Eugenics In The Late 19th Century

In the late 19th century and through much of the 20th, the idea of controlling the population in order to produce a better human race pervaded many white societies, especially England, the United States, and Germany. These ideas were described as being beneficial to society and were “linked to a liberal movement for social reforms rather than a politically conservative agenda” (Dikötter 469). The word “eugenics” was coined by Sir Francis Galton from Greek words that translate approximately to “well born” and was commonly used to describe this ideology (Hubbard 181). There are two broadly recognized categories of eugenics: positive eugenics and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics generally involves encouraging people with “good” genes - mostly white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender people - to reproduce more. This was …show more content…
However, after World War II ended, “liberal intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and Hermann Muller expressed their revulsion at Nazi practices while reinstating their belief in a ‘humane’ and ‘scientific’ way of genetically improving the human race” and eugenics remains in official Chinese policy (Dikötter 467). Scandinavian countries such as Finland had compulsory sterilization and castration laws through 1970 and Finland alone sterilized over 50,000 people between 1955 and 1970. These laws primarily focused on sterilizing mentally ill and mentally or developmentally disabled persons, but this was determined via I.Q. test in many jurisdictions, so people who were not fluent in English and others who did not perform well on the tests but were not disabled were also sterilized under these laws. In 1990, eugenic sterilization laws still existed in over half of the states in the United States, and these often extended to allow sterilization of “sexual perverts, drug fiends, drunkards, [and] epileptics” (Hubbard