Pros And Cons Of Eugenics

English Scientist Francis Galton coined the term Eugenics, which is the study/science of genetic and prenatal influences that affect the outcome of certain qualities in offspring. Francis Galton defined Eugenics as, “the improvement of a population by selective breeding of its best specimens.” Farmers and animal breeders used to employ selective breeding in order to create improved crops and improved strains of characteristics of animals. Many scientists then began studying different variations in plants and animals and were trying to understand how these variations were implemented in future generations. Although Eugenics has been used by farmers in both plants and animals, Galton decided to apply it to the human population which in turn created

These “inferior people” not only included those of a different race, but also those who were of a different religion, had a less than “normal” mental level, immigrants, and those who were infertile. Eugenicists were known to make rash assumptions about the genetics of the traits that they were studying. One of the main “issues” that eugenicists were trying to solve was the problem of people who were institutionalized. Eugenicists believe that it was apparent that these institutionalized people were insane because of bad genes and the only obvious solution to further prevent institutionalized people was to stop them from repopulating. While Eugenics quickly gained popularity and spread out of Britain across the majority of Western Europe, the most historically and politically worst offspring of Eugenics was National Socialism in Germany. Eugenics became closely tied to white supremacy. In the 1930s, the Nazi Party began to gain extreme political power over Germany by blaming the faults of Germany on ethnic minorities, especially the Jews. In 1941, Nazi Geramany began to implement extermination programs where Nazi’s then “forced European Jews, Roma, disabled and mentally ill people, and sexual minorities into concentration camps and executed 6 million Jews (about one-third the world’s Jewish

In the 20th century, distinguished American Eugenic scientists expressed their concern for “race suicide” and the differences in birth rates between immigrants and non-Nordic races versus native born Nordic whites. The Eugenicists then used their concerns as a way to promote different discriminatory policies in America such as sterilization and anit-immigration. Based on a variety of regulations, American Eugenicists declared that certain individuals were deemed “unfit” in society which then resulted in involuntary sterilization of over 60,000 people across 30 states by the 1970s. Throughout the entirety of the 20th century, American Eugenicists unfairly discriminated and targetted Native Americans, Latinxs, poor whites, African Americans and people with disabilities. The most prominent form of Eugenics in the United States was slavery. Over the course of 400 years, about 12 million Aficans were shipped across the Alantic and were affected by slavery. Slavery started because Africans were different from the Nordic Whites and were considered to be inferior. They “needed” to be ‘controlled’ and were forced into slavery to keep Africans and Nordic Whites from repopulating together and creating inferior