Eugenics the Unethical Pseudoscience Essay

Our topic was on selective human breeding, or in other words eugenics. If you don’t know what eugenics is don’t worry I’ll tell you, according to Oxford dictionaries eugenics is the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Desirable heritable characteristics for example can be things like a particular eye color, hair color, height, etc. My question to you all is if you think eugenics is ethical or not? I want to hear your answer after I give you my reasons of why I don’t believe eugenics is ethical. Now this might not sound like such a controversial topic but the history of eugenics is not exactly a bright one. Now everyone knows how WWII began, and the people responsible for it. Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent, murdered millions, during his search for what he called the â€Å"Master Race. † His vision of the ideal race was white, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed, but contrary to popular belief, this idea of the â€Å"Master Race† did not originate with Hitler. The idea came from the United States and its eugenics program. The E. R.  O also known as the Eugenics Record Office was founded on 1910 in New York. A thing that not many people know is that the United States actually had one of the largest eugenic movements in the world. Eugenics was used by scientists as a way to control people, by that I mean they would use various research methods, hereditary questionnaires, and interviewing groups with special interests. The E. R. O. was able to convince the U. S. government to administer eugenic laws nationwide. This included immigration and marriage restrictions, race segregation, and forced sterilization of criminals and who was seen as undesirable. Well what is forced sterilization you ask? To simplify it for males it’s a vasectomy and for woman it’s a tubal ligation, getting your tubes tied. The U. S. was forcing people to be sterilized just because they were seen as unfit to breed, because they didn’t fall under what was seen as desirable. Now this thing eugenics they called it science, I personally see it as pseudoscience used to discriminate people, was used for decades. Oh and did you know that California had the largest eugenics movement in the country. From 1907 to the 1970’s over 60,000 people were forced sterilized in the U. S. alone, and 20,000 of those people were in California. Now who decides if a person should be forced sterilized or not, well a list was made and if a person has or falls under any of the items on that list, they are to be sterilized right away. The few things on that list are paralysis, congenital blindness, acquired deafness, sexual promiscuity, and not being physically attractive. Now I have a video I’d like to show you about eugenics and its forced sterilization.