PBS: The Eugenics Crusade, Racial Pseudoscience In America's History

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Thu Mar 26, 2020, 06:43 PM - Edit history (2)

(8 mins) PROMO. The Eugenics Crusade, America's hidden history, PBS American Experience, 2018. The goal of the eugenics movement was simple and, to its disciples, laudable: to eradicate social ills by limiting the number of those considered to be genetically “unfit” –– a group that would expand to include many immigrant groups, the poor, Jews, the mentally and physically disabled, and the “morally delinquent.” At its peak in the 1920s, the movement was in every way mainstream, packaged as a progressive quest for “healthy babies.” Its doctrines were not only popular and practiced, but codified by laws..*Watch the full episode, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eugenics-crusade/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeble-minded

Wiki. The eugenics movement became associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust when the defense of many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials of 1945 to 1946 attempted to justify their human-rights abuses by claiming there was little difference between the Nazi eugenics programs and the U.S. eugenics programs.[9] In the decades following World War II, with more emphasis on human rights, many countries began to abandon eugenics policies, although some Western countries (the United States, Canada, and Sweden among them) continued to carry out forced sterilizations.

Since the 1980s and 1990s, with new assisted reproductive technology procedures available, such as gestational surrogacy (available since 1985), preimplantation genetic diagnosis (available since 1989), and cytoplasmic transfer (first performed in 1996), concern has grown about the possible revival of a more potent form of eugenics after decades of promoting human rights.
A criticism of eugenics policies is that, regardless of whether negative or positive policies are used, they are susceptible to abuse because the genetic selection criteria are determined by whichever group has political power at the time...