When most people hear the word “eugenics,” they immediately think of the Nazis. And for good reason: the Nazis force-sterilized over 400,000 people and brutally murdered another 300,000, all in the name of a particular approach to eugenics called “racial hygiene.” Yet the truth is that eugenics captured the imagination of people on both sides of the political spectrum. This included progressives across Europe and North America, many of whom saw it as playing an integral role in progressive social reform.
Eugenics isn’t a new idea. Though the term itself was coined in 1883, proposals for improving the “human stock” through methods like selective breeding dates back at least to the ancient Greeks. Eugenics practices — often based on what we now describe as “ableist” beliefs — have been common throughout history. It is a monster that just won’t die, no matter how many times people have tried to bury it.
One of the earliest discussions of eugenics comes from Plato’s “Republic.” In outlining what a just city-state would look like, Plato’s fourth-century B.C.E. treatise proposed a rigged lottery to...
The pseudoscience of eugenics, founded on the mistaken notion that nature envisions some “right” combination of genes, and that selective breeding can improve the human race, is making a comeback. While the heyday of eugenics was a century ago, the...
By Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews, Guest Contributors | 08.25.2026
Biopolitical Times
This is an excerpt of an article originally published on August 1, 2026 at GMWatch.
A six-year-old girl has died in a gene editing gene therapy trial in China that went wrong, the journal Sciencereports. Seven days after the girl's medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the gene editing tool – in this case a base editor – into her spinal fluid, she died of a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy.
In 1937, the U.S. began one of the largest sterilization campaigns in modern history in its colony of Puerto Rico. By the 1970s, one-third of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized, most without being properly informed...
The young girl tugged on her mother’s hand as they pressed through the doors of the hospital in Shanghai. She was 6 years old, bouncing along in a pink jacket and blue pants decorated with cartoon bears. Behind them, her...
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