eugenics

A pseudoscience designed to control reproduction in an effort to create what proponents of eugenics believe to be a superior or pure race. In America and Europe, this has historically been a white cisgender heterosexual nondisabled person. However, eugenics has been practiced all over the world with varying standards.

When the movement began in the late 1800s, it took a distorted view of Charles Darwin’s studies on natural selection. This included Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton who coined the term eugenics, which means good in birth. Galton believed eugenics could control human evolution.

Eugenics is divided into positive and negative practices. Positive eugenics are those efforts that encourage births that fit with eugenicists’ ideal human including political policies to increase birth rates among selected groups. Negative eugenics are those efforts that discourage births or remove people from the population that don’t fit with eugenicists’ ideal human. This includes forced sterilizations, marriage certification showing health, institutionalization of those deemed unfit, etc

Eugenicists seek more than racial purity; eugenicists also want to remove disability and promote what they see as intelligence. To this end, in the early 1900s eugenicists created many ways to determine levels of fitness including the Stanford-Benet I.Q. Test. The test is still in use today.

Although a discredited practice in most scientific circles, eugenics is still practiced and remains a threat to disabled people around the world, as well as others.

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