Eugenics is trending – that’s a problem
Debates on population control have always come with a dark underbelly, Caitlin Fendley reports.
The scientist Richard Dawkins sparked controversy when he tweeted that, aside from the moral problems, eugenics would work ‘‘in practice’’.
While that remark is shocking, Dawkins is hardly alone in accepting the premise at the heart of eugenic science and population-control theory. Last year, a group of 11,000 scientists signed a statement urging population control to slow human exploitation of Earth’s fragile resources. With climate change finally a topic of urgent debate, some have argued that limiting population growth – if not eugenics – could be part of saving the planet.
The idea that people should reproduce less to preserve our shared resources is nothing new. It is an old idea with a violent history. When reformers have encouraged – or forced – women to have fewer children in the name of population control, it has been the most vulnerable people and those most likely to be deemed undesirable or unfit who have paid the price.
While advocates for reproductive rights and green activists alike may call for support for greater individual bodily autonomy, they should be careful not to reinforce the dangerous, even eugenicist, forces behind encouraging population control, like those hinted at in Dawkins’ tweet.
Although the United States has not enacted an official, nationwide population policy, debates on population control have surfaced over the years across the political spectrum – involving leaders from president Richard Nixon to vice-president Al Gore.
However, the dark underbelly of population control – from eugenics in the early 20thcentury United States to mass murder during the Holocaust to compulsory sterilisation in India in the 1970s and China’s onechild policy – has undermined serious conversation about global family planning or strategies to combat climate change, poverty and overpopulation by addressing population growth.
The English statistician Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, coined the term eugenics in 1883 after studying the heritable qualities of human intelligence and ability. The eugenics movement gained momentum in early 20th-century America as, among other things, a way to explain genius and good character as well as criminality, bad social behaviour and ‘‘feeblemindedness’’.
Eugenicists sought to improve the human population and its gene pool through encouraging ‘‘fit’’ individuals to procreate (positive eugenics) and discouraging or preventing the reproduction of the ‘‘unfit’’ (negative eugenics). This led to the forced sterilisation of thousands of Americans and, in the case of Nazi Germany, the justification for murdering millions of people.
The population movement of the 20th century has shied away from that legacy and focused on how family planning could be used to minimise damage to the environment and human life.
Although these efforts have bolstered the cause of racist eugenics, they also had an active role in advancing women’s rights. Biologist and Zero Population Growth (ZPG) founder Paul Ehrlich attempted to educate Americans about the importance of having smaller families for the sake of the environment and human quality of life.
Beginning in the late 1960s, ZPG expanded its activism, arguing that overpopulation contributed to virtually all of the world’s modern ills: traffic, pollution, overcrowding and poverty, among others.
Yet, not coincidentally, Ehrlich’s work initially focused on poor cities in the global south, such as the Indian state of Delhi, as the problem – rather than the consumption rates of wealthy, majority-white countries with much higher populations and rates of consumption.
The link between population control and the darker uses of eugenics was never eliminated, which led to inhumane solutions across the globe. The problem? Many population-control advocates focused on coercive population campaigns that targeted the most powerless people.
In the 1970s, China’s one-child policy mandated contraceptive devices, abortion and sterilisation for women who became pregnant with a second child. (There were exceptions, such as if the woman’s first child was a girl or born with a disability.)
Although this policy ended a few years ago, it has led to persistent low fertility rates, a ‘‘profoundly skewed sex ratio’’ and, some researchers say, significantly higher crime rates in China.
In India, a policy of forced sterilisation during the 1970s also took the goal of curbing the population to the extreme, depriving citizens of the freedom and right to engage in voluntary family planning, mainly targeting poor men and some