Is Modern Genetics Eugenics?

Abstract

The word “eugenics” has many different meanings. It can mean simply having a healthy baby — this is what it means in China and Greece today. This is what it meant to the American farm families who exhibited themselves at fairs, along with their prize cows, at the Eugenics Society booths. At the other extreme, eugenics can mean a government sponsored, coercive program of sterilizing the genetically “unfit.” Many Western nations, including the US (Allen, 1989) Canada (Mclaren, 1990) Brazil (Stepan, 1991), Sweden, France (Adams, 1990), and Germany had eugenic laws in the 1930s that required sterilization of people with mental retardation, mental illness, deafness, epilepsy, alcoholism, or criminal or other socially deviant behavior. Over 60,000 people in the US were eugenically sterilized (Reilly, 1991). The Nazis sterilized perhaps as many as 200,000 persons (Burleigh, 1994).