Pros And Cons Of Eugenics

Eugenics was initially the scientific method which became the political idea that society and the human race could be improved genetically. Advocates of this movement went about doing so by removing the undesirable traits from the racial stock. Reproduction was treated as a privilege determined by Eugenicists standards and those who acquired those undesirable traits were subjected to surgeries, under false pretences. More than 60,000 people in the United States were blindsided by their doctors and were sterilized based on this eugenic belief. Eugenics was applied through coercive and legal power. The Eugenics Board and state governments approved lobotomies and sterilizations for people who suffered from mental illnesses, epilepsy, low intelligence
She was only 13 years old when she was raped by a man from her small neighborhood in North Carolina and became pregnant. According to records, Ms.Riddick was labeled as feeble minded and promiscuous, and immediately after giving birth, the state ordered that doctors cut and tie her fallopian tubes. She recalls in her interview with MSNBC, “I got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember. When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach” (Eugenicists Movement in America: Victims Coming Forward). Throughout the whole procedure she was uninformed and blindsided by her doctors, people who she thought she could trust to take care of her during a pregnancy at such a young. At the age of 19, when she and her husband had decided that they wanted to start a family, she learned that she was unable to have anymore children. She uses the term “butchered” to describe how her procedure left her, she also adds that “The scars are a constant reminder that I have to live with this for the rest of my life” (Eugenicists Movement in America: Victims Coming Forward). Both men and women were taken advantage of in order to create a “perfect” society in the eyes of
Having children is a right and a choice. Both men and women’s bodies were violated. Unfortunately, to this day the idea of Eugenics is still practiced to some extent. One way being the idea of preimplantation genetic diagnosis otherwise known as PGD, and the other the forced tubal ligations of inmates. In today’s world, fertility doctors give couples the opportunity to “select the embryo of choice based on the gender, modifying the physical as well as characteristic features of the embryo by gene mutations and/or to design a baby called as “savior baby” to provide HLA match stem cells to save a child suffering from incurable life threatening disease” (Qurat E Noor, Baig). These designer babies are allowing humans to essentially create a master race; children with favorable traits such as blue eyes and blonde hair. Not only that, but because the genetic screening is so expensive, it creates a divide between the classes, mostly celebrities and the rich can afford it, similar to how the eugenics movement was ran. On the other hand, between 2005 and 2013, around 150 female inmates in two of California’s women’s prisons received tubal ligations without fitting the criteria for the procedure. “Around three dozen of these unauthorized procedures directly violated the state’s own informed consent process. The majority of these female inmates were either African-American or Latina and first-time offenders” (Nathan, Giri). It is quite