Eugenics - History

History

Throughout history eugenics remains a controversial concept. As a social movement, eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century. At this point in time, eugenics was practiced around the world and was promoted by governments, and influential individuals and institutions. Many countries enacted various eugenics policies and programs, including: genetic screening, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and segregation of the mentally ill from the rest of the population), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies and genocide. Most of these policies were later regarded as coercive and/or restrictive, and now few jurisdictions implement policies that are explicitly labeled as eugenic or unequivocally eugenic in substance.

The way eugenics was practiced in this period involved "interventions", which is a euphemistic name for the identification and classification of individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, promiscuous women, homosexuals and entire racial groups — such as the Roma and Jews — as "degenerate" or "unfit"; the segregation or institutionalisation of such individuals and groups, their sterilization, euthanasia, and in the extreme case of Nazi Germany, their mass extermination.

Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities, and received funding from many sources. Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York. Eugenic policies were first implemented in the early 1900s in the United States. Later, in the 1920s and 30s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in a variety of other countries, including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, and Sweden, among others. The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany, and when proponents of eugenics among scientists and thinkers prompted a backlash in the public. Nevertheless, in Sweden the eugenics program continued until 1975.

In addition to being practiced in a number of countries it was internationally organized through the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations. (Black 2003, p. 240) Its scientific aspects were carried on through research bodies such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (Black 2003, p. 286), the Cold Spring Harbour Carnegie Institution for Experimental Evolution (Black 2003, p. 40) and the Eugenics Record Office (Black 2003, p. 45). Its political aspects involved successful advocacy for changes of law to pursue eugenic objectives, for instance sterilization laws (e.g. U.S. sterilization laws, (Black, see Chapter 6 The United States of Sterilization)). Its moral aspects included rejection of the doctrine that all human beings are born equal and redefining morality purely in terms of genetic fitness (Black 2003, p. 237). Its racist elements included pursuit of a pure "Nordic race" or "Aryan" genetic pool and the eventual elimination of less fit races (see Black, Chapter 5 Legitimizing Raceology and Chapter 9 Mongrelization).

By the end of World War II eugenics had been largely abandoned, having become associated with Nazi-Germany.This country's approach to genetics and eugenics was focused on Eugen Fischer's concept of phenogenetics and the Nazi twin study methods of Fischer and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. Both the public and some elements of the scientific community have associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, such as enforced "racial hygiene", human experimentation, and the extermination of "undesired" population groups., However, developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century are raising new questions regarding the ethical status of eugenics, effectively creating a resurgence of interest in the subject.

Today it is still widely regarded as a brutal movement which inflicted massive human rights violations on millions of people.The practices engaged in by eugenicists involving violations of privacy, attacks on reputation, violations of the right to life, to found a family, to freedom from discrimination are all today classified as violations of human rights.

The practice of negative racial aspects of eugenics, after World War II, fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also proclaims "the prohibition of eugenic pratics, in particular those aiming at selection of persons.

However, developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century have raised new questions and concerns about what exactly constitutes the meaning of eugenics and what its ethical and moral status is in the modern era.