Eugenics and human rights

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Abstract
Origins of eugenics Modern eugenics was rooted in the social darwinism of the late 19th century, with all its metaphors of fitness, competition, and rationalisations of inequality. Indeed, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and an accomplished scientist in his own right, coined the word eugenics Galton promoted the ideal of improving the human race by getting rid of the “undesirables” and multiplying the “desirables.” Eugenics began to flourish after the rediscovery, in 1900, of Mendel's theory that the biological make up of organisms is determined by certain factors, later identified with genes. The application of mendelism to human beings reinforced the idea that we are determined almost entirely by our “germ plasm.” Eugenic doctrines were articulated by physicians, mental health professionals, and scientists—notably biologists who were pursuing the new discipline of genetics—and were widely popularised in books, lectures, and articles for the educated public of the day Publications were bolstered by the research pouring out of institutes for the study of eugenics or “race biology.” These had been established in several countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Britain, and the United States. The experts raised the spectre of social degeneration, insisting that “feebleminded” people (the term then commonly applied to people believed to be mentally retarded) were responsible for a wide range of social problems and were proliferating at a rate that threatened social resources and stability. Feebleminded women were held to be driven by a heedless sexuality, the product of biologically grounded flaws in their moral character that led them to prostitution and producing illegitimate children. “Hereditarian” biology attributed poverty and criminality to bad genes rather than to flaws in the social corpus.

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