Plato’s Eugenics 

The term ‘eugenics’ was first coined in 1883 by a British natural scientist named Francis Galton and was defined as a “science” for the betterment of society through selective breeding of individuals with desirable traits (F. Galton, 1978; Proctor, 1988, p. 29). Despite the term’s origin, the roots of eugenics stretch long before Galton’s time. 

The earliest known inception of eugenics comes from Plato, a Greek philosopher, around 365 BC. In his book, The Republic, he advocated for a state-regulated selective reproduction system where the “best should match up with the best and the worst should match up with the worst” (Neri, 1998, as cited in Güvercin & Arda, 2008, p. 3). He proposed that in the guardian class, the premier class of Athens, only men and women of superior natural capacities would be allowed to marry. Their newborns would be taken to special nurseries to be split into guardian or civilian classes depending on their own superiority. Any child named defective would be “hidden away” from society, presumably killed, to prevent the inheritance of inferiority (D. Galton, 1998, p. 264). Plato argued that with this system, the guardian class would escape degeneration, parents would fully commit to cities’ military needs, not their children, and birth rates would be controlled (D. Galton, 1998). His proposal, therefore, used the then-unsubstantiated belief of inheritance to trade individual liberty and the lives of children for ideological societal needs. 

Social Darwinism 

Plato’s ideas stayed mostly out of the mainstream until the late-19th century, when the now-discredited theory of Social Darwinism gained popularity in Europe and America. After Charles Darwin proposed theories of evolution and natural selection, Herbert Spencer, an English sociologist and biologist, immediately applied them to human society under the name of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism embraced ‘survival of the fittest’ among humans, the idea that because the powerful in society are innately superior, the powerless should be left unaided to allow natural selection to occur (Offer, 2013). 

Accordingly, proponents used the assumed inferiority of the poor and powerless to justify and further laissez-faire economics, classism, and racism. At the time, lower classes could not escape generational impacts of poverty such as lack of medical care, unhealthy environmental and work conditions, and child labor that prevented proper education (Warner, 1894). Additionally, historically discriminated races like African Americans were denied basic economic and educational rights, making upwards social mobility improbable. Instead of understanding, addressing, and breaking this cycle of poverty, the primarily upper class, white Social Darwinists blamed genetic inferiority for continued poverty. Bolstered by businesses that promoted laissez-faire economics to eliminate government regulation, Social Darwinists blocked many necessary lower class governmental aid, thus widening the economic and health gap between rich and poor (Rajagopal, 2012). This devastating effect on already-marginalized communities suggests that Social Darwinists misused pure science to justify non-scientific, societal issues.

The Eugenics Movement

Immediately following Social Darwinism was the eugenics movement. Introduced by biologist and eugenicist Charles Davenport, the movement gained massive popularity in the United States and later, Germany, from the late-19th to the mid-20th century (Güvercin & Arda, 2008). Eugenics ideas differed from that of Social Darwinism in that though they both advocated for the ‘survival of the fittest’ in human society, eugenicists emphasized heredity and medicinal support to enforce more direct, crueler practices like forced sterilizations, genocides, and immigration policies (Offer, 2013).

Among the main eugenics enforcements, coerced sterilization was the most common. Throughout the 20th century, doctors in the U.S. performed more than 60,000 involuntary sterilizations under state laws by refusing to inform their patients, manipulating families, and faking consent forms (Stern, 2005). These widespread sterilizations undoubtedly targeted people with disabilities and diseases as eugenicists referred to them as sub-human and undesirable. For instance, the 1907 eugenics law in Indiana categorized the mentally ill as “undesirables and defectives” and encouraged forced sterilizations, thus framing them in a longlasting image of inferiority and increasing discrimination (Grenon & Merrick, 2014, p. 1). 

Nonetheless, sterilizations were not limited to people with disabilities and diseases. Because Eugenics Boards and doctors – primarily wealthy, white men – could choose individuals to sterilize, discriminatory beliefs against marginalized communities often influenced their choices (Smaw, 2021). Notably, sexism, racism, and classism were reflected. To start, in the U.S., nearly three females were sterilized for every male subjected to vasectomy, despite vasectomy being a safer reproduction prevention procedure (Reilly, 1987). Furthermore, involuntary sterilizations often targeted African, Native, and Latin American communities as eugenicists classified them as “loathsome, disease-doomed races” (Pernick, 1997, p. 1770). By the late-1900s, more than 33% of Native American and 25% of Hispanic American women of childbearing age in the U.S. had been forcibly sterilized (Volscho, 2010). Lastly, doctors deemed low-income individuals as exemplifying “base character, bad decisions, and general unfitness” and sterilized a significant number of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (Smaw, 2021, p. 321). These targeting of females, minority races, and lower classes illustrate the evident influence of personal bias of medical personnels in eugenics practices. 

Until the 1930s, Germany’s eugenics movement did not significantly differ from that of America. Under the 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring,” thousands were sterilized, especially non-Aryan races declared inferior by Adolf Hitler (Grodin et al., 2018, p. 54). Additionally, like Plato, the Nazi regime believed that killing children of ages three or four was most acceptable and thus killed over 5,000 children by 1940. However, nearing World War II, these practices started to include euthanasia by gas or lethal injection in concentration camps. The euthanasia program was part of the Nazi racial hygiene argument of purifying the Aryan German population by eliminating the “unfit,” which included the mentally ill, people of disabilities, and in the infamous Holocaust, Jews (Grodin et al., 2018, p. 53). By the end of the Holocaust in 1945, more than 11 million people had been killed (Proctor, 1988).

Figure 1. Number of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps from 1935 to 1945. Illustrates an exponential increase in prisoners in the 1940s accordingly with the rise in euthanasia.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Despite these inhumane enforcements, the eugenics movement gained popularity through its societal, medical, and legal justifications set by eugenicists, who successfully argued that sterilizations and genocides were good for the human race and even the targeted groups. 

To start, eugenicists appealed to lower classes’ desires by claiming that through removal of undesired genes of the poor, generational poverty will discontinue and all will have equal opportunities from birth (Freeden, 1979). Additionally, the Nazi Party argued that euthanasia were “mercy deaths,” an act of kindness (Grodin et al., 2018, p. 54).

Furthermore, the scientific and medical foundation behind targeted eugenics practices portrayed them as something more than a dislike towards those groups. Because eugenics incorporated heredity and natural selection, well-accepted sciences at the time, renowned educational and public health institutions taught eugenics as settled science and publicized their support (Cargill, 2020). For instance, in the U.S., the Department of Health and Human Services paid for 25% of forced sterilizations performed on 15 to 40-year-old Native Americans (Smaw, 2021). Moreover, the Nazi regime made sure that all eugenics practices appeared to be enforced by medical professionals, even when they weren’t. Officers were ordered to dress in medical uniforms to transport people to killing centers, and many physicians were told that their patient reports were being used for scientific research, not categorization for genocides. Still, more than half of the German medical professionals participated in eugenics practices, helping to build the medical foundation behind such practices (Grodin et al., 2018).

Figure 2. Logo of the International Eugenic Congress held in New York in 1921. Portrays eugenics as a necessary field of study for human evolution that has strong, interdisciplinary roots.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Lastly, persuaded by these societal and medical justifications, laws and court rulings allowed eugenic practices. For example, in 1927 Buck vs. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed coerced sterilization of mentally disabled individuals, stating that society benefited from preventing the “manifestly unfit from continuing their kind” (Stern, 2005, p. 1130). Such legalizations allowed public support for eugenics to grow without limitation. 

When the public rejected these justifications starting in the mid-1900s, the eugenics movement consequently came to a decline. Horrific accounts from the inhumane practices, especially from the Holocaust, made the public question whether eugenics was truly beneficial for the human race, and numerous scientific findings contradicted the eugenics argument that disabilities and diseases were a reflection of genetic inferiority (Reilly, 2015). Due to the new negative social image, courts declared such eugenics practices unlawful and prohibited governmental aid and enforcements (Reilly, 1987). Accordingly, eugenics disappeared from the public mind and history (Cargill, 2020). However, though uncommon, eugenics sterilizations can still be observed around the world. In 2020, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the U.S. was accused of forcibly sterilizing female detainees when more than 40 women shared written testimonies of invasive medical procedures that took advantage of their immigrant status or minimal knowledge of English (Bekiempis, 2020). Other recent cases of compulsory sterilizations target females of racial minority, disabilities, poverty, and more. They show a striking similarity to past eugenics’ targeting of females of marginalized communities and contribute to the remaining perception of them as “unworthy of procreation” (Patel, 2017, p. 3).