In 1883, Frances Galton, who is considered the father of modern behavior genetics and happened to be Charles Darwin’s cousin, coined the term “eugenics,” meaning, from the Greek terms eu- and genos, “good genes.” The early proposals for advancing eugenics was through government incentives (essentially, paying) for “eminent” people to marry and have children. Galton defined eminence as being rich (coming from rich families), educated (certainly not universally available), and having an eminent profession (like a doctor, judge, scientist - again, not options that were equally available to everyone).

The past and present of human behavior genetics is inextricably linked with the history of eugenics, not only because behavior genetics has been used to justify eugenic policies, which have overwhelmingly been abusive and violent, and targeted primarily at racial/ethnic/religious minorities, women, and people with disabilities. The reality is that the men and women who advocated for eugenic policies developed the methods that we still use today, often with the express purpose of producing data and statistics to support their advocacy. We cannot simply stop using their methods – not just within behavior genetics, but across the sciences overall: Karl Pearson, who developed the correlation (Pearson correlation), was Galton’s protege (Wikipedia’s word) and developed the correlation statistic to formally quantify Galton’s observation that parents and children tended to be similar on “eminence,” which he took as necessarily indicative of biological transmission. We cannot simply erase these men from our history or our science, so we need to acknowledge the bad with the good, and use knowledge of the past to consider how we can do better now and in the future.

When most people think of eugenics, they think of the Nazis. In the lead up to and during World War II, the Nazis enacted policies ranging from propaganda encouraging folks to be aware of family history of mental or physical illness when deciding who to marry and have children with, to enacting laws forbidding whites from marrying non-whites, making abortion illegal for women deemed to be ‘fit’ (of good, presumably genetic, quality), and registration of disabilities and illnesses leading to the forced surgical sterilization of over 400,000 people. And this is all in addition to the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews and millions of other people from marginalized groups, including the disabled, the Romani, and people suspected of being gay.

What is less often discussed is that many of these policies, including forced sterilization, were in fact based on existing US policies. And the Nazi versions of the US policies were not necessarily more severe or violent. For example, the US laws forbidding interracial marriage defined “white” much more strictly. Racial and ethnic identification in the US has typically followed “the one-drop rule”: one-drop of non-white blood (or, any evidence of non-white heritage) excluded a person from the “white” demographic category.

The US was the first place in which eugenic sterilization policies were put into place. Around the turn of the 1900s, several states had legislation move increasingly further until in 1907 the first policies were enacted in Indiana. In 1927, the US Supreme Court upheld (8-1) Virginia’s eugenic sterilization policy in the case of Buck v Bell. Immediately, similar policies spread quickly across the US.

Non-eugenic sterilization exists, as well. Therapeutic sterilization typically refers to cases where women with extremely painful periods or uncomfortable or potentially cancerous tumors choose to have those organs removed or cases where people choose surgical interventions (tubal ligation or vasectomies) to voluntarily, with full informed consent, serve as a form of permanent birth control. Punitive sterilization is typically non-surgical (e.g. “chemical castration”) and used as a condition of release for repeat sex offenders. Eugenic sterilization, however, is specifically targeted a controlling the reproduction of others, regardless of their consent, with the goal of reducing the rates of mental and physical disabilities in the population. In the US, over the course of the six or so decades that eugenic sterilization policies were in place in the US, over 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized. Overwhelmingly, the people targeted by the state-directed eugenics boards that made such decisions were women or girls, especially those who were poor or Black.

After World War II and the widespread revelation of the Nazi’s atrocities, public opinion of eugenic sterilization declined. But these policies didn’t simply disappear – the last eugenic sterilization in the US occurred in Oregon in 1981. 1981. That is not a typo. 1981.

This is not ancient history. Many of the victims of these policies are still alive. In a video included in the materials this week, you’ll hear members of these state eugenics boards discussing how they made these decisions. You’ll meet a woman who was sterilized by a eugenics board as a child after she became pregnant from a rape. And you’ll meet her son, who was born by c-section at the same time that she was surgically sterilized. The state that did this to her, North Carolina, has committed $10 million in compensation for victims of its eugenics program. Even if all 7,600 people sterilized by that state were alive and able to claim their share, that comes out to $1,315 per person.

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