Eugenics
So many people may be wondering, what exactly is eugenics? Well it was a time when people believed that sterilizing all of the people that weren't in their eyes perfect humans. This was wrong on so many levels because they thought that if they sterilize them there would never be another one of them. If you were not the perfect race or you were blind and handicapped in any other way, you were to be sterilized. You were not given much of a choice at that time. They would even go against your will, it was all up to the people around you. So if you were ever going to be able to reproduce the people around you would decide or if they felt like you weren't right then you would just be sterilized. Sometimes people would go into surgery for one thing and come out steril. . There had been many highly educated scientists who had believed all of the stuff that others had believed in. What the people had been doing must of been seen as reasonable because it was of what everyone had been doing, instead it was looked down upon in our time more than it was actually was in their time. In the end the whole entire world had been affected by the act of eugenics one way or another.
So the American Eugenics had developed in the wake of turbulent economic and social problems following the Civil War. There had been a lot of different types of people moving into the United States, The founder of eugenics was Francis Galton who in 1883 perceived eugenics as a moral philosophy to improve humanity by encouraging the ablest and the healthiest people to actually reproduce. The movements in eugenics had favored the negative approach in the United States, Scandinavia and Germany. The eugenicists had argued that the defective (people who were not perfect in their eyes) should not be prevented from breeding, through custody in asylums or compulsory sterilization. The favored methods had been vasectomy and tubal ligation but the doctors had felt that sterilization was a more humane way of dealing with people who could not help themselves. So some doctors believed that sterilization was not viewed as a punishment because the social failure of unfit people was due to an irreversibly degenerate germplasm.
So in the beginning they first had started to understand the human traits and how the child gets one member of the gene pair from the mother and one from the fathers. These genes may either be recessive or dominant .Then a sexlinked was expressed when males inherit a recessive gene on their single X cromosome.So the eugenicists examined family peigrees and attempted to discern the patter of one of the three basics modes of inheritances. Those were recessive, dominant or sex linked and back then and today the study of gene inheritances involves two important elements which are finding relate large families that express the trait under study and the scoring each family member for the presence or absence of the trait. In the first decades of the 20th century eugenicists fared well on the first element, because large families were much more common , but they had come across a problem because scoring traits was difficult especially the the eugenicist would try to measure complex traits or complex mental illnesses. Some of those illnesses were like schizophrenia or manic depression. During the entire time of eugenics, DNA had not yet been shown to be the molecule of heredity.The eugenicists had no physical road marks to help them follow inheritance through a family.
The eugenics research had a large impact on the American society. I believe the eugenicist were very judgement and had a image of a perfect world when in reality we will never have that. So they had so many people believing in something that was wrong and very untrue. Also people from certain places had been unfit to live in the U..S, therefore it was very hard to get through to the United States.
The eugenics had many absurd laws when it came to marriage and mixing races. So in the early 1900’s the eugenics movement had supplied a new set of argument to support the existing restrictions on interracial marriage. There had been legal restrictions of who could marry who. There had been supposedly biological dangers of mixing the races.They had believed that it would lead to racial suicide and the eventual disappearance of white civilization.
So just think a little about all of this, I feel like the eugenicist and the people who had supported it in the end were very much in the wrong. At that if someone wanted a family they could either have it if they were the right race and had no problem, but if they had a slight problem or were they wrong race they were sterilized here had been supposedly biological dangers of mixing the races.. I believe everyone should have the opportunity of having their own family as long as their head is in the right place. I think if you handicap and you could take care of your child or weren't fit for a child, then no you should not bring one into the world because they could possibly grow up having the same problem as you. Also if you are a drug addict or homeless and aren't helping yourself then you should not have a child because you wouldn't be able to provide for the child , you could put them in harms way unintentionally, or you wouldn't be able to give the love and attention because your mind would be elsewhere. Therefore I think those type of people should be given birth control, use protection or if they won't do any of those then they should be sterilized., but that is just my own belief.
Sources
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/
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