Definitions To many people, the word eugenics , from the Greek for well born or good birth simply means having a healthy baby. This is what it meant to the American farm families who exhibited themselves and their children in Eugenics Society healthy family competitions at country fairs in the 1930s, just as they exhibited their prize cows. Most people today, however, connect eugenics with the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, families with Huntington disease, the mentally ill, and other undesirables. Calling someone a eugenicist, even if no definition is attached, usually means that his or her policy is bad , if not downright evil.
Most people today connect the term eugenics with some form of coercion, explicit or implicit.
Coercion includes government sterilization laws, such as once existed in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Sweden, Germany and other nations, applied to people with mental retardation, mental illness, alcohol addiction, epilepsy, and antisocial behavior. It is the coercive element in eugenics to which most people object, not the goal of having and raising healthy babies. The real world, however, has a way to go before this type of individual eugenics becomes truly voluntary. It is not clear that these two conditions are met, even in Western nations with sophisticated genetic counseling and financial supports for people with disabilities. Predominant social values in North America are to have few children and to make each one a work of art, though not necessarily perfect .