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Eugenics Persuasive Essay

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What prompted the rise of Eugenics in the United States was their increasing belief that deficiencies in humans were hereditary. Also, there was growing worry that Americans were providing too much support for the degenerates, and needed to place more emphasis on positively fit individuals to ‘improve’ the race. They defined an aspect of fitness with beauty while ugly as a defect (Pernick 94). Lower class people were deemed to be ‘unfit’ while the middle and upper classes were classified as superior. When concerning higher status women, Eugenicists encouraged positive eugenics, or rather procreating as much as they can conceive. They were often denied sterilization and birth control; however, lower class women, often associated with prostitutes …show more content…

However, eugenic leaders advocated more for ‘selective breeding’ of the defects. American eugenic researcher, Charles Davenport stated that everyone born had the right to live, but not all had the right “to reproduce his kind” (Pernick 99) For African-Americans, they were overwhelmingly regarded as the “repulsive defectives” in film, and Haiselden often associated their skin color as ugly. Between 1932 and 1972, Tuskegee experiment provided an impetus for testing a eugenic hypothesis: racial groups have different susceptibility to infectious disease (Paul A. Lombardo, Gregory M. Dorr, 291). At that time seventy-four of the controlled subjects were still alive. Between 28-100 people had died directly from advanced syphilitic lesions. The interest emanated from doctors’ observation that black males “possessed an excessive sexual desire which threatened the very foundations of white society” because they targeted white women. It is interesting to note that at the time, men with small penises were regarded as superior, so the ‘overdeveloped’ size of the male negro’s genital made them inferior (21). Basically, black bodies were one of the targets for elimination in a secret manner, and although people promoted the death of the unfit, however, they were opposed into having the issue publicized (Pernick, Martin S.,

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Introduction James H. Jones authored the book Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment was a study of 600 African American males that started in 1932 and ended in 1972 (Jones, 1993, p. 1) The study was not beneficial. This paper will summarize the book Bad Blood as well as address theoretical perspectives, methodology, and ethics of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.

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This article gives multiple examples of unethical experiments performed on Black people one being the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. For 40 years, the Black men in the study were led to believe that they were being treated for “bad blood,” but in reality, they were not given proper treatment for syphilis. The result of withholding treatment from these men led to treatable deaths and their wives and children getting infected. Another unethical experiment mentioned in Medical Experiments on African-Americans in America was the work done by James Marion Sims, who is considered The Father of American gynecology. He performed multiple procedures on black slave women without anesthesia which was available at this time.

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The Tuskegee experimental study, which was carried out for a total of forty years from 1932 to 1972, remains one of the biggest and indeed one of the most disgusting scandals in the history of American medicine. More than 400 black men died in Alabama as public officials and doctors watched (Brandt, 1978). The Tuskegee scandal was a scientific experiment which was done using unethical ways and methods that in the end did not result in the production of new information on syphilis. The cure of the subjects who participated in the study was withheld without their knowledge, and consequently, many people died while others were left with permanent disabilities. Newborns were not spared either, and many of them were infected with congenital syphilis.

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The Tuskegee Experiment The Tuskegee experiment was a mind blowing experiment that was conducted by the Public Health Service (PHS). This experiment took place between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama and lasted for forty-years. It affected many African-American males, who were used as human “guinea pigs” in order to track the movement of Syphilis and how long the disease will take to kill someone. The men used for the experiment was not aware that they were a part of this study; instead they thought that they were being treated for having “bad blood”. The U.S Public Health Services gathered 399 black males who were affected with the disease and 201 without it, who were offered free health care and insurance for their participation.

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