raw materials, and as symbols of her world power would simply have to be taken from weaker nations, so the pan-Germans asserted publicly and the German government believed secretly.[119]
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German colonies in Africa from 1885 to 1918 includedGerman South-West Africa (present-dayNamibia),Kamerun (present-dayCameroon),Togoland (present-dayTogo) andGerman East Africa (present-dayTanzania.Rwanda andBurundi).Genocide was carried out there, against theHerero people of present-day Namibia and later a programme of research in physical anthropology was conducted using their skulls.
The rulers of German South West Africa carried out a programme of genocide against the aboriginal Herero people. One of the officials enacting this program was GeneralAdrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha.
The 1918 British "Bluebook" documented the genocide that took place atShark Island andWindhoek Concentration Camps, including photographs.[122] The Bluebook was used as a negotiating tool by the British at the end of World War I to gain control of what had been German Southwest Africa, after Germany was defeated.[123]
Skulls of the Herero were collected fromRehoboth, Namibia in about 1904, for the purpose of demonstrating the supposed physical inferiority of these people. TheKaiser Wilhelm Institute used the Herero skulls by 1928.[124]
The physical anthropologists used measurements of skull capacity, etc., in an attempt to prove that Jews, Blacks and Italians were inherently "inferior" to Whites. Examples of such activity were found from about 1928 at theKaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. This contrasted with a lot of 19th-century German anthropology which was generally more cosmopolitan.[125]
Eugen Fischer of theKaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics and his students carried out "Bastard studies" anthropological studies ofmixed race people throughout the German colonial empire, including the colonies in Africa and the Pacific.[126] Fischer also worked with the United States eugenicistCharles Davenport.
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Rita Hauschild, a doctoral student and then staff member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Human Heredity, Anthropology, and Eugenics, carried out "bastard studies", anthropometric studies of mixed-heritage populations inTrinidad andVenezuela, in pursuit of the Nazi doctrine of "racial hygiene". Her research was at first confined toTovar,Venezuela, a former German colony, and was extended toTrinidad with support from theUK Foreign Office. The populations studied, in 1935 to 1937, were "Chinese-Negro hybrids" in Trinidad, "Chinese-Indian" and "Chinese-Negro" "hybrids" in Venezuela.[127] In addition, Johannes Schaeuble engaged in "bastard studies" in Chile.
In the early part of theShōwa era, Japanese governments executed a eugenics policy to limit the birth of children with "inferior" traits, as well as aiming to protect the life and health of mothers.[128] TheRace Eugenic Protection Law was submitted from 1934 to 1938 to theImperial Diet. After four amendments, this draft was promulgated as theNational Eugenic Law in 1940 by theKonoe government.[129] According to theEugenic Protection Law (1948), sterilization could be enforced on criminals "with genetic predisposition to commit crime", patients with genetic diseases such astotal color-blindness,hemophilia,albinism andichthyosis, and mental affections such asschizophrenia, andmanic-depressiveness, and those withepilepsy.[130] Mental illnesses were added in 1952.
TheLeprosy Prevention laws of 1907, 1931 and 1953, the last one only repealed in 1996, permitted the segregation of patients in sanitariums whereforced abortions andsterilization were common, even if the laws did not refer to it, and authorized punishment of patients "disturbing peace", as most Japanese leprologists believed that vulnerability to the disease was inheritable.[131] There were a few Japanese leprologists such as Noburo Ogasawara who argued against the "isolation-sterilization policy" but he was denounced as a traitor to the nation at the 15th conference of the Japanese Association of Leprology in 1941.[132]
One of the last eugenic measures of the Shōwa regime was taken by theHigashikuni government. On 19 August 1945, theHome Ministry ordered local government offices to establish aprostitution service forAllied occupation soldiers to preserve the "purity" of the "Japanese race". The official declaration stated: "Through the sacrifice of thousands of "Okichis" of theShōwa era, we shall construct adike to hold back the mad frenzy of the occupation troops and cultivate and preserve the purity of our race long into the future..."[133]
Early in theJapanese administration of Korea, staff at the Japanese Association of Leprology attempted to discourage marriage between Japanese women and Korean men who had been recruited from the peninsula as laborers following its annexation by Japan in 1910. In 1942, a survey report argued that "the Korean laborers brought to Japan... are of the lower classes and therefore of inferior constitution...By fathering children with Japanese women, these men could lower the caliber of theYamato minzoku".[134] However, eugenics pioneer Unno Kōtoku ofRyukyu University influentially argued based onheterosis in plants that exclusive Japaneseendogamy might cause "degeneration" of the Japanese race. Since he regarded intermarriage with white or black people as "disastrous", he advocated intermarriage withKoreans, whose "inferior" physical characteristics would be subsumed by the "superior" Japanese, according to his thinking.[135] Japanese-Korean intermarriage was promoted by the government in Korea usingserological studies that claimed to prove that Japanese and Koreans had the same pure ancestral origin.[136]
After independence in the late 1940s,Brian Reynolds Myers argues that bothNorth andSouth Korea continued to perpetuate the idea of an ethnically homogeneousKorean nation based on a divine single bloodline.[137] This "pure-blood-ism" (순혈주의) is a source of pride for many Koreans, and informsKorean nationalism, politics, and foreign relations.[138][139] In South Korea, anethnic nationalism tinged with pure blood ideology sustained the dictatorships ofSyngman Rhee andPark Chung-hee,[140] and it still serves as a unifying ideology, as Myers argues, inNorth Korea.[137] Deep-seated cultural biases originating in eugenics policiesresult in discrimination againstmultiracial people in South Korea, according to the United NationsCommittee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.[141][142]
In the 20th century, the idea of eugenics was imported to South Korea from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.[143][144] During the 1970s and 80s, themilitary dictatorships of theFourth andFifth Republics ofSouth Korea established variousinternment andconcentration camps, most famously the so-calledBrothers Home, which forcibly detained people from the lower classes (often falsely accused of being homeless).[145] Additionally, from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s, these dictatorships, as well as the currently rulingSixth Republic which succeeded them, sterilizedmentally ill andintellectually disabled individuals; the exact number of individuals sterilized is not known. A law imposed byPark Chung-Hee permitting the involuntary sterilization of mentally ill or mentally retarded South Koreans was repealed only in 1997.[146]
Eugenics was one of many ideas and programs debated in the 1920s and 1930s inRepublican China, as a means of improving society and raising China's stature in the world. The principal Chinese proponent of eugenics was the prominent sociologistPan Guangdan, and a significant number of intellectuals entered into the debate, includingGao Xisheng, biologistZhou Jianren, sociologistChen Da, andChen Jianshan, and many others.[147][148] Chen Da is notable for the link he provides to thefamily planning policy andOne Child Policy enacted in China after the establishment of thePeople's Republic of China.
Other countries that adopted some form of eugenics program at one time includeSweden,Denmark,Estonia,Finland,France,Iceland,Norway, andSwitzerland with programs to sterilize people the government declared to be mentally deficient.[154] In Denmark, the first eugenics law was passed in 1926, under theSocial Democrats, with more legislation being passed in 1932. Though the sterilization was initially voluntary (at least theoretically), the law passed in 1932 allowed for involuntary sterilization of some groups.[155]
Beginning in the late 1920s, greater appreciation of the difficulty of predicting characteristics of offspring from their heredity, and scientists' recognition of the inadequacy of simplistic theories of eugenics, undermined whatever scientific basis had been ascribed to the social movement. As theGreat Depression took hold, criticism of economic value as a proxy for human worth became increasingly compelling.[156] After the experience of Nazi Germany, many ideas about "racial hygiene" and "unfit" members of society were discredited.[157] TheNuremberg Trials against former Nazi leaders revealed to the world many of the regime's genocidal practices and resulted in formalized policies of medical ethics and the 1950UNESCO statement on race. Many scientific societies released their own similar "race statements" over the years, and theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights, developed in response to abuses during the Second World War, was adopted by theUnited Nations in 1948 and affirmed, "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family."[158] In continuation, the 1978UNESCO declaration on race and racial prejudice states that the fundamental equality of all human beings is the ideal toward which ethics and science should converge.[159]
In reaction to Nazi abuses, eugenics became almost universally reviled in many of the nations where it had once been popular (however, some eugenics programs, including sterilization, continued quietly for decades). Many pre-war eugenicists engaged in what they later labeled "crypto-eugenics", purposefully taking their eugenic beliefs "underground" and becoming respected anthropologists, biologists and geneticists in the postwar world (includingRobert Yerkes in the U.S. andOtmar von Verschuer in Germany).[citation needed] Californian eugenicistPaul Popenoe foundedmarriage counseling during the 1950s, a career change which grew from his eugenic interests in promoting "healthy marriages" between "fit" couples.[160][better source needed]
In 1957, a special meeting of Britain's Eugenics Society discussed ways to stem losses in membership, including the suggestion "that the Society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful with the US Eugenics Society". In February 1960 the Council resolved to pursue "activities in crypto-eugenics...vigorously" and "specifically" to increase payments to theFamily Planning Association and theInternational Planned Parenthood Federation. The subsequent sale of a birth-control clinic (the bequest of DrMarie Stopes) to DrTim Black and the change of Society's name toGalton Institute (on the grounds that it was "less evocative") align with the Society's crypto-eugenic policy.[161]
TheAmerican Life League, an opponent of abortion, charges that eugenics was merely "re-packaged" after the war, and promoted anew in the guise of the population-control and environmentalism movements. They claim, for example, thatPlanned Parenthood was funded and cultivated by the Eugenics Society for these reasons.Julian Huxley, the first Director-General ofUNESCO and a founder of theWorld Wildlife Fund, was also a Eugenics Society president and a strong supporter of eugenics.[162]
[E]ven though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable. --Julian Huxley[163]
High school and college textbooks from the 1920s through the 1940s often had chapters touting the scientific progress to be had from applying eugenic principles to the population. Many early scientific journals devoted to heredity in general were run by eugenicists and featured eugenics articles alongside studies of heredity in nonhuman organisms. Even the names of some journals changed to reflect new attitudes. For example,Eugenics Quarterly becameSocial Biology in 1969 (the journal still exists today, though it looks little like its predecessor). Notable members of theAmerican Eugenics Society (1922–94) during the second half of the 20th century includedJoseph Fletcher, originator ofSituational ethics;Clarence Gamble of theProcter & Gamble fortune; andGarrett Hardin, apopulation control advocate and author of the essayThe Tragedy of the Commons.
In the United States, the eugenics movement had largely lost most popular and political support by the end of the 1930s, while forced sterilizations mostly ended in the 1960s with the last performed in 1981.[164] Many US states continued to prohibit biracial marriages with "anti-miscegenation laws" such as Virginia'sRacial Integrity Act of 1924, until they were overruled by the Supreme Court in 1967 inLoving v. Virginia.[165] TheImmigration Restriction Act of 1924, which was designed to limit the immigration of "dysgenic"Italians, andeastern European Jews, was repealed and replaced by theImmigration and Nationality Act in 1965.[166]
However, some prominent academics continued to support eugenics after the war. In 1963 theCiba Foundation convened a conference in London under the title "Man and His Future", at which three distinguished biologists and Nobel laureates (Hermann Muller,Joshua Lederberg, andFrancis Crick) all spoke strongly in favor of eugenics.[167][better source needed] A few nations, notably the Canadian province ofAlberta, maintained large-scale eugenics programs, including forced sterilization of mentally handicapped individuals, as well as other practices, until the 1970s.[168]
Beginning in the 1980s, the history and concept of eugenics were widely discussed as knowledge aboutgenetics advanced significantly, making practicalgenetic engineering, which has been widely used to producegenetically modified organisms, withgenetically modified foods being most visible to the general public. Endeavors such as theHuman Genome Project made the effective modification of the human species seem possible again (as did Darwin's initial theory of evolution in the 1860s, along with the rediscovery ofMendel's laws in the early 20th century). Article 23 of theConvention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities prohibits compulsory sterilization of disabled individuals and guarantees their right to adopt children.
A few scientific researchers such as psychologistRichard Lynn, psychologistRaymond Cattell, and scientistGregory Stock have openly called for eugenic policies using modern technology, but they represent a minority opinion in current scientific and cultural circles.[169] One attempted implementation of a form of eugenics was a "genius sperm bank" (1980–99) created byRobert Klark Graham, from which nearly 230 children were conceived (the best-known donors wereNobel Prize winnersWilliam Shockley andJ. D. Watson). After Graham died in 1997 funding ran out, and within two years his sperm bank had closed.[170]
Richard J. Herrnstein andCharles Murray's bookThe Bell Curve argued that immigration from countries with lownational IQ is undesirable. According toRaymond Cattell, "when a country is opening its doors to immigration from diverse countries, it is like a farmer who buys his seeds from different sources by the sack, with sacks of different average quality of contents".[171]
With thePeople's Republic of China's 1950 Marriage Law stating that "impotence,venereal disease,mental disorder andleprosy", as well as any other diseases seen by medical science as making a person unfit to marry, were grounds for prohibition frommarriage. The 1980 law dropped all specific conditions bar leprosy, and the 2001 law now specifies no conditions, simply approval by a medical doctor.[172]
Various provinces began to pass laws barring certain classes of people, such as the mentally delayed, from reproducing in the late 1980s.[172] The Chinese Maternal and Infant Health Care Law (1994), which has been referred to as the "Eugenic Law" in the West, required a health check prior to marriage. Carriers of certain genetic diseases were allowed to marry only if they are sterilized, or agree to use some other form of long-term contraception.[173] Though the requirement for the health check has been dropped at the national level, it continues to be required by some provinces. Local medical doctors make the decision on who is "unfit" to marry.[172] Much Western comment on the law has been critical, but many Chinese geneticists are supportive of the policy.[174]
In the Chinese province ofSichuan in 1999, a sperm bank called Notables' Sperm Bank opened, with professors as the only permitted donors. The semen bank was approved by the authority for family planning in the provincial capitalChengdu.[175]
Inpostwar Japan, theEugenic Protection Law (ja:優生保護法,Yusei Hogo Hō) was enacted in 1948 to replace the National Eugenic Law of 1940.[176] The main provisions allowed for the surgical sterilization of women, when the woman, her spouse, or family member within the 4th degree of kinship had a seriousgenetic disorder, and where pregnancy would endanger the life of the woman. The operation required consent of the woman, her spouse and the approval of the Prefectural Eugenic Protection Council.[177]
The law also allowed forabortion for pregnancies in the cases ofrape,leprosy,hereditary-transmitted disease, or if the physician determined that the fetus would not be viable outside of the womb. Again, the consent of the woman and her spouse were necessary.Birth control guidance and implementation was restricted to doctors, nurses and professionalmidwives accredited by the Prefectural government. The law was also amended in May 1949 to allow abortions for economic reasons at the sole discretion of the doctor, which in effect fully legalized abortion in Japan.[177]
Although the law's wording is unambiguous, it was used by local authorities as justification for measures enforcingforced sterilization and abortions upon people with certaingenetic disorders, as well asleprosy, as well as an excuse for legalized discrimination against people with physical and mental handicaps.[178]
In Russia, one supporter of preventive eugenics is the president of theIndependent Psychiatric Association of RussiaYuri Savenko, who justifiesforced sterilization of women, which is practiced in Moscow psychoneurological nursing homes. He states that “one needs a more strictly adjusted and open control for the practice of preventive eugenics, which, in itself, is, in its turn, justifiable.”[179] In 1993, thehealth minister of theRussian Federation issued the order that determined the procedure offorced abortion and sterilization of disabled women and the need for court decision to perform them.[180] The order was repealed by the head ofMinistry of Health and Social Development of the Russian FederationTatyana Golikova in 2009.[180] Therefore, now women can be subjected to compulsory sterilization without court decision, according to thePerm Kraiombudswoman Tatyana Margolina.[180] In 2008, Tatyana Margolina reported that 14 women with disabilities were subjected to compulsory medical sterilization in Ozyorskiy psychoneurological nursing home whose director was Grigori Bannikov.[180] The sterilizations were performed not on the basis mandatory court decision appropriate for them, but only on the basis of the application by the guardian Bannikov.[181] On 2 December 2010, the court has not foundcorpus delicti in the compulsory medical sterilizations performed by his consent.[180]
Dor Yeshorim, a program which seeks to reduce the incidence ofTay–Sachs disease,cystic fibrosis,Canavan disease,Fanconi anemia,familial dysautonomia,glycogen storage disease,Bloom Syndrome,Gaucher disease,Niemann-Pick disease, andmucolipidosis IV among certainJewish communities, is another screening program which has drawn comparisons withliberal eugenics.[182] InIsrael, at the expense of the state, the general public is advised to carry out genetic tests to diagnose these diseases early in the pregnancy. If a fetus is diagnosed with one of these diseases, among which Tay–Sachs is the most commonly known, the pregnancy may be terminated, subject to consent.
Most otherAshkenazi Jewish communities also run screening programs because of the higher incidence of genetic diseases. In some Jewish communities, the ancient custom of matchmaking (shidduch) is still practiced, and some matchmakers require blood tests so that they can avoid making matches between individuals who share the same recessive disease traits. In order to attempt to prevent the tragedy of infant death which always results from beinghomozygous for Tay–Sachs, associations such as the strongly observant Dor Yeshorim (which was founded by Rabbi Joseph Ekstein, who lost four children to the disease) with the purpose of preventing others from suffering the same tragedy test young couples to check whether they carry a risk of passing on fatal conditions.
If both the young man and woman are Tay–Sachs carriers, it is common for the match to be broken off. Judaism,[dubious –discuss] like numerous other religions, discourages abortion unless there is a risk to the woman, in which case her needs take precedence. The effort is not aimed at eradicating the hereditary traits, but rather at the occurrence of homozygosity. The actual impact of this program onallele frequencies is unknown, but little impact would be expected because the program does not impose genetic selection. Instead, it encouragesdisassortative mating.
Which ideas should be described as "eugenic" are still controversial. Bio-ethicists Stephen Wilkinson and Eve Garrard note that due to its history, "there's no overwhelming argument for completely abandoning the term 'eugenics', but concerns remain about ambiguity, confusion and manipulation, and the consequent failure to respect people's autonomy." The pair argue that anyone using the term "must at least be clear about what they mean by it and be prepared to offer a clear definition. Otherwise unnecessary confusion and disagreement may ensue."[183]
Modern inquiries into the potential use of genetic engineering have led to an increased invocation of the history of eugenics in discussions ofbioethics, most often as a cautionary tale. Some suggest that even non-coercive eugenics programs are inherently unethical.[184]
James D. Watson, the first director of theHuman Genome Project, initiated theEthical, Legal and Social Implications Program (ELSI) which has funded a number of studies into the implications of human genetic engineering (along with a prominent website on the history of eugenics), because:
In putting ethics so soon into the genome agenda, I was responding to my own personal fear that all too soon critics of the Genome Project would point out that I was a representative of theCold Spring Harbor Laboratory that once housed the controversialEugenics Record Office. My not forming a genome ethics program quickly might be falsely used as evidence that I was a closet eugenicist, having as my real long-term purpose the unambiguous identification of genes that lead to social and occupational stratification as well as genes justifying racial discrimination.[185]
PhilosopherPhilip Kitcher, writing in 1997, has described the use ofgenetic screening by parents as making possible a form of "voluntary" eugenics.[186] In 2006,Richard Dawkins stated that breeding humans for traits is possible and society should not be afraid to debate the ethical differences between breeding a child for an ability versus forcing a child to gain an ability through training.[187]
HistorianNathaniel C. Comfort wrote in 2012, "The eugenic impulse drives us to eliminate disease, live longer and healthier, with greater intelligence, and a better adjustment to the conditions of society."[188] Comfort claims, "the health benefits, the intellectual thrill and the profits of genetic biomedicine are too great for us to do otherwise."[188]
Bill McKibben suggests that emerging reprogenetic technologies would be disproportionately available to those with greater financial resources, thereby exacerbating the gap between rich and poor and creating a "genetic divide".[189]Lee M. Silver, a biologist and science writer who coined the term "reprogenetics" and supports its applications, has expressed concern that these methods could create a two-tiered society of genetically engineered "haves" and "have nots" ifsocial democratic reforms lag behind implementation of reprogenetic technologies.[190]
The Spartan Council of Elders or Gerousia decided whether a new-born child brought before them would live or die. Impairment, deformity, even puny appearance was enough to condemn a child to death.
Tacitus's Germania, read through this kind of filter, became a manual for racial and sexual eugenics
Lynn is a self-described 'scientific racist'...
Richard Lynn, for example, a self-described 'scientific racist,' ...
...Richard Lynn, who has described himself as a 'scientific racist'.
Since the nineteenth century, a 'race deterioration' has been repeatedly predicted as a result of the excessive multiplication of less gifted people. Nevertheless, the educational and qualification level of people in the industrialized countries has risen strongly. The fact that the 'test intelligence' has also significantly increased, is difficult to explain for supporters of the dysgenic thesis: they suspect that the 'phenotypic intelligence' has increased for environmental reasons, while the 'genotypic quality' secretly decreases. There is neither evidence nor proof for this theory.Citations in original omitted.
There is no convincing evidence that any dysgenic trend exists. . . . It turns out, counterintuitively, that differential birth rates (for groups scoring high and low on a trait) donot necessarily produce changes in the population mean.
Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.
