Eugenics Movement and Human Right

The Nazi’s used eugenics to sterilize thousands of people by sending them to death camps. This hostile eugenics movement is seen in many images, historical documents and on video records. However it was not just the Nazi’s who wanted to sterilize the ‘unfit’, many parts of the world become a part of the eugenics movement. This brutal part of history of using eugenics is so associated with the Nazi’s people get shocked when they hear that Sweden sterilized thousands of people between 1930’s and 1970’s. What they wanted to do was to decrease the number of children that was born with genetic disorders and genetic diseases. Throughout history this violent movement started to take place around in many countries such as the United States, Canada, Britain and so on.

During the late nineties eugenics started with the idea of Darwinism which mentioned fitness, competition and rationalization of inequality which led to the idea of getting rid of the ‘undesired’ and increase the ‘desired’ ones in order to improve human race. Many countries believed that the people with mental retardation caused social problems and instability.

Many countries believed that they could eliminate crimes, prostitution, alcoholism which was problems that depended on genetics. Also the industrial world and the economic situations would be affected by the people with lower incomes spending more money to raise a child with genetic disorders. Race and the ‘quality’ of people also played a major role in the eugenics movement. In the United States the fitter families were awarded by the grade A which depended in the organizers thoughts on necessary qualities.

Soon critics about the eugenic movement said that the most of the human behaviors were shaped by the environment. Eugenic movements also become associated with the Hitler’s regime when the Nazi’s sent people to the death camps and sterilization was named as ‘Hitlerisation.’ The holocaust made eugenics and sterilization become a moral objection. The human right movement created a strong sense of moral sensibility.

I believe that eugenics is a way to manipulate human breeding and heredity and controlling human race by eliminating biologically inferior people. This kind of violation and crime soon made people nourish moral sensibility and made people embrace the human rights movement instead of concerning about the social needs, science and law. Even though at the first place it was introduced as a way to solve social problems in my opinion a society cannot solve their problems without facing them. This kind of maturity would make a nation stronger and would make them have wider perspectives.

Zeynep Ercan