Eugenics is an inaccurate theory linked to historical and present-day forms of discrimination, racism, ableism and colonialism. It has persisted in policies and beliefs around the world, including the United States.

The Big Picture: 

• Eugenics is the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations.
  
• Eugenicists believed in a prejudiced and incorrect understanding of Mendelian genetics that claimed abstract human qualities (e.g., intelligence and social behaviors) were inherited in a simple fashion. Similarly, they believed complex diseases and disorders were solely the outcome of genetic inheritance.
  
• The implementation of eugenics practices has caused widespread harm, particularly to populations that are being marginalized.
  
• Eugenics is not a fringe movement. Starting in the late 1800s, leaders and intellectuals worldwide perpetuated eugenic beliefs and policies based on common racist and xenophobic attitudes. Many of these beliefs and policies still exist in the United States.
  
• The genomics communities continue to work to scientifically debunk eugenic myths and combat modern-day manifestations of eugenics and scientific racism, particularly as they affect people of color, people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Eugenics is the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding,” which gained popularity during the early 20th century. Eugenicists worldwide believed that they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity. They believed the use of methods such as involuntary sterilization, segregation and social exclusion would rid society of individuals deemed by them to be unfit.

Scientific racism is an ideology that appropriates the methods and legitimacy of science to argue for the superiority of white Europeans and the inferiority of non-white people whose social and economic status have been historically marginalized. Like eugenics, scientific racism grew out of:

• the misappropriation of revolutionary advances in medicine, anatomy and statistics during the 18th and 19th centuries.
• Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through the mechanism of natural selection.
• Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance.

Eugenic theories and scientific racism drew support from contemporary xenophobia, antisemitism, sexism, colonialism and imperialism, as well as justifications of slavery, particularly in the United States.

Francis Galton, an English statistician, demographer and ethnologist (and cousin of Charles Darwin), coined the term “eugenics” in 1883.

Galton defined eugenics as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.” Galton claimed that health and disease, as well as social and intellectual characteristics, were based upon heredity and the concept of race.

During the 1870s and 1880s, discussions of “human improvement” and the ideology of scientific racism became increasingly common. So-called experts determined individuals and groups of people to be either superior or inferior. They believed biological and behavioral characteristics were fixed and unchangeable, and placed individuals, populations and nations inside of that hierarchy.

By the 1920s, eugenics had become a global movement. There was popular, elite and governmental support for eugenics in Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, Canada and other countries. Statisticians, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, social reformers, geneticists, public health officials and members of the general public supported eugenics through a variety of academic and popular literature.

The most well-known application of eugenics occurred in Nazi Germany in the lead up to World War II and the Holocaust. The Nazi German racial state between 1933 and 1945 used its resources to “cleanse” the German people and the Nazi state of those they deemed “unworthy of life.” Nazis in Germany, Austria and other occupied territories euthanized at least 70,000 adults and 5,200 children. They implemented a campaign of forced sterilization that claimed at least 400,000 victims. This culminated in the near destruction of the Jewish people, as well as an effort to eliminate other marginalized ethnic minorities, such as the Sinti and Roma, individuals with disabilities and LGBTQ+ people.

In the United States, slavery and its legacies, fears of “miscegenation” and eugenics were deeply connected in the early 20th century. Prominent American eugenicists expounded on their concerns of “race suicide,” or the increasingly differential birthrates between immigrants and non-Nordic races compared to native-born Nordic whites. Eugenicists used these concerns to promote discriminatory policies like anti-immigration and sterilization.

American eugenicists from a variety of disciplines declared certain individuals unfit, “feebleminded” or anti-social, which resulted in the involuntary sterilization of at least 60,000 people through 30 states’ laws by the 1970s.

These eugenicists disproportionately targeted Latinxs, Native Americans, African Americans, poor whites and people with disabilities during the entirety of the 20th century. Eugenicists were also crucial to the enactment of discriminatory immigration legislation that was passed in 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act), which completely excluded immigrants from Asia.

Yes.

While eugenics movements especially flourished during the three decades before the end of World War II, eugenics practices such as involuntary sterilization, forced institutionalization, social ostracization and stigma were common in many states until at least the 1970s and, in some instances, have continued into the present in various forms.

With the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and, more recently, advances in genomic screening technologies, there is some concern about whether generating an increasing amount of genomic information in the prenatal setting would lead to new societal pressures to terminate pregnancies where the fetus is at heightened risk for genetic disorders, such as Downs Syndrome and spina bifida.

The emergence of statistical techniques, such as polygenic risk scores, that can estimate risks for more genetically complex disorders have raised concerns among ethicists that their use in the context of in vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic diagnoses. The possible genomic-based screening of embryos for behavioral, psychosocial and/or intellectual traits would be reminiscent of the history of eugenics in its attempt to eliminate certain individuals.

Some geneticists view both genomic screening and genetic counseling as an extension of eugenics.

If you could prevent your child from getting a devastating genetic disease, would you do it? Would you select the sex of your child or select for their attractiveness, strength, or intelligence? How far would you go to maximize the possibility of resistance to disease? The genetic engineering of a human child, the production of "designer babies" with desirable phenotypic characteristics, was once a topic restricted to science fiction. This is the case no longer: science fiction is now overlapping into science fact. Many phenotypic choices for offspring are already available, with many more likely to be possible in the not too distant future. Which traits should be selected and how they should be selected are topics of much debate within the worldwide medical community. The ethical and moral line is not always clear or agreed upon, and some fear that modern reproductive technologies could lead to a new form of eugenics.

Eugenics is the use of information and technology from a variety of sources to improve the genetic makeup of the human race. The goal of creating genetically superior humans was quite prevalent (although controversial) in several countries during the early 20^th century, but fell into disrepute when Nazi Germany developed an extensive eugenics program in the 1930's and 40's. As part of their program, the Nazis forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of the so-called "unfit" and killed tens of thousands of institutionally disabled people as part of a systematic program to develop a genetically superior race of Germans known as Aryans. Ever since, eugenic ideas have not been as publicly expressed, but there are still those who promote them.

Efforts have been made in the past to control traits in human children using donated sperm from men with desired traits. In fact, eugenicist Robert Klark Graham established a sperm bank in 1980 that included samples exclusively from donors with high IQs. The "genius" sperm bank failed to capture the public's imagination and the operation closed in 1999.

In more recent times, the procedure known as prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD) has been developed. PGD involves the screening of human embryos as part of the process of in vitro fertilization, during which embryos are conceived and grown outside the mother's body for some period of time before they are implanted. The term PGD usually refers to both the diagnosis, selection, and the implantation of the selected embryos.

In the least controversial use of PGD, embryos are tested for the presence of alleles which cause genetic diseases such as sickle cell disease, muscular dystrophy, and hemophilia, in which a single disease-causing allele or pair of alleles has been identified. By excluding embryos containing these alleles from implantation into the mother, the disease is prevented, and the unused embryos are either donated to science or discarded. There are relatively few in the worldwide medical community that question the ethics of this type of procedure, which allows individuals scared to have children because of the alleles they carry to do so successfully. The major limitation to this procedure is its expense. Not usually covered by medical insurance and thus out of reach financially for most couples, only a very small percentage of all live births use such complicated methodologies. Yet, even in cases like these where the ethical issues may seem to be clear-cut, not everyone agrees with the morality of these types of procedures. For example, to those who take the position that human life begins at conception, the discarding of unused embryos, a necessary result of PGD, is unacceptable under any circumstances.

A murkier ethical situation is found in the selection of a child's sex, which is easily performed by PGD. Currently, countries such as Great Britain have banned the selection of a child's sex for reasons other than preventing sex-linked diseases. Other countries allow the procedure for "family balancing", based on the desire of some parents to have at least one child of each sex. Still others, including the United States, have taken a scattershot approach to regulating these practices, essentially leaving it to the individual practicing physician to decide which practices are acceptable and which are not.

Even murkier are rare instances of disabled parents, such as those with deafness or dwarfism, who select embryos via PGD to ensure that they share their disability. These parents usually cite many positive aspects of their disabilities and associated culture as reasons for their choice, which they see as their moral right. To others, to purposely cause a disability in a child violates the basic medical principle of Primum non nocere, "first, do no harm." This procedure, although not illegal in most countries, demonstrates the complexity of ethical issues associated with choosing genetic traits in offspring.

Where could this process lead? Will this technology become more affordable and how should it be used? With the ability of technology to progress rapidly and unpredictably, a lack of definitive guidelines for the use of reproductive technologies before they arise might make it difficult for legislators to keep pace once they are in fact realized, assuming the process needs any government regulation at all. Other bioethicists argue that we should only deal with technologies that exist now, and not in some uncertain future. They argue that these types of procedures will always be expensive and rare, so the fears of eugenics and "master" races are unfounded and overstated. The debate continues.