Eugenics Alive and well.....

[Belsnickel]

(07-25-2017, 10:58 AM)Vlad Wrote: I'm amazed at how people want to make this so complicated. Its not.

Eugenics is the belief that quality of the human species can be improved by reducing the birthrate of people with undesirable traits....regardless of how it is undertaken, whether it is voluntary, forced, under duress, blah blah blah... or the chance that it was ever done covertly under the guise of  controlling overpopulation is all irrelevant.

God help me, but I agree with Vlad on this. The exact definition of eugenics doesn't exist, but in a very broad sense what he states here is what eugenics is all about. We have a tendency to get defensive about the use of the term for things like this because we are aware of the extreme abuses of the concept that occurred thanks to the movement here and elsewhere in the first half of the twentieth century. But there is no doubt that the basis behind the idea of sterilization of prisoners or even providing prophylactics, no matter how voluntary, is rooted in the concepts of eugenics when viewed in the historical perspective and not solely based on the movement in the modern era.