Eugenics

Eugenics is a movement and set of practices aimed at shaping human heredity by encouraging reproduction among some groups and restricting it among others. It has been used to justify coercive policies and racial discrimination.

Positive eugenics: Eugenic policies that encourage people deemed desirable to reproduce. It pursued hereditary improvement by promoting reproduction among favored groups.
Francis Galton: An English polymath who founded eugenics as a program for improving human hereditary qualities. He coined the term and framed selective reproduction as social improvement.
Buck v. Bell: A 1927 United States Supreme Court decision that upheld Virginia's compulsory sterilization law. The ruling gave constitutional approval to a prominent American sterilization program.
Racial hygiene: A movement that sought to manage population health and heredity through racialized policies. It connected eugenic aims to racial classification and state intervention.
Genetic enhancement: The use of genetic technologies to promote traits beyond preventing or treating disease. It raises questions about selection and inequality without necessarily involving state coercion.
Negative eugenics: Eugenic policies intended to prevent people deemed undesirable from reproducing. It pursued hereditary change through restrictions and reproductive coercion.
Hereditary Genius: Francis Galton's 1869 book arguing that ability clustered in families and could be cultivated through selective breeding. This work supplied an early argument for Galton's eugenic program.
Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924: A Virginia law authorizing compulsory sterilization of people classified as unfit by state institutions. It provided the statute upheld in Buck v. Bell.
Human rights: Basic rights and freedoms held by all people, regardless of status or identity. Eugenic coercion helped sharpen demands for protections of bodily autonomy and equality.
Genetic discrimination: Unfair treatment based on actual or presumed genetic information. It is a contemporary risk associated with using heredity to rank or exclude people.

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