Eugenics as the Basis of Population Policy

Eugenics was a worldwide movement in the early twentieth century aimed at reducing social problems by planned breeding. Positive eugenics programs encouraged people considered to have good heredity to have more children, while negative eugenic programs attempted to discourage or prevent people considered to have poor heredity from having any children. Eugenics, in most countries except France and Latin America, was based on a strongly hereditarian view (justified by the then-new science of Mendelian genetics) that mental ability, personality traits, and social behavior in general were strongly determined by genes. Eugenics movements were very popular as a means of solving the social problems associated with rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Research organizations such as the Eugenics Record Office (Cold Spring Harbor, New York), the Eugenics Education Society (London), and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology (Munich) became centers of eugenics research, gathering family pedigree information on a whole series of supposedly hereditary traits. For eugenicists one of the main goals of research was to inform public policy decisions. In the United States eugenicists lobbied strongly for the Immigration Restriction Act (Johnson Act) of 1924, that would restrict immigration from areas of southern and eastern Europe on the grounds that people from these harbored a large number of defective genes. In the United States, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, eugenicists also work hard for the passage of compulsory sterilization laws of those declared to be genetically defective. By 1935 some 30 states in the United States, and one Canadian province, had enacted such laws for those confined to state institutions. In 1933 the Nazi government in Germany passed the worlds' most comprehensive eugenic sterilization legislation, based in part on the US laws. The sector of the population designated as ‘defective’ and thus the object of sterilization was almost always the poor and disadvantaged. Eugenicists argued that by sterilizing people who carried genes for defective mental or personality traits, problems such as criminality, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, rebelliousness, and manic depression could be eliminated in a few generations. The movement reached its peak in North America in the mid to late 1920s, and in Scandinavia and Germany in the late 1930s. Eugenic ideas were strongly criticized at the time by leading biologists, especially geneticists, on the grounds that they were based on a highly simplistic model of genetics, and could not possibly accomplish their own stated goals. In most countries, except for Germany, eugenics gradually fell into disfavor during the 1930s. After 1945 eugenics came in for even more severe criticism due to the revelation of Nazi atrocities, committed in its name. Eugenics came to be recognized as a pseudo-science whose social programs had no basis in modern biology; rather it served largely as a cover for political, ethnic, and racial biases and political programs for racial purity. In the post-war period many of the same people involved with eugenics in the 1930s came to advocate population control on a global scale. The same idea—that the wrong kinds of people were having too many children—formed the basis for population policy, only the targets were now Third World countries rather than the poor and disadvantaged in the industrialized world. Many medical ethicists are raising the question today about whether a new form of eugenics is being introduced in the guise of prenatal testing and genetic screening. The object of such tests is to determine whether pregnancies should be carried to term, based on the detection of genetic abnormalities. With many insurance programs arguing that genetic flaws are ‘pre-existing conditions’ and thus that a defective child will not be covered by the parents' health care policy, eugenics can again become a major factor in human reproductive policy.