Eugenics: history and major issues

By Christine Rosen

With the successful mapping of the human genome, advances in reproductive and cloning technologies, and the continued expansion of pharmacogenomics, the fertility industry, stem cell research, and gene therapy, the public is eager for guidance in what has become, in many ways, a brave new world. Law and social policymakers scramble to keep up with scientific advances, while a cadre of professional bioethicists dominates the public debates on these issues. Frequently, the specter of eugenics is raised. But what is eugenics? How should we approach both the historical and contemporary questions raised by genetic engineering and the manipulation of human life?

In 1883, a British scientist named Francis Galton coined the word "eugenics," from the Greek meaning "good in birth," to describe his plan to improve the human race through better breeding. A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton promised that his new science would give people control over reproduction by encouraging the reproduction of the "fittest" specimens of humanity (a process he called positive eugenics) and the prevention of reproduction among the "unfit" (which he called negative eugenics). Galton and the scientists who followed him also hoped to eradicate disease and improve the health of all human beings through better breeding. "What nature does blindly, slowly, ruthlessly," Galton wrote, "man may do providentially, quickly, and kindly."

Galton's ideas found fertile soil in the United States, and during the first several decades of the twentieth century, from the Progressive Era through the 1920s and 1930s, Americans eagerly embraced the movement. Americans entered "Fitter Families" and "Better Babies" contests at state fairs; elite colleges and universities offered eugenics courses as part of their curricula; religious leaders extolled the virtues of eugenics in their pulpits; and opinion leaders championed eugenic ideas in the pages of newspapers, books and magazines.

In 1924, eugenic ideas served as the underpinning for the Immigration Restriction Act passed by the U.S. Congress, which placed strict quotas on entry for immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe, whom native-born Americans feared would "pollute the bloodstream" of the country. In addition, states passed marriage restriction laws based on the principles of eugenics and compulsory sterilization laws aimed at the supposedly unfit; as a result, tens of thousands of Americans residing in state institutions for the "feebleminded" and epileptic were sterilized. In 1927, in Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such laws were constitutional. Writing for the majority, progressive jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. declared, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough." In Europe, eugenic ideas reached their horrifying conclusion in the policies of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

After World War II, eugenics fell out of favor. States took eugenic sterilization laws off the books and lifted restrictions on marriage. But the desire to use genetic science to improve and extend human life never abated. With the rise of the fertility industry and the mapping of the human genome, we have entered a new era in the history of eugenics. Although we do not use the word "eugenics" to describe techniques such as amniocentesis for Down's Syndrome screening, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and sex selection, all of these activities ultimately are eugenic in their purpose. They are undertaken with the hope of preventing illness and choosing the kind and quality of children we will have. And although most Americans still associate eugenics with state-mandated control of reproduction (and thus thoroughly reject it), we have entered a new era of individual, consumer-driven eugenics. This new world poses many difficult ethical challenges and raises questions about how much we can and should mold nature to our purposes.

The history of our country's (and other nations') eager embrace of eugenics reminds us of the importance of approaching questions about transforming human life with humility rather than hubris. The history of eugenics also reminds us of the dangers of ambitious proposals for social engineering and the unintended consequences of such far-reaching efforts, many of which, at their outset, are heralded as enlightened, progressive reforms. Today, we are much closer to having the ability to engineer human beings, although we will not necessarily do so; we can choose the sex of our children, prevent the birth of diseased children, and find out the details of our own individual genetic risks. History should serve as a sobering reminder that we should not confuse what we have the ability to do with what is morally and legally appropriate to do. After all, it is often at the moment when groups abandon their longstanding principles and embrace uncritically the seemingly "progressive" goals of scientific and social engineering that they also abandon respect for human dignity and freedom.

Christine Rosen is the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, a fellow for the Project on Biotechnology and American Democracy, a senior editor of The New Atlantis, editor of the John Templeton Foundation's In Character.

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