Eugenics: What It Is, Types, And Social Implications
Since time immemorial, human beings have tried to improve what nature had given them, for better and worse.
Eugenics is an idea that defends that humanity must take control of its own evolution, selecting those individuals who, when reproduced, represent a qualitative improvement of society.
In this article we will address the eugenicist postulates, explaining what eugenics is as it has been carried out throughout the last century and its social implications.
The word eugenics is composed of the Greek roots eu, “good, right” and genia, “origin.” So that, means “the science of good birth” In essence, it is the science originated at the beginning of the 20th century that defended that human beings should take part in their own evolution. The idea was that governments, through laws of biological perfection, improved the qualitative characteristics of society.
The followers of this current wanted an ideal world, a utopian society in which, thanks to the selection of those with the best characteristics and promoting their reproduction, there were no diseases of genetic origin, psychological disorders, disabilities or social problems.
Types of eugenic ideas
Although the idea is attractive as it is presented, the truth is that doctors, psychiatrists and other health professionals, together with the scientific community at the beginning of the last century, carried out terribly immoral practices to achieve the much desired perfect society.
Many considered that the reproduction should not only be encouraged of those who had beneficial characteristics for humanity, such as great physical strength, great intelligence and good health. It was also necessary to prevent those considered inferior from reproducing
The concept of an inferior person was clearly very subjective and is not scientific, but moral. Both people with disabilities, psychological disorders and illnesses and, in some cases, criminals, prostitutes or people of a race other than Caucasian fell into the category.
So, based on what has been explained so far, we can talk about two types of eugenics:
History and social implications
Eugenicist ideas have deep roots in Darwin’s theory of evolution. The naturalist, at the end of his life, was troubled by the belief that in the society in which he lived the laws of natural selection were not fulfilled. Francis Galton, his cousin, took his ideas and, in 1903, created the idea of eugenics
Concern for the evolution of humanity made the eugenic doctrine very popular in Europe and the United States. Great philanthropists, such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, supported institutions of this type. From the perspective of the early 20th century, encouraging the strong to reproduce and preventing the weak from doing so It was seen as a great step towards the perfect society and there were even those who considered it the beginning of the process to achieve the long-awaited state of well-being.
Many eugenicists argued that if people with hereditary problems stopped reproducing, There would no longer be new generations of people who would incur social expenses Less spending on people who did not benefit society meant being able to allocate those resources to those who could work or offer something to the world.
These ideas gained greater social recognition and associations began to be created to guarantee the application of eugenics from a Darwinian perspective. There was fear of the degeneration of humanity
Diffusion of eugenic political and repressive measures
In 1905, the first eugenic organization was founded in Berlin: the Society for Racial Hygiene, led by a doctor, Alfred Ploetz, and a psychiatrist, Ernst Rüdin. Two years later, in the United States, the first sterilization laws were passed These laws were intended to sterilize all those people who were considered harmful to society: disabled, maladjusted people, criminals…
One of the great figures in American eugenics was Harry Laughlin, who in 1914 calculated that about 15 million American citizens should be sterilized, approximately 10% of the country’s population at the time. He argued that doing this would save a large social cost.
Several years later, Adolf Hitler was inspired by ideas linked to eugenics to write his famous book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and systematically put eugenics into practice already in the early years of Nazi Germany.
At first, Nazism sterilized those individual people considered inferior, but it eventually morphed into the great genocide that was the Holocaust, in which Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, the sick, the disabled, and many more people were executed “for the good of the Aryan race.”
Although once the Second World War ended in 1945, the Nazi eugenics plan ended when Germany was defeated, it is surprising that Laws of this type continued to exist until relatively recently in other Western countries.
The Nordic countries and several US states maintained sterilization laws for those they considered mentally weak until almost the end of the last century and, today, hundreds of victims of these laws can be found who still demand justice.
In the society we live in, preventing someone from reproducing represents a violation of their right to sexual and reproductive freedom The fact that a person suffers from a certain condition is not sufficient reason to force them to be sterilized and to prevent their hereditary problem from passing to the next generation.
However, humanity continues to desire to reach a society in which these types of diseases and other disorders do not exist, given that many of them are limiting, require great economic expenditure and entail great suffering for both the affected person and their loved ones. around. This has favored researching the selection and manipulation of genes, perfecting genetic engineering
For several years now, it has been possible to prevent children from suffering from the same diseases as their parents, and we are getting closer to making some diseases of genetic origin disappear, such as certain types of cancer, diabetes, or blindness, among many others. .
It seems that the utopian world presented in the film Gattaca, by Andrew Niccol, in which there are no longer people with hereditary problems and parents can select on demand what their children will be like, is not as far away as we might think.
