Eugenics grew from Victorian class anxiety into state-run forced sterilisation
Francis Galton coined eugenics in 1883, borrowing from his half-cousin Darwin's work, though Darwin rejected Galton's extension of it. Within decades the idea had university chairs, clergy backing and international conferences. By the 1930s countries from the United States to Sweden and Japan were sterilising psychiatric patients against their will.
The movement drew on real changes in science. Governments had begun gathering institutional statistics in the 19th century, and new tools claimed to measure human traits, including Alfred Binet's school test, later adapted into IQ testing. Galton and Charles Davenport argued that intellect and morality were inherited like eye colour. That led eugenicists to treat disability, mental illness and crime as overlapping, heritable problems, and crime explanations swung from social causes to biological ones. Cesare Lombroso used phrenology, now debunked, to link body shape to criminality.
Social fear supplied the energy. In late Victorian Britain, worries about industrial rivals and falling birth rates among the upper class fuelled a popular movement, especially among a middle class drawn to notions of inborn superiority. Americans fretted about cities, factories and immigration. Britain's Eugenics Education Society formed in 1907 and the American Eugenics Society in 1921; both courted clergy. Conferences met in London in 1912 and New York in 1921 and 1932, and American states began passing eugenic laws in the early 1900s.
Programmes came in two flavours. Positive measures encouraged the supposedly fit to have children; negative ones used marriage bans, segregation and sterilisation against those labelled unfit. Both could be coercive: Nazi Germany outlawed abortion for women the state rated superior. Even supporters disagreed on basics. Some thought the First World War disastrously killed the fittest young men; others claimed war weeded out the weak. The geneticist J. B. S. Haldane joked in 1940 that motor buses, by breaking up inbred villages, did eugenic work.
Supposed ancient precedents are shaky. Plutarch is the only source for Spartans discarding weak infants, and a 2007 study of the traditional site near Mount Taygetus found remains only of people aged 18 to 35. By the mid 20th century the word was bound up with scientific racism and coercion, and today it is largely discredited. Modern genetic testing and counselling, sometimes called liberal eugenics, stress individual parental choice instead. Scientific bodies such as the UK Genetics Society are now examining their own past links, from R. A. Fisher's long support to L. S. Penrose's opposition.
Source: Eugenics
