Ethical Decision Making within Eugenics.
Around the turn of the century, eugenics was becoming an accepted method in the attempt to breed better humans. The notion of a superior race, racial purity, and inheritable intelligence is the backbone of the eugenics movement. In the United States, the eugenics movement forcibly sterilized tens of thousands of Americans because of a belief that they were "feebleminded" or "of inferior stock." Many people are unaware that Adolph Hitler received most of his eugenic information and ideas from publications originating in the United States (Parker). Unfortunately, Hitler did not stop with sterilizing citizens with perceived genetic defects; he began exterminating them. Hitler's extreme use of eugenics caused the U.S. population to contemplate the morality of eugenics; however, it did not stop its use. Today, eugenics is becoming more hi-tech. .
Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883. He used the Greek eu meaning "good" and combined it with a derivative of genetics, meaning "born" to form a word whose meaning was "good birth" (Encyclopedia Britannica). According to Galton, "Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally" (Encyclopedia Britannica). Galton believed that society's sympathy for the weak and poor would allow for a corruption of the gene pool if they were left to their own devices and allowed to reproduce. His theory was that humanity needs an artificial selection process because the natural selection process theorized by Darwin, as the "survival of the fittest" no longer applied. .
Over the next 30 years, various countries adopted eugenic philosophies, including the United States of America. Although the United States never enacted a federal sterilization law, approximately 33 states did, many after the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law that permitted state officials to sterilize institutionalized retarded persons whom a physician determined likely to become the parent of children with similar defects (Buck v.
