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Eugenics is a term loaded with historical significance and a strong negative valence. Its literal meaning – good birth – suggests a suitable goal for all prospective parents, yet its historical connotations tie it to appalling policies, including forced sterilizations, selective breeding programs in North America and Asia, and horrifying concentration camps and mass exterminations in Nazi Germany. The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, advocated a system that would allow “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” Social Darwinism, the popular theory in the late 19th century that life for humans in society was ruled by “survival of the fittest,” helped advance eugenics into serious scientific study in the early 1900s. By World War I many scientific authorities and political leaders supported eugenics. However, it ultimately failed as a science in the 1930s and ’40s, when the assumptions of eugenicists became heavily criticized and the Nazis used eugenics to support the extermination of entire races.
