Research Essay: Eugenics

Research Essay: Eugenics

Humans have long been highly motivated to achieve success, ensuring survival and developing new tools and technologies to help them achieve these aims. As a result, it must be unsurprising that eugenics has followed this similar path throughout history. Francis Galton developed the word “eugenics” in 1883, which comes from the Greek word eugenes and means well-born (Graham 36). Eugenics is the act or provision of selectively pairing people with specified anticipated genetic qualities in order to advance humankind. It aims to lessen human misery by breeding diseases, deformities, and different unwanted characters from the world population. This essay relates the novel Heart of a Dog reflect and the pseudo-science of eugenics.

Eugenics aims to increase the human race’s quality by stimulating the procreation of humans with desirable attributes and preventing the breeding of humans with less desirable characteristics. Biases of the period were perpetuated by genetics, which labeled others with good genetic features as White, wealthy, and healthy. On the other hand, individuals with negative traits were defined as non-White, of lower socioeconomic standing, or mentally or psychologically impaired. Criminals and those perceived to be sexually aberrant were also viewed as unpleasant. The eugenics movement started in the 1800s and continued to the 1940s (Kevles 89).

The American eugenics movement encouraged negative eugenics, with the aim of artificial selection to eradicate unwanted genetic characteristics in humankind. Throughout the American eugenics movement, statutes were agreed that authorized involuntary sterilization and made it unlawful for persons with mental or physical incapacities and mixed-race couples to espouse. Galton’s English eugenics movement emphasized eugenics by selective breeding for desirable qualities. The eugenics movement in the United States, on the other hand, immediately focused on eradicating unfavorable features. As expected, the undesirable elements were prevalent among poor, illiterate, and minority communities. Eugenicists aided in the passage of legislation requiring forced sterilization of these populations in order to prevent them from reproducing. Indiana was the initial state to authorize a sterilization decree in 1907, while California and 28 different states followed before 1931. More than 64,000 people in the United States were forcefully sterilized due to regulations. Sterilization initiatives began with the physically challenged but eventually extended to encompass persons that only crime was extreme poverty. 

Eugenics took a dark turn in America during the first years of the 20th century, especially in California.  Between 1909 and 1979, more than 20,000 sterilizations took place in California state mental institutions to protect the communities from the generation of people with mental diseases (Fabre & Eleonore 27). Most sterilization was conducted on minorities. More than thirty states eventually allowed spontaneous sterilization in whomever. However, the lawmakers thought that it was not very helpful to reproduce.

 The United States Supreme Court proclaimed in 1927 that obligatory sterilization of incapacitated persons does not infringe the Constitution. Three groups of imbeciles are adequate, Supreme Court Judge Oliver Wendall Holmes remarked. This verdict was reversed in 1942. Not previously, hundreds of families had endured the operation. Ramos, the governor of Puerto Rico, started sterilization initiatives for ladies from Puerto Rico in the 1930s. The governor said the phase was essential to battle widespread impoverishment and financial fight; however, it could also have been a way to prevent the Latino blood from polluting the so-called better Aryan gene pool (Reilly 359).

From 1970 to 1976, approximately 28 and 52 percent of Indigenous Americans were subjected to sterilization, based on the Government Accountability Office investigation. Many sterilizations were suspected of being deprived of consent during different surgical processes, such as outpatient procedures. In particular situations, surviving kids were denied health care provided their mothers consented to such a process. Nothing is equivalences to Adolf Hitler’s eugenic trials preceding to and through World War II, as horrifying as compulsory sterilization was in America. And Hitler did not invent the idea of a superior Aryan race through his own. In fact, in his 1934 book Mein Kampf, Hitler mentioned American eugenics (Kevles 90).

Hitler declared non-Aryan people like the Jews and gypsies poorer in Mein Kampf. He thought that Germans must have used all ways needed, even extinction, to guarantee that their gene pool continued to be pure. The Nazis also approved the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring during 1933, which led to many of compulsory sterilizations. Hundreds of thousands of Germans with psychological or bodily infirmities were exterminated by either gas or lethal injection during Hitler’s master-race madness by 1940. During World War II, jail camp prisoners were exposed to horrible medicinal trials in the term of assisting Hitler found the perfect race. At Auschwitz, a doctor by the name Josef Mengele,  performed many tests on adult and kid siblings (Finger 229).

He wanted to make blue eyes using chemical eyedrops, inoculate inmates with lethal infections, and execute an operation without anesthetic. Most of his “patients” perished or were permanently disabled due to his heinous experiments, earning him the moniker “Angel of Death.” During the Holocaust, an estimated eleven million individuals died, most of whom did not meet Hitler’s notion of a dominant race.

Heart of a Dog is a novel produced in 1925 in Moscow, USSR, subsequently Russia, by author and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov. In 1968, an early English version was released. Heart of a Dog is the narrative of an abandoned dog called Sharik, discovered by a physician and undertakes major operation for experimental drives to generate a new Soviet man, a person dedicated to the Soviet Union’s communist principles. Bulgakov satirizes the Soviet Union’s socialist revolution and the idea of a New Soviet gentleman in the heart of a Dog and the idea and practices of eugenics. The Russian people saw a political transition towards communist in the early 1900s. This ideology freed individuals of their social class and status while also promoting the principles of shared ownership (Kim 23).

 The Communist Party in the Soviet Union aggressively advocated communist goals and values be reflected in the individuals, resulting in the New Soviet Man. During this period, Soviet doctors and medical experts pushed eugenics, the concept that selective breeding, which enhances favorable genetic qualities while decreasing negative characters in people, will advance the value of future generations.

The Soviet urged physicians and researchers to concentrate their research programs on eugenics in the early 1900s to improve the Soviet race. Doctors who traveled in other area of the Soviet Union learned about the eugenics movement that was being practiced in the Western world, notably the United States (Kim 56). The Soviet Union promoted the idea that those with good characteristics should remain to procreate for those characteristics to be transmitted to future generations known as positive eugenics. It also stated that negative attributes such as alcoholism and violence were inherited and that people who possessed those tendencies should not procreate (negative eugenics) (Finger 217).

After World War II, eugenics seemed to have lost momentum due to Hitler’s and the Nazis’ terrible atrocities, yet obligatory sterilizations were sustained. However, as medical technology advanced, a new sort of eugenics emerged. Contemporary eugenics, similarly identified as human genetic engineering, includes altering or eradicating genes to avoid illness, treat illness, or meaningfully improve the body. Since most catastrophic or dangerous disorders could be treated, the potential health advantages of cloning experiments are enormous.

However, there is a possible cost associated with current genetic engineering. As technology progresses, people may systematically filter out features in their offspring that they deem unattractive. Parents can already utilize genetic testing to detect problems in their children while they are still in the womb, allowing them to abort the child (Popenoe & Roswell 12). This is contentious because what defines “bad qualities” is explained. Numerous individuals believe that all people have the right to lifetime, illness, or no illness and that natural laws must not be interfered with. Although a few states gave restitution to victims or their survivors, many of America’s historical eugenics activities, such as forced sterilizations, went unpunished. But, for the more significant part, it is a mostly forgotten chapter in American history. And no amount of money will ever be able to compensate for the harm caused by Hitler’s eugenics initiatives. As researchers begin a new eugenics limit, the previous failures can serve as a cautionary to tackle contemporary genetic study with caution and sensitivity (Kevles 87).

Several people on either side of the Atlantic had moral problems regarding sterilization and were hesitant to subject people to the knife unnecessarily. In the arguments over the Mental Deficiency Act in 1913, efforts to legalize eugenic sterilize in the United Kingdom reached a pinnacle. They failed, in part, due to strong opposition from civil libertarians who were adamant about safeguarding the rights of the individuals. Moreover, a third of American states and the eastern regions of Canada rejected sterilizing legislation. The majority of the states in the United States that passed the legislation did not enforce them, while British Columbia’s statute was rarely implemented. The opposition was made up of a variety of coalitions. It came from mental health specialists who questioned eugenics’ scientific foundations and civil libertarians who cautioned that forced sterilizing was Hitlerization. Sterilization was also fiercely opposed by Roman Catholics, partially since it was against church principle. Many new immigrants to the United States were Catholics, putting them at an unfair disadvantage. Individual human rights mattered significantly more to many people before WWII than those authorized by science, legislation, and apparent social necessities of the time.

The genocide disclosures bolstered moral qualms to eugenics and sterilization, as did the growing global discussion of human rights anchored by the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Ever since, the fight for women’s rights and reproductive liberty has further shifted moral perceptions about eugenics, causing us to cringe at the majority’s decision in Buck v Bell. At the very least, history has taught us those personal freedoms must be at the center of whatever strategy we design for utilizing our fast-expanding insight into medical and human genetics (Reilly 360).

In supporting the eugenics movement, I wish to honor the spirit of writers like Francis Galton and Charles Darwin, who argued that our reproductive responsibilities evolve as our awareness of biology and ability to regulate it grows. Defending eugenics should not imply that we support state-sponsored coercion or the parochial notions held by certain early 20th eugenics proponents. Likewise, keeping eugenics does not obligate us to biological determinism, which holds that genes control every part of our nature (Kim 34). This is something that no competent scientist believes. Instead, the consensus view is that nearly every feature that determines our character and chances of living a happy life has a significant hereditary component, including intellect, health, compassion, and impulse control.

The most vital difference between contemporary genetic expertise, which people regard as eugenic, and historic eugenics is permission. People nowadays opt for genetic testing of their own volition. A person can never be forced to test or act depending on the outcomes of a screening diagnosis, such as sterilization. Personal views on genomic testing regarding generative decision-making and likely eugenic details differ, but at least now, parents can chose of utilizing or not utilizing the expertise.

It is becoming progressively possible to block the transmission of some heritable disorders as research uncovers new disease-causing mutations. Diseases like Down Syndrome, cystic fibrosis, and anemia could be eradicated in the long run. Nevertheless, some argue that current efforts to eliminate genetic illnesses are eugenics. One issue with genetic analysis for disease elimination is that, in reality, a particular ethnic group will almost certainly be implicated based on the shared ancestry. Tay-Sachs illness, for example, is far more common in some Jewish populations. Tay-Sachs is a genetic disorder that causes mental and physical decline and leads to death by four. To eradicate Tay-Sachs, all people in the affected community will need to be screened (Graham 37).

It is unavoidable that today’s modern genetics continues in the shadow of eugenics, as the second of two eras in which the knowledge of heredity was sought to bring immense benefits to humanity. In this view, the present genomics revolution is Round Two. Anything that smacks of eugenics is sure to be questionable in light of this past. When specific applications of genetic technology and science are labeled eugenic, the term conjures up images of the evil that eugenics implies. It’s a strong warning. If we want to avoid the past mistakes, we must first understand them. The term “eugenics” refers to a movement by that name, not to a specific tenet or practice that we should avoid.

Works Cited

Fabre, Manon, and Eleonore Schreiber. “The coercive sterilization of Indigenous women in

Canada: A study of the sexual sterilization act in Alberta and British Columbia.” Between

Arts and Science 2 (2017): 27

Graham, Loren R. Science and values: the eugenics movement in Germany and Russia in the

1920s. KG Saur, 2011. -36.

Finger, Anne. “The left hand of Stalin: Eugenics in the Soviet Union.” Disability Politics in a

Global Economy. Routledge, 2016. 215-235.

Kevles, Daniel J. “Eugenics, the genome, and human rights.” Medicine Studies 1.2 (2009): 85-

93.

Kim, Grace. “Heart of a Dog (1925), by Mikhail Bulgakov.” Embryo Project

Encyclopedia (2017).

Popenoe, Paul, and Roswell H. Johnson. Applied eugenics. Good Press, 2019.

Reilly, Philip R. “Eugenics and involuntary sterilization: 1907–2015.” Annual Review of

Genomics and Human Genetics 16 (2015): 351-368.