Eugenics

The most dramatic example of eugenics is the attempt in Nazi Germany to wipe out not only Jews but also other groups of people considered to be inferior, including the physically and mentally handicapped, Gypsies and Slavs (Biesold and Friedlander, 1999, p. 4). But the United States, along with every European nation, has also at some time in the past century tried its hand at eugenics. Perhaps best known as examples of eugenically oriented social policy in the United States have been the Tuskeegee experiment in which black men were considered to be dispensable and so were intentionally infected with syphilis, which could then be spread to other disposable black people and the sterilization of poor black and handica

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may produce healthier offspring through freely chosen mates. It is only when the time-span for improvement of the human species is artificially shrunken and one group of humans decides that it can command the direction of the future of the species that eugenics becomes a dirty word (Buchanan etal, 2000, p. 212). In 1900, with the birth of modern genetics, the undercurrents of interest in ôimprovingö the human race were transformed into an institutionalized movement, now known as the eugenics movement. Historically, the movement had two general aspects: positive eugenics, concentrating on the means to increase the breeding potential of especially ôfitö individuals, and negative eugenics, emphasizing the restriction on breeding for particularly ôunfitö types. Many organizations devoted to eugenic purposes arose around the world, but the movement was especially strong in England, the United States, and Germany between 1910 and 1940 (Selden, 1999, p. 21). From the outset the movement was closely associated with a sense of white Anglo-Saxon superiority. Sir Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin), the founder of the English eugenics movement, for example, had been drawn to the study of human heredity and eugenics by his curiosity ab
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Approximate Word count = 1486
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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