Eugenics: what is eugenics, types, and social implications?

What is eugenics and what did it mean to apply it in society? Let us look at its variants and implications.

Since time immemorial, human beings have tried to improve what nature had bestowed upon them, for better and for worse.

Eugenics is an idea that advocates that mankind should take control of its own evolution, selecting those individuals who, by reproducing themselves, will bring about a qualitative improvement in society.

In this article we will discuss the eugenics postulates, explaining what eugenics ishow it has been carried out over the last century and its social implications.

What is eugenics?

The word eugenics is composed of the Greek roots eu, "good, right" and genia "origin". Thus, means "the science of good birth".. In essence, it is the science originating in the early twentieth century that advocated that human beings should take part in their own evolution. The idea was that governments, through laws of Biological perfection, would improve the qualitative characteristics of society.

The followers of this current desired an ideal world, a utopian society in which, thanks to selection of those with the best characteristics and by encouraging and encouraging their reproduction, there would be 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 in order to achieve the much desired perfect society.

Many believed that not only those with characteristics beneficial to mankind, such as great physical strength, high intelligence and good health, should be encouraged to reproduce. Those considered inferior should also be prevented from reproducing..

The concept of an inferior person was clearly very subjective and was not scientific, but moral. It included people with disabilities, psychological disorders and diseases as well as, in some cases, criminals, prostitutes or people of a race other than Caucasian.

Thus, based on what has been explained so far, we can speak of two types of eugenics. two types of eugenics:

• Positive: that which encourages the strongest individuals to reproduce.
• Negative: that which prevents those considered less fit from having offspring.

History and social implications

Eugenicist ideas have deep roots in Darwin's theory of evolution. The naturalist, late in his life, was troubled by the belief that in the society in which he lived the laws of natural selection were not being followed. Francis Galton, his cousin, took his ideas and, in 1903, created the idea of eugenics..

Concern for the evolution of mankind made the eugenic doctrine very popular in Europe and the United States. Great philanthropists, such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, supported institutions of this type. In the view of the early twentieth century, encouraging the strong to reproduce and preventing the weak from doing so was seen as a major step toward the perfect society, and some even saw it as a and some even saw it as the beginning of the process to achieve the longed-for welfare state.

Many eugenecists argued that if people with hereditary problems stopped reproducing, there would no longer be new generations of people who would incur social costs.. Less expenditure 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 were gaining greater social recognition and associations began to be created to ensure the application of eugenics under a Darwinian perspective. It was feared for the degeneration of humanity..

Spread of eugenic political and repressive measures.

In 1905, the first eugenic organization was founded in Berlin: the Society for Racial Hygiene, headed by a physician, Alfred Ploetz, and a psychiatrist, Ernst Rüdin. Two years later, in the U.S.A., the first sterilization laws were passed, the first sterilization laws were passed.. These laws were intended to sterilize all those people who were considered harmful to society: the disabled, the maladjusted, criminals....

One of the great figures in American eugenics was Harry Laughlin, who in 1914 calculated that some 15 million American citizens should be sterilized, approximately 10% of the country's population at that time. He argued that doing so would save a great social cost.

Several years later, Adolf Hitler was inspired by the ideas associated with 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 individuals deemed inferior, but eventually evolved 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 the Nazi eugenicist plan was terminated after the end of World War II in 1945 when Germany was defeated, it is surprising that such laws continued to exist until the end of the war. laws of this type continued to exist until relatively recently in other Western countries. in other Western countries until relatively recently.

The Nordic countries and several U.S. states maintained sterilization laws for those they considered feeble-minded until almost the end of the last century and, to this day, hundreds of victims of these laws can be found who are still demanding justice.

Eugenics today

In the society in which we live, preventing someone from reproducing is a violation of their right to sexual and reproductive freedom. is 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 being passed on to the next generation.

Nevertheless, mankind still wishes 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 expense and entail great suffering for both the affected person and his or her environment. This has favored research in 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 and closer to the disappearance of some diseases of genetic origin, such as certain types of cancer, diabetes, 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 a la carte what their children will be like is not as far away as we might think.

Bibliographical references:

• Galton, F. (1904). Eugenics: its definition, scope, and aims. The American Journal of Sociology, 10(1).
• Farrall, L.A. (1970), The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement 1863-1925. (Doctoral dissertation) Indiana University, Indiana, USA.