Eugenics

Eugenics is the practice, and philosophical underpinning of such practice, of seeking to improve the human population by promoting the reproduction of people with desired traits and reducing or eliminating the reproduction of those with undesirable traits. Eugenics is especially associated with the sterilization or execution of those with undesirable traits, in an attempt to reduce the prevalence of those traits in the gene pool, and it shared many of the same philosophical foundations with miscegenation laws of the 19th and 20th century, which sought to prevent the introduction of nonwhite genes into a “white” gene pool. The Holocaust made outright support of eugenics, especially by that name, politically untenable (though eugenics policies were still proposed in the United States and Europe, under cover of ...