Eugenics+in+the+US

By: Sam Scherer

History of Eugenics in the United States

The definition of Eugenics is “ the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traitsor encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits” (“Eugenics”). The basis of Eugenics is the study, or idea of improving the human species as a whole, by forced sterilization, or encouraged reproduction.

In 1914 Harry Laughlin “proposed to authorize sterilization of the ‘socially inadequate’ – people supported in institutions or maintained wholly or in part by public expense. The law encompassed the ‘feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf; deformed; and dependent’ – including ‘orphans, ne'er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless and paupers’” (Lombardo). By 1924 in America, 3000 people had been “involuntarily sterilized” and Virginia had “passed a Eugenical Sterilization Act based on Laughlin’s” proposition (Lombardo). In Virginia, the first person to be sterilized was a seventeen-year-old girl named Carrie Buck. She had a child, but was not married. Her mother was institutionalized and a sociologist of the Eugenics Record Office examined Carrie’s baby and deemed her to be “‘below average’ and ‘not quite normal’” (Lombardo). The judge assigned to her case decided that those factors were enough to recommend Carrie be sterilized. But recent studies have shown that her sterilization was based on false pretenses and that Carrie’s “child was not the result of promiscuity, [but rape] by a relative of her foster parents” (Lombardo). The case of “Buck v. Bell supplied a precedent for the eventual sterilization of approximately 8,300 Virginians. Borrowing from Laughlin’s Model Law, the German Nazi government adopted a law in 1933 that provided the legal basis for sterilizing more than 350,000 people” (Lombardo).


 * 1907: Indiana passed the first sterilization law.
 * 1914:  the largest eugenic center in the United States, The Race Betterment Foundation was founded.
 * 1923:The American Eugenics society was founded.
 * 1927: Buck v. Bell Supreme Court decision
 * 1935: South Carolina was the 31st and last state to pass a eugenic sterilization law.
 * 1972: The last of the state sterilization laws is repealed.

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