Eugenics
Based on Wikipedia: Eugenics
The Science That Became a Horror
In 1927, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the state of Virginia could forcibly sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the most celebrated jurists in American history, wrote the opinion. His reasoning included eight words that still echo through history: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Carrie Buck was not an imbecile. Neither was her mother. Neither was her daughter, who later made the honor roll at school. But by the time anyone thought to check, it was too late. Carrie had already been sterilized, one of roughly sixty thousand Americans who would undergo the same procedure against their will.
This was eugenics in action—a movement that promised to improve humanity through selective breeding, attracted support from progressives and conservatives alike, and ultimately provided the intellectual scaffolding for genocide.
What Eugenics Actually Means
The word "eugenics" comes from Greek roots meaning "good birth" or "well-born." In its simplest form, eugenics is the belief that you can improve human populations by controlling who has children and who doesn't.
This can work in two directions. Positive eugenics encourages people deemed "fit" to have more children—through financial incentives, propaganda campaigns, or social pressure. Negative eugenics tries to prevent people deemed "unfit" from reproducing—through sterilization, institutionalization, marriage restrictions, or outright murder.
The distinction matters less than you might think. Both approaches require someone to decide who counts as fit and who doesn't. Both assume that complex human traits are purely hereditary and can be bred like cattle. Both treat people as means to an end rather than ends in themselves.
The Invention of a Science
The modern eugenics movement began with Francis Galton, a Victorian polymath who happened to be Charles Darwin's half-cousin. In 1883, Galton coined the term and defined eugenics as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations."
Galton had read his cousin's work on natural selection and drawn what seemed like a logical conclusion: if nature selects for survival, couldn't humans select for improvement? Couldn't we speed up evolution, eliminate hereditary diseases, and produce a better breed of human being?
Darwin himself strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory. But Galton's idea caught fire.
It's easy to see why. The late nineteenth century was an era of dizzying progress. Humans had tamed electricity, conquered diseases, built machines that could outwork a thousand laborers. If science could do all that, why couldn't it perfect humanity itself?
Within decades, eugenics had become an academic discipline taught at major universities. It attracted funding from wealthy philanthropists, including the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. Organizations like the British Eugenics Education Society and the American Eugenics Society recruited prominent supporters, including leading clergymen who found ways to reconcile selective breeding with religious teaching.
Three International Eugenics Conferences convened to share research and coordinate policy—in London in 1912, and New York in 1921 and 1932. The 1921 conference was endorsed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York.
The Progressive Eugenicists
Here's what makes the history of eugenics genuinely disturbing: it wasn't a fringe movement of obvious villains. Many of its most ardent supporters were progressives, reformers, and humanitarians who believed they were reducing human suffering.
Winston Churchill, before he became the lion who defied Hitler, served as honorary vice president of the British Eugenics Society. He believed eugenics could solve "race deterioration" and reduce crime and poverty. H.G. Wells, the socialist science fiction writer who imagined utopian futures, called for "the sterilization of failures" in 1904.
Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger spoke at eugenics conferences. Progressive economists worried that charity and modern medicine were keeping alive the "unfit" who would have died in earlier eras, weakening the genetic stock of the nation. Some labor unions supported eugenic immigration restrictions to protect workers from competition.
These people weren't monsters. They were responding to real problems—poverty, disease, crime, alcoholism—with what seemed like a scientific solution. They were also profoundly wrong, in ways that would become horrifically clear.
From Theory to Practice
The United States pioneered eugenic legislation. Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilization law in 1907, allowing the state to sterilize people in institutions without their consent. Other states followed. By the 1930s, more than thirty states had sterilization laws on the books.
Who got sterilized? The laws typically targeted people labeled "feebleminded," "epileptic," "insane," or "criminal." In practice, this often meant poor people, immigrants, people with disabilities, and anyone whose behavior deviated from middle-class norms. Unmarried mothers. People who couldn't pass culturally biased intelligence tests. Those who spoke English poorly.
The eugenic net was cast wide. Some laws classified "sexual perverts"—meaning gay people—as targets for sterilization. Roma people were deemed racially inferior. The deaf community was considered defective.
Sweden, often held up as a model of progressive governance, sterilized approximately 63,000 people between 1934 and 1975. Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Brazil, and Japan all implemented similar programs. In each case, the people sterilized were disproportionately poor, institutionalized, or from ethnic minorities.
The Question of Ancient Eugenics
Defenders of eugenics sometimes pointed to ancient precedents. The Greek philosopher Plato argued in "The Republic" that human reproduction should be controlled by the state through selective breeding. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Germanic tribes drowned community members they considered cowardly or degenerate in swamps.
The most famous example is Sparta. According to Plutarch, writing five centuries after Sparta's peak, Spartan elders examined every newborn and ordered any child deemed unfit thrown into a chasm near Mount Taygetus.
But here's the thing: Plutarch is the only source for this practice, and he was writing propaganda more than history. Modern historians view Tacitus's ethnographic claims as unreliable. And when anthropologist Theodoros Pitsios investigated the supposed infant disposal site near Mount Taygetus in 2007, he found no infant remains at all—only bodies of adolescents and adults up to around age 35, suggesting criminals or enemies, not infants.
The ancients may have practiced infanticide, as many societies did. But the systematic, state-directed program that Plutarch described appears to be largely myth. The eugenicists who invoked Sparta were citing a fantasy.
Critics Sounded the Alarm
Not everyone was fooled. From the beginning, eugenics had thoughtful critics who identified its fundamental flaws.
The American sociologist Lester Frank Ward published "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics" in 1913, arguing that social environment mattered far more than heredity. The British writer G.K. Chesterton published "Eugenics and Other Evils" in 1917, calling the movement "a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning."
Anthropologist Franz Boas, whose work would later demolish the scientific basis for racial hierarchies, criticized eugenics in a 1916 article in The Scientific Monthly. He pointed out that most human traits are influenced by both heredity and environment in complex ways that eugenicists ignored.
Even some biologists who considered themselves eugenicists expressed skepticism. J.B.S. Haldane and R.A. Fisher, both influential geneticists, doubted that sterilizing "defectives" would actually eliminate undesirable traits from the population. The math didn't work. Recessive genes would persist in carriers, and new mutations would continue to arise.
The Catholic Church consistently opposed eugenic sterilization. In 1930, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical explicitly condemning sterilization laws: "Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason."
In countries where the Catholic Church had significant influence—Poland, Czechoslovakia, parts of the United States—eugenic legislation faced stronger opposition and often failed to pass.
Germany
Adolf Hitler read American eugenic writings and admired American sterilization laws. In "Mein Kampf," published in 1925, he praised and incorporated eugenic ideas. Once he took power in 1933, he moved quickly to implement them.
The Nazi sterilization program ultimately sterilized approximately 400,000 people. But sterilization was just the beginning.
The Nazis developed a classification system that identified various groups as "degenerate" or "unfit": Jews, Roma, the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, the deaf, the blind, those with hereditary diseases, homosexuals, and others. These classifications led first to segregation and institutionalization, then to something worse.
The program called Aktion T4 systematically murdered people with disabilities using poison gas. The Nazis tested their methods on disabled Germans before scaling up to the Holocaust. They used the same gas chambers, the same crematoriums, the same bureaucratic machinery of death. Aktion T4 killed approximately 70,000 people and served as a rehearsal for genocide.
The Holocaust murdered six million Jews and millions of others. And it grew, in part, from ideas that had seemed respectable just years earlier—ideas taught in universities, endorsed by clergymen, implemented by democracies.
After the War
By the end of World War II, eugenics had become toxic. The word itself became an epithet.
H.G. Wells, who had once called for sterilizing failures, reversed himself completely. In his 1940 book "The Rights of Man," he argued that every human being should have protection from "mutilation, sterilization, torture, and any bodily punishment."
The newly formed United Nations included forced sterilization in its definition of genocide. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948, specifically listed "imposing measures intended to prevent births within" a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
Decades later, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union would explicitly prohibit "eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at selection of persons."
Many countries quietly dismantled their sterilization programs. Sweden continued until 1975. Some American states kept eugenic sterilization laws on the books until the 1970s or even later, though enforcement largely ceased.
But the repudiation was not universal.
Singapore's Experiment
In 1983, Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore, gave a speech that would have fit comfortably in a 1920s eugenics conference. He worried that educated women were having too few children while uneducated women had too many. He proposed incentives to change this.
The following year, Singapore introduced the "Graduate Mothers Scheme," offering financial benefits to women with university degrees who had more children. The government also created a matchmaking agency to help educated Singaporeans find suitable partners.
The program was extremely unpopular. Critics called it eugenic, which it was. They also noted that it effectively discriminated against Singapore's non-Chinese ethnic minorities, who had lower rates of university education. Within a year, some of the incentives were abandoned as ineffective. The matchmaking agency, however, continues to operate.
The New Eugenics
Here's where the story gets complicated again.
Today, prospective parents routinely use technologies that would have delighted Francis Galton. Prenatal screening can detect Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, sickle cell anemia, and hundreds of other genetic conditions. Parents who receive these results can choose whether to continue pregnancies. In vitro fertilization allows parents to select embryos based on genetic characteristics. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, can screen embryos for specific conditions before implantation.
Is this eugenics?
Some bioethicists argue it is—but that it's acceptable because it's voluntary. They call this "liberal eugenics" or "new eugenics." The term was coined by bioethicist Nicholas Agar, who argues that as long as the state doesn't coerce anyone, and parents make their own choices, genetic selection is ethically permissible.
Philosopher Julian Savulescu points out that prenatal screening for Down syndrome is already widely practiced without controversy precisely because it's framed as enhancing parental choice rather than restricting it. Nobody calls it eugenics, but it has the same effect: selecting which genetic combinations get born.
Critics see this as euphemism. UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster has called modern genetics "a back door to eugenics." Tania Simoncelli, who later served as a White House advisor, wrote in 2003 that advances in genetic technology were moving society toward "a new era of eugenics"—one that was "consumer driven and market based, where children are increasingly regarded as made-to-order consumer products."
The United Nations' International Bioethics Committee has warned that even though modern genetic engineering isn't the same as Nazi eugenics, it still challenges human equality and creates new forms of discrimination. Those who can't afford genetic selection, or don't want it, may face stigma.
The Frontier
In 2025, geneticist Peter Visscher published a paper in Nature arguing that genome editing of human embryos might become feasible within this century. Not just selecting between existing embryos, but actively editing the DNA of embryos to add or remove genetic variants.
The technology is called CRISPR, and it has already revolutionized genetic research. Scientists can now make precise edits to DNA sequences with relative ease. The question is whether, and when, to apply this to human embryos.
The response to Visscher's paper was immediate. Critics argued that human embryo editing remains "unsafe and unproven." Nature published an editorial noting that "the fear that polygenic gene editing could be used for eugenics looms large" and explaining why no country currently allows genome editing in human embryos, even for single genetic variants.
This isn't just about designer babies. One major concern is genetic diversity. If parents consistently select against certain traits, those genes might disappear from the population entirely. This could reduce human resilience to disease and environmental change. The very traits that seem undesirable today might prove crucial tomorrow.
What Did Eugenics Get Wrong?
Almost everything.
Eugenicists assumed that complex human traits like intelligence, morality, and even poverty were determined primarily by heredity. They weren't. These traits are influenced by thousands of genes interacting with environments in ways we still don't fully understand.
They assumed they could identify "defective" individuals with certainty. They couldn't. The criteria for "feeblemindedness" included things like having an illegitimate child, scoring poorly on culturally biased tests, or simply being poor. Carrie Buck was sterilized because her mother was poor and promiscuous, and Carrie herself had gotten pregnant after being raped.
They assumed that sterilizing "defectives" would eliminate undesirable traits from the population. It wouldn't. Most carriers of recessive genes appear perfectly healthy. You'd have to sterilize huge portions of the population to make a dent in gene frequencies, and new mutations would continue anyway.
They assumed they knew what "improvement" meant. They didn't. The qualities eugenicists valued—intelligence as measured by certain tests, particular physical characteristics, conformity to social norms—reflected the biases of their era and social class, not objective measures of human worth.
Most fundamentally, they treated people as means to an end. They sacrificed real individuals—their bodily autonomy, their reproductive choices, their lives—in pursuit of an imagined future population. They forgot that the "gene pool" they wanted to improve was made up of actual human beings with inherent dignity.
The Uncomfortable Questions
It would be comforting to leave eugenics in the past, a cautionary tale about bad science and worse politics. But the questions it raised haven't gone away.
When a couple uses genetic screening to select an embryo without a gene for Huntington's disease, is that different in kind from what the eugenicists wanted, or only in degree? When we treat genetic disabilities as conditions to be prevented rather than variations to be accommodated, what are we saying about the people who already have those conditions?
If gene editing becomes safe and effective, who will have access to it? Only the wealthy? Will genetic enhancement become another source of inequality, another way that advantages compound across generations?
And if we reject all genetic selection as tainted by its history, are we obligating people to suffer from preventable diseases out of principle?
These questions don't have easy answers. But they do have one crucial difference from the eugenics of the past: we're asking them. We're debating them in public, subjecting them to ethical scrutiny, building international frameworks to regulate genetic technology.
The old eugenics failed in part because it claimed scientific certainty it didn't have, and in part because it gave states power over the most intimate decisions of individuals. Any honest engagement with genetics and human reproduction must acknowledge uncertainty, respect individual autonomy, and remain perpetually suspicious of those who claim to know what "improvement" means for the human species.
The lesson of eugenics is not that we should stop asking how to reduce human suffering. It's that we should be very, very careful about who gets to answer—and who has to live with the consequences.