In 1929, two California eugenicists named Ezra Gosney and Paul Popenoe published a book called Sterilization for Human Betterment. It was a careful, data-rich account of California’s compulsory sterilization program: how many people had been processed, under what legal authority, with what results. Copies reached Germany, where officials in the emerging Nazi movement studied them closely. German sterilization advocates later stated openly that their own legislation had been modeled on the California experiment as Gosney and Popenoe had described it. In 1934, a California eugenicist named C.M. Goethe returned from a visit to Germany and wrote to a colleague that everywhere he traveled, he sensed that German thinking had been tremendously stimulated by American ideas. He was not writing in horror, but pride.
That exchange—American science flowing eastward across the Atlantic to inform the machinery of the Holocaust—is the detail that tends to silence a room. The question we typically ask is how respectable people could have supported something so monstrous. But we should also ask a harder question: why has the dream that drove them; the dream of scientifically improving the human race; never gone away? Every generation discredits the last version, dubs it evil, and then quietly rebuilds it under a different name. Understanding why requires going back further than California, and further back even than Galton.
Humans have been attempting to engineer better people for as long as they have been capable of thinking systematically about anything. The impulse predates science by several millennia. In Sparta, newborns were inspected by state elders, and any infant judged weak or deformed was left on a hillside to die. This was not understood as cruelty, but civic duty—the maintenance of a warrior population whose strength was the city’s only real asset. Plato, in the Republic, imagined an ideal city where the rulers secretly arranged matings between the best men and the best women, using a rigged lottery to disguise the selection as chance. The deception was considered a noble lie, justified by the quality of its outcomes. Royal families across Europe pursued pure bloodlines through cousin marriage for centuries, an approach that produced some of the most spectacular genetic disasters in recorded history: the Habsburgs’ inbreeding yielded deformity, infertility, and cognitive impairment across multiple generations.
What changed in the nineteenth century was not the desire but the machinery available to satisfy it. Charles Darwin’s account of natural selection gave the old dream a scientific vocabulary. Darwin himself was cautious about the social implications of his theory. He worried, in fact, that human compassion for the weak might interfere with natural selection in ways that would eventually weaken the species. He did not advocate cruelty, but he had planted a seed.
It was his half-cousin Francis Galton who cultivated it. Galton coined the word eugenics in 1883, defining it as the science of improving the human stock. He was not a crank or a fanatic. He was one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation; the inventor of statistical correlation, a pioneer of fingerprint identification, a Fellow of the Royal Society. His eugenic program was, in his mind, a straightforward extension of the scientific method into the domain of social policy. What nature accomplished slowly and brutally through the attrition of the unfit, man could accomplish quickly and kindly through deliberate management of reproduction. The word “kindly” is worth sitting with. Galton did not think of himself as a cruel man, but a compassionate one, applying reason to suffering in order to reduce it.
This self-understanding defined the movement that grew up around his ideas. By the early 1900s, eugenics was the cutting edge of progressive thought across the Western world. If disease, poverty, and crime could be traced to defective heredity—and the emerging science of genetics seemed to suggest they could—then addressing those hereditary patterns was not merely logical but obligatory. Harvard geneticist Edward East argued that social progress without eugenics was simply unthinkable, asserting that the less desirable elements of the population were reproducing faster than the fit. The phrase carries the quiet arrogance of a man who has confused his ideology with arithmetic.
The movement was not confined to one political tradition, which is part of what made it so durable and so dangerous. Progressives embraced it as social hygiene. Some early feminists supported it as a path to reproductive autonomy and a means of preventing unwanted births. Socialists like George Bernard Shaw spoke of eliminating undesirables humanely. Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes both expressed sympathy for eugenic ideas at various points in their careers. In Scandinavia, the program was implemented with characteristic Nordic thoroughness: Sweden sterilized tens of thousands of its own citizens under laws that remained on the books until 1975. The eugenics movement was a genuinely cross-ideological project, united not by party but by the shared conviction that science and expertise, properly applied, could solve the human problem.
In the United States, that conviction found legislative expression with remarkable speed. Indiana passed the world’s first compulsory sterilization law in 1907, permitting institutions to sterilize those labelled degenerate or mentally ill. Dozens of states followed. In 1927, the Supreme Court provided constitutional cover in Buck v. Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—one of the great legal minds of his generation, not a provincial reactionary—wrote that it was better for the world if society could prevent certain people from reproducing, and declared that three generations of imbeciles were enough. That ruling has never been formally overturned. Eventually, somewhere between 60,000 and 65,000 Americans were sterilized under these laws. California alone performed roughly a third of them.
Eugenics entered mainstream American culture with a thoroughness that is now difficult to comprehend. By the 1920s, a third of American high school biology textbooks endorsed the idea. State fairs held Better Babies and Fitter Families contests, awarding trophies to those with the most eugenically sound traits and publishing the winners’ photographs with the same approving coverage given to prize livestock. A 1917 film called The Black Stork told the story of a doctor who allowed a disabled infant to die and marketed it as a eugenic love story. The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, funded by the Carnegie Institution and staffed by trained scientists, compiled vast hereditary databases to identify patterns of degeneracy across American families.
However, the movement did not go unchallenged. The Catholic Church was among its most vocal opponents, insisting that eugenics violated divine law and that no temporal authority could legitimately harm the integrity of the human body. Bertrand Russell warned in 1924 that once governments accepted the power to determine who should reproduce, they would inevitably expand it, imagining a future in which political dissidents or academic underperformers might be labeled unfit. Almost immediately, Germany proved his point in ways that even Russell’s dark imagination had not fully anticipated.
While imprisoned in the 1920s following the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler read widely in British and American eugenic literature, calling Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race his Bible. He praised American immigration restrictions in Mein Kampf and expressed admiration for the United States’ treatment of its Black citizens. Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg would later write that America had led the way in preserving racial purity through law. The compliment was accepted with pride by at least some of those to whom it was paid.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they moved with administrative efficiency. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring mandated compulsory sterilization for those diagnosed with schizophrenia, epilepsy, hereditary deafness and blindness, physical deformities, and chronic alcoholism. In less than a decade, roughly 400,000 Germans were sterilized—approximately 5,000 per month at the program’s peak. Posters and pamphlets explained to the public how much the unfit cost taxpayers in institutional care. Sterilization was sold, as in California and Indiana, as a matter of efficiency and fiscal responsibility.
Sterilization addressed future births, not the living. But what followed carried a logic that some contemporaries recognized, and most preferred not to. In 1939, Hitler signed a secret order authorizing what became known as Aktion T4—a euthanasia program targeting the disabled. Patient files received color markings: a blue dash to spare, a red cross to die. Buses with painted-over windows transported patients from their hospitals to killing centers, where gas chambers had been installed behind the false fronts of shower rooms. Staff wrote false death certificates citing pneumonia or heart failure, and families received letters of condolence signed by doctors who had never met their loved ones.
The paperwork was designed to make every murder look like an ordinary hospital death. The bureaucratic apparatus allowed everyone inside the system to maintain the fiction that they were still engaged in the practice of medicine rather than the administration of death. Between 200,000 and 250,000 disabled Germans were killed under T4. The same doctors, the same administrative logic, some of the same physical infrastructure, later reappeared in the extermination camps of occupied Poland.
At the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi officials defended themselves by citing American sterilization laws and academic writings. The connection was undeniable, and deeply shameful to the Western scientists whose work had made the crossing. The word “eugenics” went, almost overnight, from mainstream science to moral poison. Universities dropped it from their curricula. Journals and learned societies hastily changed their names. The same people who had called it humane now called it evil. The intellectual about-face was nearly instantaneous.
But while the word died, the dream did not. The conviction that suffering has identifiable causes, and that those causes can be addressed by people intelligent enough to identify them, is simply too appealing. The post-war decades saw that dream find new institutional forms—quieter and more defensible, but still recognizable.
The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953, and within two decades genetic counseling had become an established medical profession. Genetic counselors, as practitioners emphasized, did not tell patients what to do: they provided information and let individuals make their own choices. This distinction between state compulsion and individual consent was real, legally significant, and morally important. But it did not make the questions that arose any simpler. It relocated them.
Prenatal testing in the 1970s allowed parents to detect chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome early in pregnancy. The test was presented, and genuinely intended, as a tool for informed decision-making. What it produced, across millions of individual decisions made independently over several decades, was a dramatic reduction in the number of people with Down syndrome born in many Western countries. Iceland now reports that it has had years in which no child with Down syndrome was born at all. Denmark has achieved a reduction of similar magnitude. Neither country has a law mandating this outcome. It is the aggregate result of individual choices, each made in the context of a medical system that routinely offers testing and a cultural environment that shapes the meaning attached to the results. Critics have taken to calling it “eugenics by consent”. Defenders respond that individual reproductive choice is precisely what distinguishes modern genetic medicine from what happened in California and Berlin. Both observations are accurate. The tension between them remains unresolved and largely unaddressed.
The development of in vitro fertilization extended these possibilities into new territory. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis—the screening of embryos before implantation—was developed initially to exclude lethal hereditary conditions. The medical case for screening embryos for Tay-Sachs disease or cystic fibrosis was straightforward: these are conditions that cause severe suffering and early death, and parents who carry the relevant genes have a reasonable interest in knowing which of their embryos are affected.
But the practice widened, as such practices reliably do when the underlying logic is demand-driven rather than purpose-built. Clinics began offering sex selection alongside disease screening. Then, sorting by predicted susceptibility to conditions ranging from heart disease to depression became available. Then, more recently, ranking by polygenic scores—composite genetic indices designed to predict complex traits including height, and, most contentiously, intelligence—emerged. A polygenic score for IQ can identify statistical distributions across very large populations but performs poorly at predicting outcomes for any individual. The effect sizes involved are modest. Some genetic variants associated with higher cognitive scores also correlate with elevated risk for autism spectrum conditions or mood disorders. The science underlying polygenic scoring for cognitive ability is uncertain, and the social and environmental variables that interact with genetic predispositions remain difficult to model.
None of this uncertainty has prevented fertility clinics from advertising embryo-ranking algorithms to prospective parents on the basis of predicted intellectual potential.
When companies market smarter babies, they are not selling a scientific certainty. They are selling the feeling of having done everything possible to give a child the best start, expressed in the vocabulary of genomics. The promise is compelling precisely because it is dressed in the language of responsibility. The parent who declines to screen is implicitly positioned as the parent who failed to act on available information. That framing is commercially effective. Whether it is intellectually honest is a different question.
The classical liberal tradition tends to resolve questions of this kind by appeal to consent. State coercion is wrong. Individual choice is legitimate. The absence of the former guarantees the moral permissibility of the latter. It is a clean principle and it does important work—the work, above all, of distinguishing free societies from totalitarian ones. But the history of eugenics suggests this principle may not be sufficient on its own, and that applying it too quickly forecloses questions that deserve to remain open.
Consider what happens when individual choices accumulate at scale. Each parent who screens an embryo for genetic disease makes a reasonable decision in the context of their own family. Each parent who terminates a pregnancy following a Down syndrome diagnosis makes a painful and deeply personal choice. No individual decision in this chain is coerced. No government has ordered any outcome. And yet when those choices, made independently and without coordination across an entire population, produce a society in which a class of people is progressively eliminated from the gene pool, the cumulative result looks less like the exercise of individual liberty and more like a social program that nobody debated, nobody voted on, and nobody is accountable for. The mechanism differs fundamentally from what Indiana enacted in 1907. The outcome is not entirely different.
Market pressure compounds this difficulty in ways that the consent framework does not adequately capture. The original eugenics movement was highly visible: it expressed itself through legislation, court rulings, official state registries, and the formal apparatus of government. It could be identified, named, contested, and eventually discredited. What is developing now is quieter. When fertility clinics rank embryos by predicted desirability, genetic testing companies advertise consumer products built on population-level genomic data, and the cultural logic implies that availing oneself of every available optimization is simply responsible parenting, formal compulsion is no longer necessary. Coercion has been replaced by something more diffuse and in some ways harder to resist: a social arms race in which standing still is coded as negligence.
The ideological continuity is also worth naming, even at the risk of a comparison that will make some readers uncomfortable. The original eugenics movement was not primarily a conservative project. It grew most vigorously from the progressive conviction that science and systematic expertise, applied with sufficient boldness, could eliminate the structural causes of human suffering. The problems of poverty, disease, criminality, and cognitive limitation were understood as technical problems susceptible to technical solutions. A sufficiently rational administration of human reproduction— as in public health, urban planning, or economic production—would yield better outcomes than the unmanaged processes of nature and chance. This conviction animated the Fabian socialists who supported eugenics in Britain, the Progressive Era reformers who championed it in America, and the Scandinavian social democratic governments that implemented it most systematically of all.
That same conviction is recognizable today. The vocabulary has changed—fitness and purity have become wellness and optimization, degeneracy has become suboptimal outcomes—but the underlying premise is continuous: human beings are improvable by design, the tools to accomplish this improvement are becoming available, and using them is an expression of progress rather than hubris.
None of this is to condemn every aspect of reproductive genetics. The history of eugenics does not demand these conclusions. What it demands is more modest and considerably more difficult: a genuine reckoning with the questions eugenics raised. These questions—whether there are limits to the managed improvement of human beings, where those limits lie, and who has the standing to enforce them—have not been answered by the passage of time or by the discrediting of a word.
The twentieth century’s answer was to leave it to the state, guided by science. The result was sterilization programs, euthanasia, and eventually genocide. The answer that has replaced it: leave it to individuals, guided by markets and medical professionals. This has produced outcomes that are not comparable to twentieth-century horrors, but still deserve serious scrutiny. The elimination of Down syndrome from the population of Iceland did not require a single act of government coercion. That is a morally significant fact. It is not the end of the moral inquiry.
What the present moment requires, alongside whatever regulatory frameworks are eventually developed, is historical literacy: an understanding of where these ideas came from, how genuinely intelligent and compassionate people were drawn into their worst expressions, and why the promise of improving human beings through the management of reproduction has survived every disaster it has produced. The technology available to pursue that promise is now more powerful than anything Galton imagined when he coined his hopeful word in 1883. The ethical frameworks governing its use are not obviously more sophisticated than the ones that failed so catastrophically in the century that followed. That asymmetry is not a reason for paralysis, but for seriousness: the kind that begins by looking clearly at what has already happened, and at what it means that we keep finding new ways to want the same thing.
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