Eugenics
In 2022, actress Sydney Sweeney sparked outrage when a Gap advertisement featured her as an idealized beauty standard: blonde, blue-eyed, and conventionally perfect. Critics immediately recognized the troubling implications: if this is the ideal, what does that say about everyone else? This modern moment unwittingly echoes a much darker chapter in history when eugenicists literally attempted to engineer “ideal” humans by controlling who could reproduce and who couldn’t. Eugenics, derived from the Greek words meaning “well-born,” is the pseudoscientific belief that human populations can and should be “improved” through selective breeding and reproductive control. What began as a philosophical speculation in ancient Greece slowly evolved into a systematic science in the nineteenth century and ultimately became state policy. By using law, medicine, and terror to determine who deserved the right to have children and who did not.
Sydney Sweeney overlooks herself in her latest campaign for American Eagle. Credit… American Eagle Instagram
Early Eugenics
The history of eugenics reveals how scientific theories about human ancestry became tools for social control. By shaping laws and policies, they determined who could marry, reproduce, or even enter a country. Sterilization, which is the medical procedure that permanently prevents reproduction, became one of the most direct methods governments used to enforce eugenic ideals. Though often used as social improvement, these practices targeted vulnerable populations and took away individuals’ simplest reproductive autonomy.
Ancient Roots: Philosophy Before Science
The roots of eugenic thinking stretch back to ancient civilizations, though these early ideas lacked the scientific framework that we would use in modern day eugenics. In ancient Greece and Rome, philosophers like Plato envisioned ideal societies where the state controlled reproduction to produce “superior” citizens. Plato’s Republic described a system where rulers would arrange marriages between the best individuals while discouraging or preventing reproduction among those deemed “inferior”. Sparta practiced infanticide, which exposed or weeded out the weak or deformed newborns to ensure only the physically fit survived to adulthood. These practices reflected a belief that human quality could be managed through selective breeding, though they remained philosophical concepts rather than actually becoming systemic policies back in those ancient civilizations. The emphasis was on physical strength and social order, and not the hereditary science that would emerge centuries later.
John William Waterhouse, “Diogenes” (1882). Oil on canvas. Credit…Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
The Birth of Modern Eugenics: Francis Galton’s Scientific Framework
Modern eugenics took shape in the late nineteenth century when British scientist Francis Galton formalized the concept. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term “eugenics” in 1883, deriving it from the Greek word meaning “well-born.” Galton believed that human traits (such as: intelligence, moral character, and even social status) were primarily inherited, and he argued that society should encourage reproduction among those with “desirable” traits while discouraging it among those again deemed inferior. His work drew very much on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but Galton looked to apply it deliberately to human populations. He promoted positive eugenics, which encouraged the “fit” to have more children, and negative eugenics, which contrastingly prevented the “unfit” from reproducing. Galton’s ideas gained traction among scientists and policymakers who saw eugenics as a progressive solution to poverty and crime. His theories provided a scientific cover to existing prejudices about class and race, transforming his social biases into supposed biological facts.
Sir Francis Galton – National Portrait Gallery, London
1900-WWII
The Rise and Institutionalization of Eugenics
Eugenics became deeply institutionalized throughout the United States and in Europe as governments, medical professionals, and reformers around the world sought to apply hereditarian theories to social policy during the early twentieth century (Kevles 1–3). Within the U.S., institutionalization took concrete form in the shape of sterilization laws. Indiana passed the first in 1907, and over thirty states eventually followed suit, enacting statutes for involuntary sterilization of individuals judged unfit (Kevles 63–66). These policies targeted those labeled mentally deficient, epileptic, disabled, or socially marginal, reflecting the core belief that heredity determined human value and that such policies could diminish social problems (Kevles 67–72).
This poster from the England 1930s promotes the idea of ‘positive’ eugenics through the figure of the ‘healthy’ sower of seed.’
Marriage Laws & Immigration in the U.S.
Eugenic ideology also dictated marriage laws, most of which imposed medical certification requirements or outlawed marriage for people with disabilities or in specific conditions of health. Other states, such as Connecticut and Michigan, enforced medical examinations before marriage with the hope of limiting who would reproduce (Kevles 88–91). Eugenics shaped national policy through immigration control. In response to eugenics fears about race and disability, the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 developed strict national quotas that dramatically favored Northern and Western Europeans while severely limiting Southern and Eastern Europeans and nearly all non-Europeans (Kevles 96–102). Immigration officials applied various fitness exams, including literacy tests, psychological assessments, and physical inspections, in hopes of excluding those deemed defective or unfit (Kevles 102–05).
1920s premarital health certificate circa 1924. Credit… Robert Bogdan Collection.
Buck v. Bell & the Expansion of American Eugenics
The most significant legal endorsement of American eugenics came with Buck v. Bell (1927). In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s sterilization law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declaring that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Kevles 111). As historian Daniel Kevles notes, the decision provided sweeping legal authority for the expansion of sterilization programs across the country (111). Tens of thousands of involuntary sterilizations followed, many performed without genuine consent (Kevles 116–18).
Carrie Buck photograph
European Eugenics & Nazi Racial Policy
Other European nations also adopted sterilization policies, though the extent and motivations behind the practice sometimes differed. Long-lasting eugenic programs were adopted in Scandinavian nations and persisted well into the mid-twentieth century (Kevles 135–40). In Germany, eugenic measures became central to state policy even before the rise of the Nazi regime. Following 1933, however, eugenics in Germany expanded dramatically. The Nazi sterilization law of 1933 imposed mass sterilization for a wide number of hereditary conditions and provided a basis for broader racial hygiene campaigns (Kevles 147–50).
Nazi racial hygiene poster Credit… Cover of Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (1994).
These policies escalated during World War II into programs of segregation, forced euthanasia, and genocide, climaxing in the systematic killing of millions deemed biologically or racially unfit (Kevles 150–55). The war exposed the extreme dangers of state-directed eugenics and reshaped global thinking on scientific ethics, human rights, and genetic research. Although the scale and outcome of the U.S. and European cases were different, there was commonality in the belief of those policies in the authority of the state to direct human reproduction and the power of science to engineer society (Kevles 2–3). In these policies, one finds a legacy that continues to reverberate in contemporary debates over reproductive autonomy, genetic technologies, and the misuse of scientific authority (Kevles 164–66).
Post World War II
After the Holocaust, views on the term Eugenics changed a lot. In many European countries, as well as the US, they began heavily examining and reassessing sterilization laws and practices. This shift was due to an obvious stigma and pressure against forced sterilization and the ideology used to justify the holocaust. Despite this shift against eugenic practice, more and more Americans were being sterilized. Before 1969, doctors worked under the assumption that sterilization used as a contraceptive device was illegal, but a 1969 federal court case, Jessin v. County of Shasta, stated that “sterilization [was] an acceptable method of family planning” a nd “on May 18, 1971, the Office of Economic Opportunity began funding sterilizations”. At the same time, Medicaid was permitted to reimburse up to 90% of the operation. As a result, by 1975, 7.9 million Americans had undergone sterilization, and sterilization had become a contraceptive method for married couples. However, concerns and protests over the resurgence of coerced sterilization arose all around the country as communities fought back.
Sterilization of Natives
Throughout American history, Native American women have been forcefully sterilized in an attempt to civilize the American population. In the post-WW2 era, eugenists were more subtle. Throughout the early 70’s, there were fears motivated by the Nixon administration of overpopulation and resource scarcity, as well as a changing racial demographic of the United States. Because of this, the Nixon administration promoted ‘family planning’ significantly. Under these policies, federally-funded sterilization incread 300% between 1970 and 1977. Since the Indian Health Service (IHS) was the only healthcare provider available to native American women on reservations at the time, they were particularly vulnerable to abuse by IHS physicians and social workers. The Indian Health Service (IHS) was created in 1954 when healthcare provisions for Native Americans were consolidated under federal administration. It grew out of treaties and the federal trust responsibility, where tribes had exchanged land and sovereignty for goods and services, including healthcare. The IHS was staffed primarily by non-natives at the time, meaning they were highly influenced by the current administration. In 1976, a specific 26-year-old native american woman arrived at a medical office in California requesting a “ womb transplant”, a procedure that isn’t possible to this day. Six years prior, the young woman and mother was told by a doctor working for the IHS that her uterus had been removed and lied to, assuring her that it could be replaced later. Dr Connie Redbird Pinkerman-Uri, a Choctaw and Cherokee descendant, explained to the native women that she had been misinformed and involuntarily sterilized. Dr Pinkerman-Uri began asking other Native American women about their situation and quickly discovered the ongoing systemic abuse they faced from IHS physicians as more women retold similar stories. In some cases, doctors didn’t provide interpreters to explain the procedures and the native women’s language, and often failed to suggest alternative birth control methods or explain how the procedures were irreversible. Some social workers even threaten to take away Native women’s current children if they do not agree or are pressured postpartum women already under sedation to give their consent. The Women of All Red Nations (WARN, a native american women’s activist organization estimates that the sterilization rates were as high as 8-% on some reservations compared to the national average of 15% for white women at the same time. By the end of 70s, Dr Pinkerman-Uri estimated that fewer than 100,000 native American women of childbearing age remained unsterilized. This system of misinformation and coercion was not only rampant in Native communities; these same predatory practices were present against many women of color.[1]
Image of Indigenous demonstrators protesting involuntary sterilization procedures at an IHS facility in Claremore, Oklahoma. Credit…Akwesasne Notes (1974: Vol. 6, No. 5), The American Indian Digital History Archive.
Under Nixon-era “family planning” policies, federally funded sterilizations increased nearly 300% between 1970 and 1977. Indigenous, Black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican-American women were disproportionately affected/
African American Sterilization
The idea of family planning was upheld in other communities as well in the Relf v. Weinberger case (1974). In this case, two black girls, twelve and fourteen years old, were sterilized in an Alabama hospital after their mother, who was illiterate, had signed a consent form, under the impression that her daughters were gaining access to an experimental long-term birth control drug. When District Court Judge Gesell gave the verdict of the court, he recognized that sterilization abuses were a reality, “Although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis, there is uncontroverted evidence in the record that minors and other incompetents have been sterilized with federal funds and that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization. Patients receiving Medicaid assistance at childbirth are evidently the most frequent targets of this pressure”. New 1979 regulations included key safeguards:
- A new, standardized, HEW-approved consent form.
- A mandatory 30-day waiting period between the signing of the consent form and the procedure (later amended from an initial 72-hour period in the interim rules).
- Explicit requirements that individuals be informed orally and in writing that refusal to be sterilized would not affect their eligibility for any other federal benefits.[2]
Photograph of Minnie Lee Relf and Mary Alice Relf in 1973, from The Times’s photography archives.Credit…Gary Settle/The New York Times
According to physician Helen Rodriguez-Trias, “In 1970, it was found that 43% of the women sterilized in federally-financed family planning programs were black, although they represented only one-third of the patient population”.
Puertorican Sterilization
The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW) also funded sterilizations in Puerto Rico. A program launched by the US, beginning with Law 116 (Act No. 116) in 1937 and Operation Bootstrap in 1947, resulted in one of the highest rates of female sterilization in the world. By 1956, one out of three Puerto Rican women had been sterilized, and by the late 1960s, approximately one-third of women of childbearing age (20-49) had undergone the procedure. A 1973 study by demographer José Vasquez Calzada found that 35% of Puerto Rican women were sterilized at the time, compared to 16.5% in 1953-54. The U.S. government, in collaboration with Puerto Rican officials and private organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, systematically promoted and subsidized sterilization as a public health measure and a solution to poverty. Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trias challenged coerced sterilization and fought for informed consent and reproductive rights. Her advocacy helped end mandated sterilization and shaped ethical public health practices.[3]
These examples reveal the strong coercion fueling the undercover eugenics movement of the time.
Featured Image is Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias speaking to new mothers. Credit… the National Library of Medicine
During this time, Anti-sterilization movements in the United States emerged as powerful campaigns led largely by women of color, Indigenous activists, and feminist organizations, fighting against widespread coerced and involuntary sterilizations.
Groups like WARN and Black American and Latina activist groups, such as the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA) and the Puerto Rican feminist movement, highlighted how sterilization was weaponized against their communities, often through coercion in hospitals and welfare offices. These movements reframed reproductive rights to include not just access to contraception and abortion, but also the right to be free from state-imposed sterilization. Despite sterilization being reframed as family planning and a form of contraception, it was soon revealed to be another form of oppression, control, and eugenics by these feminist movements.
Despite progress over the years, eugenics persists as an idea in some contexts. Disability rights advocates continue to challenge reproductive rights for people with disabilities, including instances of misinformed sterilizations in an ICE detention center in 2022. Additionally, the Sydney Sweeney Gap ad suggested that she embodied a white, blue-eyed, blonde ideal, implying that others with “bad genes” exist, an implication many found problematic.
Refrenceces
[1] Sophia Shepherd, The Enemy is the Knife: Native Americans, Medical Genocide, and the Prohibition of Nonconsensual Sterilizations, 27 Mich. J. Race & L. 89 (2021).
[2] Villarosa, Linda. “The Long Shadow of Eugenics in America.” Center for Genetics and Society, June 8, 2022. https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/long-shadow-eugenics-america.
[3] Presser, Harriet B. “Puerto Rico: The Role of Sterilization in Controlling Fertility.” Studies in Family Planning 1, no. 45 (September 1969): 8. https://doi.org/10.2307/1965004.
4. Bashford, Alison, and Philippa Levine, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
5. Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. London: Macmillan, 1869. https://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/text/pdf/galton-1869-genius-v3.pdf
6. Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London: Macmillan, 1883. https://galton.org/books/human-faculty/text/galton-1883-human-faculty-v4.pdf
7. Galton, D. J. “Greek Theories on Eugenics.” Journal of Medical Ethics 24, no. 4 (August 1998): 263-267. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.24.4.219
8. Galton, D. J. “Greek Theories on Eugenics.” Journal of Medical Ethics 24, no. 4 (August 1998): 263-267. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.24.4.219
9. Fancher, Raymond E., and Henderikus J. Rutherford. “Scientific Cousins: The Relationship Between Charles Darwin and Francis Galton.” American Psychologist 64, no. 2 (January 2009): 84-92. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013339
10. Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. New York: Knopf, 1985.
11. Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
12. Leonard, Thomas C. “Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 207-224. https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf
13. Lombardo, Paul A. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. (Reissued with new afterword, 2022).
14. Lombardo, Paul A. “Eugenics and Involuntary Sterilization: 1907-2015.” AMA Journal of Ethics 16, no. 12 (December 2014): 1020-1024. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26322647/
15. McKibban, Allison. “Involuntary Sterilization.” History Workshop, October 29, 2022. https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/anti-racism/involuntary-sterilization/.
16. Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. “Reproduction, Ethics, and Public Policy: The Federal Sterilization Regulations.” The Hastings Center Report 9, no. 5 (October 1979): 29. https://doi.org/10.2307/3561518.
18. Presser, Harriet B. “Puerto Rico: The Role of Sterilization in Controlling Fertility.” Studies in Family Planning 1, no. 45 (September 1969): 8. https://doi.org/10.2307/1965004.
19. Shepherd, Sophia. The Enemy is the Knife: Native Americans, Medical Genocide, and the Prohibition of Nonconsensual Sterilizations, 27 Mich. J. Race & L. 89 (2021)
20. Stern, Alexandra Minna. “Eugenics, Sterilization, and Historical Memory in the United States.” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 23, suppl. 1 (December 2016): 195-212. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-59702016000500011
21. Villarosa, Linda. “The Long Shadow of Eugenics in America.” Center for Genetics and Society, June 8, 2022. https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/long-shadow-eugenics-america.