EUGENICS

EUGENICS
Eugenics, from Greek roots eu- (meaning “good”) and
gen- (“birth” or “family”), is often translated as “well-
born.” Eugenics is the application of genetic studies
to the improvement of the human species—genetic
manipulation to produce so-called better human
beings. Applied eugenics, widely popular in the
United States and northern Europe in the early 20th
century, sought to control the heredity of individuals
or groups carrying supposedly desirable and undesir-
able genes by evaluating their phenotypes, or
expressed physical/ behavioral traits. Selective breed-
ing methods included positive eugenics, such as pro-
viding marriage incentives and parenting rewards, and
206———Eugenicsnegative eugenics, such as mandatory sterilization,
segregation, and genocide. Although the eugenics
movement began as a progressive effort to eradicate
social ills of feeble-mindedness, poverty, drunken-
ness, prostitution, criminality, epilepsy, and insanity
in the mid- to late 19th century, desirable and undesir-
able quickly equated to superior and inferior and, in
the racialized atmosphere of Western culture, attached
to the concept of race. Eugenicists, concerned with
racial purity, usually White (Nordic) or Aryan purity,
believed that degeneracy, atavism (evolutionary
regression), or mongrelization would result from pro-
creation between undesirables or across racial lines.
Eugenic ideologies  contributed to anti-immigration,
antimiscegenation (mixed marriage), and mandatory
sterilization laws. Many then-prominent psycholo-
gists embraced eugenics and applied psychometric
methods to help achieve “a more perfect human soci-
ety.” However, American eugenic social policies
declined in popularity after the fall of Germany’s Nazi
regime, which exposed the Third Reich’s “final solu-
tion” (eradication of Jewish people to maintain Aryan
purity). Nevertheless, some eugenics practices con-
tinue in medicine and social policy today