Eugenics in the United States

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The Roots of the I.Q. Debate: Eugenics and Social Control
By Margaret Quigley, The Public Eye, 1995. The eugenics movement extrapolated from the new science of human genetics a complex set of beliefs justifying the necessity for racial and class hierarchy. It also advocated limitations on political democracy.
In Genes We Trust: When Science Bows to Racism
By Barry Mehler, Reform Judaism, Winter 1997. Frustrated by the inability of high-cost social programs to contain violence, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, poverty and other social afflictions, senior public health officials and legislators are adopting the theory that traces anti-social behavior to DNA and recommend that the most efficient way to improve society is by screening out and sterilizing people diagnosed as genetically unfit.
Cracking Open CRACK
By Betsy Hartmann, [11 November 1999]. CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity) aims to permanently or temporarily sterilize women with substance abuse problems using monetary incentives. Sacrificing the reproductive rights of poor women and women of color is considered the simple solution to complex social ills.
Yale Study: U.S. Eugenics Paralleled Nazi Germany
By David Morgan, Reuters, [15 February 2000]. U.S. doctors who believed that sterilization could help rid society of mental illness and crime launched a 20th century eugenics movement that in some ways paralleled the policies of Nazi Germany. Sterilizations were carried out longer and on a larger scale in the United States than previously believed.
The Human Genome Project and Eugenics
By Robert Lederman, 1 July 2000. Will out knowledge of the language of the genetic code usher in a new age of disease—free human life or begin an epoch in which our social status, and even our right to exist, is based on an analysis and classification of our genes?
The American Origins of the Nazi Holocaust
8 September 2002. Summary of a chapter on the history of the eugenics movement in Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America. In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld states’ eugenic sterilization laws. In 1925, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the beginning of the movement in Germany.
Eugenics and the Nazis—the California connection (excerpt)
By Edwin Black, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday 9 November 2003. The concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn’t originate with Hitler, but was created in the US and cultivated in California decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important role in the American eugenics movement’s campaign for ethnic cleansing. Appended is a comment by Vera Hassner Sharav, Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP)