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Over 30 states adopted sterilization laws, resulting in "more than 60,000 sterilizations of [the] disabled"(Kaelber). The majority of sterilizations were made, due to mental illnesses

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Eugenics: Compulsory Sterilization in 50 American States

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While Germany has taken important steps to commemorate the horrors of its past, including compulsory sterilization (however belatedly), the United States arguably has not when it comes to eugenics. For some states, there still is a paucity of reliable studies that show how and where sterilizations occurred.

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Francis Galton created eugenics to preserve desired genes, people who were successful and good looking by eliminated the genes of criminals, alcoholics, psychotics, the mentally disabled and people in poor health.

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Eugenics has been a disgrace to society, many people are victims of this study. Many people had this procedure done to them with no consent. The victims claim that they were attacked, drugged and then sterilized. Many of these victims were only from the ages of 13-16.

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Procedure of Genetically Modifying Children - I.C.

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Procedure of Genetically Modifying Children - I.C.

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Nuclear material is removed from the embryo or the egg of a woman, with an inheritable disease, in order to prevent the offspring from being born with a certain type disease that will affect them in the long run. As a result, the offspring will be carrying genes from a total of three individuals: their mother, father, and donor of one whose nuclear material is disposed of.

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BERKELEY, Calif. - AN advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration is set to begin two days of meetings tomorrow to consider radical biological procedures that, if successful, would produce genetically modified human beings. This is a dangerous step. These techniques would change every cell in the bodies of children born as a result of their use, and these alterations would be passed down to future generations.

The F.D.A. calls them mitochondrial manipulation technologies. The procedures involve removing the nuclear material either from the egg or embryo of a woman with inheritable mitochondrial disease and inserting it into a healthy egg or embryo of a donor whose own nuclear material has been discarded. Any offspring would carry genetic material from three people - the nuclear DNA of the mother and father, and the mitochondrial DNA of the donor.

Roughly 1,000 to 4,000 children born in the United States each year will develop a mitochondrial disease, most by age 10, with symptoms that can range from mild to devastating. These diseases typically prevent mitochondria from converting food into energy and are the result of genetic abnormalities, although some cases can be caused by exposures to toxins. Disorders caused by mutations in the mitochondrial DNA are passed down from the mother.

Developers of these modification techniques say they are a way for women with mitochondrial disease to give birth to healthy children to whom they are related genetically. Some are also promoting their use for age-related infertility. These are worthy goals. But these procedures are deeply problematic in terms of their medical risks and societal implications. Will the child be born healthy, or will the cellular disruptions created by this eggs-as-Lego-pieces approach lead to problems later on? What about subsequent generations? And how far will we go in our efforts to engineer humans?

These sorts of concerns were first voiced decades ago, well before the human genome had even been "mapped." Those were the days when our accelerating knowledge about genetics led to over-optimistic hopes for quick fixes to an array of afflictions and grandiose visions of designing genetically enhanced babies to be more intelligent, athletic, musically talented and the like.

More recently, many scholars, scientists and policy makers have urged a different approach: We should carefully and thoughtfully apply the tools of human genetic engineering to treat medical conditions in people, but we should not use them to manipulate the genetic traits of future children. Genetic modifications of sperm, eggs and early embryos should be strictly off limits. Otherwise, we risk venturing into human experimentation and high-tech eugenics.

Unfortunately, there are now worrisome signs that opposition to inheritable genetic modifications, written into law by dozens of countries, according to our count, may be weakening. British regulators are also considering mitochondrial manipulations, and proponents there, like their counterparts in the United States, want to move quickly to clinical trials.

Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University have produced five macaque monkeys using one of these techniques. Four are now adults and all five appear healthy. But we won't know for years how subsequent generations may be affected.

And the O.H.S.U. researchers themselves report a difference between their experience with the macaques and their work so far on fertilized human eggs. More than half of the human zygotes - single cells formed by the merging of an egg and sperm - had abnormalities not observed in the fertilized eggs of the monkeys. "It looks like human oocytes are more sensitive," the lead researcher, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biologist, told Nature.

Some media accounts about these techniques have misleadingly referred to "saving lives," as if they were aimed at people who are sick and suffering. Others have failed to note how very few women would be candidates for even considering them. And they could turn to safer and simpler alternatives. An affected woman could adopt or use in vitro fertilization with another woman's eggs. Of course, the resulting child would not be genetically related to her, but neither would the child be put at grave risk by an extreme procedure.

The F.D.A. advisory panel says that its meeting will consider only scientific aspects of mitochondrial manipulation and that any "ethical and social policy issues" are outside its scope. But those are precisely the issues that we must address. Simply being able to do something doesn't mean we should do it.

Marcy Darnovsky is executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society.

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BERKELEY, Calif. - AN advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration is set to begin two days of meetings tomorrow to consider radical biological procedures that, if successful, would produce genetically modified human beings. This is a dangerous step.

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Sir Francis Galton the geographer, statistic, meteorologist, psychologist and forensic scientist created the idea of eugenics. Galton dedicated most of his life to investigating and improving human heredity. His goal was to figure out a way to "improve the human stock and prevent degeneration of genetic potential".

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galton.org: Sir Francis Galton FRS, 1822-1911.

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"Eugenics is a moral philosophy to improve humanity by encouraging the ablest and healthiest people to have more children". The goal of negative eugenics is to discourage people with undesired traits from reproducing to "preserve humanities finest". People with desired traits are encouraged to reproduce to improve human traits, this is called positive eugenics.

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Elof Carlson, State University of New York at Stony Brook

The eugenics movement arose in the 20th century as two wings of a common philosophy of human worth. Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics in 1883, perceived it as a moral philosophy to improve humanity by encouraging the ablest and healthiest people to have more children. The Galtonian ideal of eugenics is usually termed positive eugenics. Negative eugenics, on the other hand, advocated culling the least able from the breeding population to preserve humanity's fitness. The eugenics movements in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia favored the negative approach.

The notion of segregating people considered unfit to reproduce dates back to antiquity. For example, the Old Testament describes the Amalekites - a supposedly depraved group that God condemned to death. Concerns about environmental influences that might damage heredity - leading to ill health, early death, insanity, and defective offspring - were formalized in the early 1700s as degeneracy theory. Degeneracy theory maintained a strong scientific following until late in the 19th century. Masturbation, then called onanism, was presented in medical schools as the first biological theory of the cause of degeneracy. Fear of degeneracy through masturbation led Harry Clay Sharp, a prison physician in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to carry out vasectomies on prisoners beginning in 1899. The advocacy of Sharp and his medical colleagues, culminated in an Indiana law mandating compulsory sterilization of "degenerates." Enacted in 1907, this was the first eugenic sterilization law in the United States.

By the mid-19th century most scientists believed bad environments caused degenerate heredity. Benedict Morel's work extended the causes of degeneracy to some legitimate agents - including poisoning by mercury, ergot, and other toxic substances in the environment. The sociologist Richard Dugdale believed that good environments could transform degenerates into worthy citizens within three generations. This position was a backdrop to his very influential study on The Jukes (1877), a degenerate family of paupers and petty criminals in Ulster County, New York. The inheritance of acquired (environmental) characters was challenged in the 1880s by August Weismann, whose theory of the germ plasm convinced most scientists that changes in body tissue (the soma) had little or no effect on reproductive tissue (the germ plasm). At the beginning of the 20th century, Weismann's views were absorbed by degeneracy theorists who embraced negative eugenics as their favored model.

Adherents of the new field of genetics were ambivalent about eugenics. Most basic scientists - including William Bateson in Great Britain, and Thomas Hunt Morgan in the United States - shunned eugenics as vulgar and an unproductive field for research. However, Bateson's and Morgan's contributions to basic genetics were quickly absorbed by eugenicists, who took interest in Mendelian analysis of pedigrees of humans, plants, and animals. Many eugenicists had some type of agricultural background. Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, who together ran the Eugenics Record Office, were introduced through their shared interest in chicken breeding. Both also were active in Eugenics Section of the American Breeder's Association (ABA). Davenport's book, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement through Better Breeding, had a distinct agricultural flavor, and his affiliation with the ABA was included under his name on the title page. Agricultural genetics also provided the favored model for negative eugenics: human populations, like agricultural breeds and varieties, had to be culled of their least productive members, with only the healthiest specimens used for breeding.

Evolutionary models of natural selection and dysgenic (bad) hereditary practices in society also contributed to eugenic theory. For example, there was fear that highly intelligent people would have smaller families (about 2 children), while the allegedly degenerate elements of society were having larger families of four to eight children. Public welfare might also play a role in allowing less fit people to survive and reproduce, further upsetting the natural selection of fitter people.

Medicine also put its stamp on eugenics. Physicians like Anton Ochsner and Harry Sharp were convinced that social failure was a medical problem. Italian criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso popularized the image of an innate criminal type that was thought to be a reversion or atavism of a bestial ancestor of humanity. When medical means failed to help the psychotic, the retarded, the pauper, and the vagrant, eugenicists shifted to preventive medicine. The German physician-legislator Rudolph Virchow, advocated programs to deal with disease prevention on a large scale. Virchow's public health movement was fused with eugenics to form the racial hygiene movement in Germany - and came to America through physicians he trained.

Eugenicists argued that "defectives" should be prevented from breeding, through custody in asylums or compulsory sterilization. Most doctors probably felt that sterilization was a more humane way of dealing with people who could not help themselves. Vasectomy and tubal ligation were favored methods, because they did not alter the physiological and psychological contribution of the reproductive organs. Sterilization allowed the convicted criminal or mental patient to participate in society, rather than being institutionalized at public expense. Sterilization was not viewed as a punishment because these doctors believed (erroneously) that the social failure of "unfit" people was due to an irreversibly degenerate germ plasm.

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Elof Carlson, State University of New York at Stony Brook The eugenics movement arose in the 20th century as two wings of a common philosophy of human worth. Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics in 1883, perceived it as a moral philosophy to improve humanity by encouraging the ablest and healthiest people to have more children.

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The history of eugenics began in England, when Sir Francis Galton studied the genetics of upper class England. He believed eugenics meant to be "well-born", or having favorable genetics.  Almost a century later, in the U.S., the ERO, (Eugenics Record Office), conducted a research on the correlation of poverty and eugenics. They concluded that people were poor because it was in their traits to be poor. Whether an accurate research or not, they deemed there to be a correlation. Their "solution" was to sterilize all of these people to prevent them from passing such "undesirable" traits. During the 1900's over 65,000 people in the US were sterilized. Most were deaf, blind, and African American women who never consented to being sterilized. Even though deaf and blindness are in fact not due to genetics, they were sterilized. African American women were sterilized because they didn't have "desirable" traits. Even though eugenics was so popular during this time period, by the start of WWII, it lost popularity in the US when eugenics was used to kill so many in Nazi Germany. Today, eugenics is used to eliminate genetically inherited diseases. The goal for the future is to eradicate these diseases, however controversy over these attempts is great since some genetic diseases comes from a certain race. That's when eugenics becomes borderline racism.
History of Eugenics Timeline:
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1y4Lr4nQZB7gp2c5i-Epn9D3Z3c1SG2_V_2YkR4RXfqA/edit?usp=sharing

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Eugenics is a movement that is aimed at improving the genetic composition of the human race. Historically, eugenicists advocated selective breeding to achieve these goals. Today we have technologies that make it possible to more directly alter the genetic composition of an individual. However, people differ in their views on how to best (and ethically) use this technology.
History of Eugenics
In 1883, Sir Francis Galton, a respected British scholar and cousin of Charles Darwin, first used the term eugenics, meaning "well-born." Galton believed that the human race could help direct its future by selectively breeding individuals who have "desired" traits. This idea was based on Galton's study of upper class Britain. Following these studies, Galton concluded that an elite position in society was due to a good genetic makeup. While Galton's plans to improve the human race through selective breeding never came to fruition in Britain, they eventually took sinister turns in other countries.

The eugenics movement began in the U.S. in the late 19 th century. However, unlike in Britain, eugenicists in the U.S. focused on efforts to stop the transmission of negative or "undesirable" traits from generation to generation. In response to these ideas, some US leaders, private citizens, and corporations started funding eugenical studies. This lead to the 1911 establishment of The Eugenics Records Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The ERO spent time tracking family histories and concluded that people deemed to be unfit more often came from families that were poor, low in social standing, immigrant, and/or minority. Further, ERO researchers "demonstrated" that the undesirable traits in these families, such as pauperism, were due to genetics, and not lack of resources.

Committees were convened to offer solutions to the problem of the growing number of "undesirables" in the U.S. population. Stricter immigration rules were enacted, but the most ominous resolution was a plan to sterilize "unfit" individuals to prevent them from passing on their negative traits. During the 20 th century, a total of 33 states had sterilization programs in place. While at first sterilization efforts targeted mentally ill people exclusively, later the traits deemed serious enough to warrant sterilization included alcoholism, criminality chronic poverty, blindness, deafness, feeble-mindedness, and promiscuity. It was also not uncommon for African American women to be sterilized during other medical procedures without consent. Most people subjected to these sterilizations had no choice, and because the program was run by the government, they had little chance of escaping the procedure. It is thought that around 65,000 Americans were sterilized during this time period.

The eugenics movement in the U.S. slowly lost favor over time and was waning by the start of World War II. When the horrors of Nazi Germany became apparent, as well as Hitler's use of eugenic principles to justify the atrocities, eugenics lost all credibility as a field of study or even an ideal that should be pursued.

CLICK HERE to learn more about eugenics in modern times

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Introduction to Eugenics - Genetics Generation

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Introduction to Eugenics Eugenics is a movement that is aimed at improving the genetic composition of the human race. Historically, eugenicists advocated selective breeding to achieve these goals. Today we have technologies that make it possible to more directly alter the genetic composition of an individual.