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The term eugenics (from the Greek eugenes, meaning well-born) was coined by Englishman Francis Galton in 1883. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, used Darwin's ideas of evolutionary fitness in the animal kingdom to forge a concept of selective breeding for humans. Proposing to produce superior citizenries, eugenics encompasses two interconnected philosophies: (1) restricting the reproduction capabilities of so-called undesirable segments of a population (negative eugenics); and (2) encouraging so-called desirable segments to reproduce (positive eugenics). At the turn of the twentieth century a eugenics movement gained widespread international support, particularly in Great Britain, the United States, and Germany. In 1895 German physician Alfred Ploetz created the related science of Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene), and in 1907 he founded the International Society for Racial Hygiene. That same year Indiana passed laws making it the first U.S. state to permit involuntary sterilization of individuals considered criminally insane or genetically inferior. By 1932 similar laws existed in twenty-seven other U.S. states. Other countries issued comparable legislation, including Denmark (1929), Sweden and Norway (1934), Finland (1935), and Estonia (1936).

In Germany eugenics underwent a transformation from scientific theory to state policy when the Nazis (National Socialists) assumed power in 1933. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared that all facets of German life were to be informed by a "eugenic way of thinking." Doctors and midwives became "guardians of the nation," responsible for ensuring proper racial health. The Office for Racial Policy disseminated printed materials that strove to indoctrinate the general public on the importance of marrying "correctly." A series of laws aimed at guaranteeing racial purity were introduced. The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (July 1933) allowed for the sterilization of individuals suffering from any of a cluster of hereditary disabilities, including feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, insanity, genetic epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, genetic blindness or deafness, and chronic alcoholism. The Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race (1935) were focused on "Aryanizing" German blood, redefining citizenship to exclude Jews, and preventing marriage or any sexual contact between Christians and Jews.

The Nazis did not restrict their eugenic agenda to preventing the birth of undesired offspring, but went a step further to formalize the killing of those deemed "lives unworthy of living," targeting first children and later adults with mental and/or physical disabilities. At the heart of this agenda was Operation T-4 (named after its Berlin headquarters, at Tiergartenstrasse 4), headed by Philip Bouhler and Karl Brandt. From December 1939 to August 1941, under the sponsorship of Operation T-4, some 70,000 psychiatric patients, asylum inmates, and concentration camp internees deemed nonproductive were transported to six killing institutions (Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein), where they died, primarily by gas asphyxiation. Although offshoots of Operation T-4 continued to operate after August 1941, killing another estimated 130,000 people by 1945, many T-4 doctors had transferred to extermination camps, where they continued to help to actualize the Holocaust.

It was Nazi Germany's shift from an agenda of mass sterilization to one of mass killing and its efforts to annihilate the world's Jewish population (and the eventual reportage of these calamities) that brought an end to widespread social acceptance of eugenics as a means to create a better race. However, the collapse of the Third Reich did not mean the corresponding collapse of eugenic practices elsewhere. For example, it was not until 1972 that the western Canadian province of Alberta repealed its sterilization act, originally passed in 1928. In 1996 the National Film Board of Canada released a film, The Sterilization of Leilani Muir, that documented the history of the province's eugenic practices. The film tells the story of Muir, the first woman to win a wrongful sterilization suit against the province. In the 1990s other countries began recognizing and compensating victims of involuntary or coerced sterilization. In 1997 news stories revealed that, between 1936 and 1976, some 63,000 people in Sweden had undergone sterilization. Although most of these people had signed consent forms, the ten percent who had not were suddenly entitled to compensation. In 2002 the state of Virginia issued a formal apology to the approximately seven thousand victims of its eugenics program, which had operated until 1979, and erected a memorial to commemorate them.

Not all countries, however, have chosen to recognize the victims of or even suspend eugenic practices. In the 1970s and 1980s the government of Czechoslovakia sponsored a policy that strove to reduce the nation's Romani population through involuntary sterilization. The Czech successor state of Slovakia, formed in 1993, has sustained the sterilization practices. Still other countries promote programs that are reminiscent (to varying degrees) of earlier Nazi legislation. For example, in China, couples seeking to marry must undergo medical tests that screen for hereditary diseases and related conditions. Finally, for many countries, eugenics-related issues continue to hover at the periphery of national debate as new scientific and medical discoveries raise related moral and ethical questions: Should governments permit physician-assisted suicide with consent of the patient? Should parents be allowed to select the sex of their unborn child? How far should medical scientists pursue human cloning?

SEE ALSO Euthanasia; Films, Eugenics; Racism

Lynne Fallwell