Euthanasia
In certain countries, euthanasia – the right to die, is officially permitted. Euthanasia is the practice of medically-assisted death.
In general, “the mercy killing”, as commonly known, relives the patient out of his pain and worries when it was medically accepted that there is no more cure for his sickness or simply cannot be saved anymore.
Euthanasia may be conducted with consent (voluntary euthanasia) or without consent (involuntary euthanasia).
Euthanasia entails the withholding of common treatments (such as antibiotics, pain medications, or surgery) or the distribution of a medication (such as morphine) to relieve pain, knowing that it may also result in death. Passive euthanasia is the most accepted form, and it is a common practice in most hospitals. Non-aggressive euthanasia entails the withdrawing of life support and is more controversial. Aggressive euthanasia entails the use of lethal substances or forces to kill and is the most controversial means.
Before jumping to the debate of righteous or evilness of this procedure, let us look into what leads to the mercy killing?
Case 1: The dying patient XX is financially sound.
Case 2: The dying patient YY is financially broken.
Both of them are at their last stages, surviving just because of the life supporting gadgets connected to him. The medical opinion is that they cannot be saved and will be bed ridden with all the pain and suffering.
In both the above cases it was suggested for euthanasia and followed.
What does this imply? Besides judging whether it is justified or unjustified or right to die, it is simply that since these patients cannot survive and also they are undergoing a lot of pain and suffering, mercy killing was done.
Crudely, still to state, in perspective of the majority of decision makers, this avoids further time spent for them and unwarranted expenses.
The pain and suffering a person feels during a disease, even with pain relievers, can be incomprehensible to a person who has not gone through it. Moreover, despite modern painkillers, there is little available to deal with the problem of 'breathlessness', which makes many ailing patients feel they will suffocate.
Today in many countries there is a shortage of hospital space. The energy of doctors and hospital beds could be used for people whose lives could be saved instead of continuing the life of those who want to die which increases the general quality of care and shortens hospital waiting lists. It is a burden to keep people alive past the point they can contribute to society.
Now, euthanasia is right or wrong? If every life has a right to live in this planet, why does they are deprived of that?
Simply, they cannot be saved any more and let start giving treatment to somebody who can be saved.
An extended scenario is that you are a doctor. There are 2 persons needed immediate medical attention in a war torn country – both of them in their 20s, but one is a civilian with severe developmental disability from birth and the other is soldier fighting for the country, wounded by shrapnel. You can provide medical assistance to only one with the resources and time you have – whom will you provide medical assistance? In other words, who will you let go die?
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Death Penalty
Capital punishment is being followed in most of the countries. Why does the capital punishment is still being followed invariably in most of the developed, most civilized countries?
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the execution of a person by the state as punishment for a crime. In most places that practice capital punishment today, the death penalty is reserved as punishment for premeditated murder, espionage, treason, or as part of military justice. In some countries sexual crimes, such as rape, adultery and sodomy, carry the death penalty, as do some religious crimes. In some countries drug trafficking is also a capital offense. In China human trafficking and serious cases of corruption are also punished by the death penalty. In militaries around the world courts-martial have imposed death sentences for offenses such as cowardice, desertion, insubordination, and mutiny.
Supporters of capital punishment argue that it reduces crime rate, that it is less expensive than life imprisonment and is an appropriate form of punishment for some crimes. Opponents of capital punishment argue that it has led to the execution of wrongfully convicted, that it discriminates against minorities and the poor, that it does not deter criminals more than life imprisonment, that it encourages a "culture of violence", and that it violates human rights.
South Africa, which is probably the most developed African nation, does not have the death penalty. This fact is currently quite controversial in that country, due to the high levels of violent crime, including murder and rape
Why capital punishment does being followed? One major argument is the severe the punishment the lesser will be crimes.
When the state feels that the convict is extremely unfit to live in the common society, they are imprisoned and based on the crime they are punished with a death row. In other words, they are deprived their right to live because they are not socially unfit.
Should capital punishment be followed?
In certain countries, euthanasia – the right to die, is officially permitted. Euthanasia is the practice of medically-assisted death.
In general, “the mercy killing”, as commonly known, relives the patient out of his pain and worries when it was medically accepted that there is no more cure for his sickness or simply cannot be saved anymore.
Euthanasia may be conducted with consent (voluntary euthanasia) or without consent (involuntary euthanasia).
Euthanasia entails the withholding of common treatments (such as antibiotics, pain medications, or surgery) or the distribution of a medication (such as morphine) to relieve pain, knowing that it may also result in death. Passive euthanasia is the most accepted form, and it is a common practice in most hospitals. Non-aggressive euthanasia entails the withdrawing of life support and is more controversial. Aggressive euthanasia entails the use of lethal substances or forces to kill and is the most controversial means.
Before jumping to the debate of righteous or evilness of this procedure, let us look into what leads to the mercy killing?
Case 1: The dying patient XX is financially sound.
Case 2: The dying patient YY is financially broken.
Both of them are at their last stages, surviving just because of the life supporting gadgets connected to him. The medical opinion is that they cannot be saved and will be bed ridden with all the pain and suffering.
In both the above cases it was suggested for euthanasia and followed.
What does this imply? Besides judging whether it is justified or unjustified or right to die, it is simply that since these patients cannot survive and also they are undergoing a lot of pain and suffering, mercy killing was done.
Crudely, still to state, in perspective of the majority of decision makers, this avoids further time spent for them and unwarranted expenses.
The pain and suffering a person feels during a disease, even with pain relievers, can be incomprehensible to a person who has not gone through it. Moreover, despite modern painkillers, there is little available to deal with the problem of 'breathlessness', which makes many ailing patients feel they will suffocate.
Today in many countries there is a shortage of hospital space. The energy of doctors and hospital beds could be used for people whose lives could be saved instead of continuing the life of those who want to die which increases the general quality of care and shortens hospital waiting lists. It is a burden to keep people alive past the point they can contribute to society.
Now, euthanasia is right or wrong? If every life has a right to live in this planet, why does they are deprived of that?
Simply, they cannot be saved any more and let start giving treatment to somebody who can be saved.
An extended scenario is that you are a doctor. There are 2 persons needed immediate medical attention in a war torn country – both of them in their 20s, but one is a civilian with severe developmental disability from birth and the other is soldier fighting for the country, wounded by shrapnel. You can provide medical assistance to only one with the resources and time you have – whom will you provide medical assistance? In other words, who will you let go die?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Death Penalty
Capital punishment is being followed in most of the countries. Why does the capital punishment is still being followed invariably in most of the developed, most civilized countries?
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the execution of a person by the state as punishment for a crime. In most places that practice capital punishment today, the death penalty is reserved as punishment for premeditated murder, espionage, treason, or as part of military justice. In some countries sexual crimes, such as rape, adultery and sodomy, carry the death penalty, as do some religious crimes. In some countries drug trafficking is also a capital offense. In China human trafficking and serious cases of corruption are also punished by the death penalty. In militaries around the world courts-martial have imposed death sentences for offenses such as cowardice, desertion, insubordination, and mutiny.
Supporters of capital punishment argue that it reduces crime rate, that it is less expensive than life imprisonment and is an appropriate form of punishment for some crimes. Opponents of capital punishment argue that it has led to the execution of wrongfully convicted, that it discriminates against minorities and the poor, that it does not deter criminals more than life imprisonment, that it encourages a "culture of violence", and that it violates human rights.
South Africa, which is probably the most developed African nation, does not have the death penalty. This fact is currently quite controversial in that country, due to the high levels of violent crime, including murder and rape
Why capital punishment does being followed? One major argument is the severe the punishment the lesser will be crimes.
When the state feels that the convict is extremely unfit to live in the common society, they are imprisoned and based on the crime they are punished with a death row. In other words, they are deprived their right to live because they are not socially unfit.
Should capital punishment be followed?
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Eugenics Theory
The word eugenics derives from the Greek word eu (good or well) and the suffix -genēs (born).
Eugenics is a theory about evolving socially fit breed of (human) generation, healthier and intelligent people to save earthly resources and lessen human suffering.
The means of achieving these goals focused on selective breeding, prenatal testing and screening, genetic counseling, birth control, in vitro fertilization, and genetic engineering etc.
From its inception eugenics was supported by prominent people, including H.G. Wells, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, William Keith Kellogg and Margaret Sanger.
The basic ideals of eugenics can be found from the beginnings of Western civilization. The philosophy was most famously expounded by Plato, who believed human reproduction should be monitored and controlled by the state.
Mates, in Plato’s Republic, would be chosen by a “marriage number” in which the quality of the individual would be quantitatively analyzed, and persons of high numbers would be allowed to procreate with other persons of high numbers. In theory, this would lead to predictable results and the improvement of the human race. However, Plato acknowledged the failure of the “marriage number” since “gold soul” persons could still produce “bronze soul” children.
Other ancient civilizations, such as Rome, Athens and Sparta, practiced infanticide through exposure as a form of phenotypic selection. In Sparta, newborns were inspected by the city's elders, who decided the fate of the infant. If the child was deemed incapable of living, it was usually killed. It was more common for girls than boys to be killed this way. Trials for babies were conducted which included bathing them in wine and exposing them to the elements. To Sparta, this would ensure only the strongest survived and procreated.
The 12 Tables of Roman Law, established early in the formation of the Roman Republic, stated in the fourth table that deformed children would be put to death. In addition, patriarchs in Roman society were given the right to "discard" infants at their discretion. This was often done by drowning undesired newborns in the Tiber River. The practice of infanticide in the ancient world did not subside until the Christianization of the Roman Empire.
Sir Francis Galton systematized these ideas and practices according to new knowledge about the evolution of man and animals provided by the theory of his cousin Charles Darwin during the 1860s and 1870s. After reading Darwin's Origin of Species, Galton built upon Darwin's ideas whereby the mechanisms of natural selection were potentially thwarted by human civilization. He reasoned that, since many human societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, those societies were at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest; and only by changing these social policies could society be saved from a "reversion towards mediocrity," a phrase he first coined in statistics and which later changed to the now common "regression towards the mean."
He began by studying the way in which human intellectual, moral, and personality traits tended to run in families. Galton's basic argument was "genius" and "talent" is hereditary traits in humans. He concluded since one could use artificial selection to exaggerate traits in other animals, one could expect similar results when applying such models to humans. According to Galton, society already encouraged dysgenic conditions, claiming the less intelligent were out-reproducing the more intelligent. Galton's formulation of eugenics was based on a strong statistical approach.
Eugenics eventually referred to human selective reproduction with intent to create children with desirable traits, generally through the approach of influencing differential birth rates. These policies were mostly divided into two categories: positive eugenics, the increased reproduction of those seen to have advantageous hereditary traits; and negative eugenics, the discouragement of reproduction by those with hereditary traits perceived as poor. Negative eugenic policies in the past have ranged from attempts at segregation to sterilization and even genocide. Positive eugenic policies have typically taken the form of awards or bonuses for "fit" parents who have another child. Relatively innocuous practices like marriage counseling had early links with eugenic ideology.
One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenics (before it was labeled as such) was Alexander Graham Bell. In 1881 Bell investigated the rate of deafness on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. From this he concluded that deafness was hereditary in nature and, through noting that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children, tentatively suggested that couples where both were deaf should not marry. Bell warned that boarding schools for the deaf could possibly be considered as breeding places of a deaf human race.
Eugenics was supported by Woodrow Wilson, and, in 1907, helped to make Indiana the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.
Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying.
During the 20th century, researchers conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. State laws were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation. By 1945 over 45,000 mentally ill individuals in the United States had been forcibly sterilized. All in all, 60,000 Americans suffered from sterilization.
After the experience of Nazi Germany, many ideas about "racial hygiene" and "unfit" members of society were publicly renounced by politicians and members of the scientific community. The Nuremberg Trials against former Nazi leaders revealed to the world many of the regime's genocidal practices and resulted in formalized policies of medical ethics under the name of eugenics and the 1950 UNESCO statement on race. Many scientific societies released their own similar "race statements" over the years, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, developed in response to abuses during the Second World War, was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and affirmed, "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.
Beginning in the 1980s, the history and concept of eugenics were widely discussed as knowledge about genetics advanced significantly. Endeavors such as the Human Genome Project made the effective modification of the human species seem possible again (as did Darwin's initial theory of evolution in the 1860s, along with the rediscovery of Mendel's laws in the early 20th century). The difference at the beginning of the 21st century was the guarded attitude towards eugenics, which had become a watchword to be feared rather than embraced.
A few scientific researchers such as psychologist Richard Lynn, psychologist Raymond Cattell, and doctor Gregory Stock have openly called for eugenic policies using modern technology. One attempted implementation of a form of eugenics was a "genius sperm bank" (1980–99) created by Robert Klark Graham, from which nearly 230 children were conceived (the best known donors were Nobel Prize winners William Shockley and J.D. Watson).
Eugenicists have argued that immigration from countries with low national IQ is undesirable. According to Raymond Cattell "when a country is opening its doors to immigration from diverse countries, it is like a farmer who buys his seeds from different sources by the sack, with sacks of different average quality of contents."
A similar screening policy (including prenatal screening and abortion) intended to reduce the incidence of thalassemia exists on island of Cyprus. Since the program's implementation in the 1970s, it has reduced the ratio of children born with the hereditary blood disease from 1 out of every 158 births to almost zero. Tests for the gene are compulsory for both partners, prior to church wedding.
There are some US states that require a blood test prior to marriage. While these tests are typically restricted to the detection of the sexually transmitted disease Syphilis, some partners will voluntarily test for other diseases and genetic incompatibilities. In 1971, the US organization The International Association for Voluntary Sterilization (AVS), called voluntary sterilization of low income Americans for birth-control purposes. AVS also focused on the International community, to encourage Third World/Developing World countries to utilise abortion and sterilization in order to control their population growth.
Dor Yeshorim, a screening program which seeks to reduce the incidence of many hereditary diseases among certain Jewish communities. In Israel, at the expense of the state, the general public is advised to carry out genetic tests to diagnose these diseases before the birth of a baby. If an unborn baby is diagnosed with one of these diseases among which Tay-Sachs is the most commonly known, the pregnancy may be terminate.
Most other Ashkenazi Jewish communities also run screening programs because of the higher incidence of genetic diseases. In some Jewish communities, the ancient custom of matchmaking is still practiced, and in order to attempt to prevent the tragedy of infant death which always results from being homozygous for Tay-Sachs, associations such as the strongly observant Dor Yeshorim test young couples to check whether they carry a risk of passing on fatal conditions. If both the young man and woman are Tay-Sachs carriers, it is common for the match to be broken off. The actual impact of this program on allele frequencies is unknown, but little impact would be expected because the program does not impose genetic selection. Instead, it encourages disassortative mating.
In modern bioethics literature, the history of eugenics presents many moral and ethical questions. Commentators have suggested the new eugenics will come from reproductive technologies that will allow parents to create "designer babies"
It has been argued that this non-coercive form of biological improvement will be predominantly motivated by individual competitiveness and the desire to create the best opportunities for children, rather than an urge to improve the species as a whole, which characterized the early 20th-century forms of eugenics.
While the science of genetics has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology there is, at this point, no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Eugenic manipulations that reduce the propensity for criminality and violence, for example, might result in the population being enslaved by an outside aggressor it can no longer defend itself against. On the other hand, genetic diseases like hemochromatosis can increase susceptibility to illness, cause physical deformities, and other dysfunctions. Eugenic measures against many of these diseases are already being undertaken in societies around the world, while measures against traits that affect more subtle, poorly understood traits, such as criminality, are relegated to the realm of speculation and science fiction. The effects of diseases are essentially wholly negative, and societies everywhere seek to reduce their impact by various means, some of which are eugenic in all but name. The other traits that are discussed have positive as well as negative effects and are not generally targeted at present anywhere.
To conclude, Eugenic theories have prevailed for more than a century and been practiced by most of the world countries at one time or other either directly (eliminating the unfit) or indirectly (contraception methods for financially backward countries).
So, does Eugenics is a right way to follow the base rule of “Survival of the fittest” or nature will take its own course on selecting a species to survive on the planet earth?
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Action-T4
The idea of enforcing “racial hygiene” had been an essential element if Hitler’s ideology from its earliest days. The Nazi regime began to implement "racial hygienist" policies as soon as it came to power.
Adolf Hitler had read some racial-hygiene tracts during his period of imprisonment in Landsberg Prison. The future leader considered that Germany could only become strong again if the state applied to German society the basic principles of racial hygiene and eugenics. Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream. In his opinion, these had to be removed as quickly as possible. He also believed that the strong and the racially pure had to be encouraged to have more children, and the weak and the racially impure had to be neutralized by one means or another.
The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilization for people with a range of conditions thought to be hereditary such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea and "imbecility". Sterilization was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. This law was administered by the Interior Ministry which examined the inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged care homes and special schools to select those to be sterilized.
It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilized under this law between 1933 and 1939. The law was used punitively in some cases, against women convicted of prostitution.
It may be noted that racial hygienist ideas were far from unique to the Nazi movement, although Hitler expressed them in an extreme form. The eugenics movement had many followers among educated people, being particularly strong in the United States. Between 1935 and 1975, for example, 63,000 people were sterilized on eugenicist grounds in Sweden.
Hitler had always been in favor of killing those whose lives he judged to be "unworthy of life." The outbreak of war thus opened up for Hitler the possibility of carrying out a policy he had long favored. People with severe disabilities, even when sterilized, still needed institutional care. They occupied places in facilities which would soon be needed for wounded soldiers and people evacuated from bombed cities. They were housed and fed at the expense of the state and took up the time of doctors and nurses. All this the Nazis found barely tolerable even in peacetime, and totally unacceptable in wartime. Leading Nazi doctor, Dr Hermann Pfannmüller, said: "The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that feebleminded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum."
Initially, the Interior Ministry required doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe disabilities. Those to be killed were "all children under three years of age in whom any of the following 'serious hereditary diseases' were 'suspected': idiocy and mongolism (especially when associated with blindness and deafness); microcephaly; hydrocephaly; malformations of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column; and paralysis, including spastic conditions.
Once war broke out in September 1939, the program expanded to include older children and adolescents. The conditions covered also expanded and came to include "various borderline or limited impairments in children of different ages, culminating in the killing of those designated as juvenile delinquents. Jewish children could be placed in the net primarily because they were Jewish; and at one of the institutions, a special department was set up for 'minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds'". At the same time increased pressure was placed on parents to agree to their children being sent away. Many parents suspected what was really happening, especially when it became apparent that institutions for children with disabilities were being systematically cleared out, and refused consent. They were threatened that they would lose custody of all their children, and if that did not suffice the parents themselves could be threatened with call-up for "labour duty."[26] By 1941 over 5,000 children had been killed.
Soon plans developed to expand the program to adults, made preliminary arrangements for a national register of all institutionalized people with mental illnesses or physical disabilities.
Hundreds of patients were shot dead or killed by means of carbon monoxide gas in an improvised gas chamber. The idea of killing "useless" mental patients soon spread as Germans wounded from the Polish campaign were expected to be accommodated, creating a demand for hospital space.
Rhineland Bastard was a derogatory term used in Nazi Germany to describe children of mixed German and African parentage. Under Nazism's racial theories, these children were considered inferior to "pure Aryans" and consigned to sterilization. The program began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all "Rhineland Bastards" under their jurisdiction. All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilized.
In December 1946, an American military tribunal (commonly called the Doctors Trial) tried 23 doctors and administrators for their roles in war crimes and crimes against humanity. These crimes included the systematic killing of those deemed "unworthy of life," including the mentally retarded, the institutionalized mentally ill, and the physically impaired. After 140 days of proceedings, including the testimony of 85 witnesses and the submission of 1,500 documents, in August 1947 the court pronounced 16 of the defendants guilty.
The program is commonly described as one of "euthanasia," and this expression was used at the time by some of the officials responsible for carrying the program out, but it had little in common with euthanasia as this term is usually defined. It was not motivated by concern for the welfare of the people concerned or by a desire to release them from suffering – most of those killed were not suffering. It was carried out primarily according to the dictates of "racial hygiene" ideology, and secondarily to reduce the cost to the state of maintaining people with disabilities at a time when the overwhelming financial priority of the regime was rearmament. It was nearly always carried out without the consent of the people concerned or their families.
The Nazi's based their eugenics program on the United States' programs of forced sterilization.
The Nazi eugenics policy led to Germans suffering from cerebral palsy and other physical impairments being killed. Action T4 (German Aktion T4) was the official name of the Nazi Germany eugenics program which forcefully conducted euthanasia on Germans who were institutionalized or suffering from birth defects. In total, an estimated 200,000 people were killed as a result of the program.
Now the question is - what was that common among euthanasia, capital punishment, eugenics theory, Action-T4? All of them have been followed or are being followed all over the world irrespective of civilized / developed / third world / Nazi / pre-world war / post world war countries? They all are interconnected and form the basis for each of the other theory.
Eugenics Theory
The word eugenics derives from the Greek word eu (good or well) and the suffix -genēs (born).
Eugenics is a theory about evolving socially fit breed of (human) generation, healthier and intelligent people to save earthly resources and lessen human suffering.
The means of achieving these goals focused on selective breeding, prenatal testing and screening, genetic counseling, birth control, in vitro fertilization, and genetic engineering etc.
From its inception eugenics was supported by prominent people, including H.G. Wells, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, William Keith Kellogg and Margaret Sanger.
The basic ideals of eugenics can be found from the beginnings of Western civilization. The philosophy was most famously expounded by Plato, who believed human reproduction should be monitored and controlled by the state.
Mates, in Plato’s Republic, would be chosen by a “marriage number” in which the quality of the individual would be quantitatively analyzed, and persons of high numbers would be allowed to procreate with other persons of high numbers. In theory, this would lead to predictable results and the improvement of the human race. However, Plato acknowledged the failure of the “marriage number” since “gold soul” persons could still produce “bronze soul” children.
Other ancient civilizations, such as Rome, Athens and Sparta, practiced infanticide through exposure as a form of phenotypic selection. In Sparta, newborns were inspected by the city's elders, who decided the fate of the infant. If the child was deemed incapable of living, it was usually killed. It was more common for girls than boys to be killed this way. Trials for babies were conducted which included bathing them in wine and exposing them to the elements. To Sparta, this would ensure only the strongest survived and procreated.
The 12 Tables of Roman Law, established early in the formation of the Roman Republic, stated in the fourth table that deformed children would be put to death. In addition, patriarchs in Roman society were given the right to "discard" infants at their discretion. This was often done by drowning undesired newborns in the Tiber River. The practice of infanticide in the ancient world did not subside until the Christianization of the Roman Empire.
Sir Francis Galton systematized these ideas and practices according to new knowledge about the evolution of man and animals provided by the theory of his cousin Charles Darwin during the 1860s and 1870s. After reading Darwin's Origin of Species, Galton built upon Darwin's ideas whereby the mechanisms of natural selection were potentially thwarted by human civilization. He reasoned that, since many human societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, those societies were at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest; and only by changing these social policies could society be saved from a "reversion towards mediocrity," a phrase he first coined in statistics and which later changed to the now common "regression towards the mean."
He began by studying the way in which human intellectual, moral, and personality traits tended to run in families. Galton's basic argument was "genius" and "talent" is hereditary traits in humans. He concluded since one could use artificial selection to exaggerate traits in other animals, one could expect similar results when applying such models to humans. According to Galton, society already encouraged dysgenic conditions, claiming the less intelligent were out-reproducing the more intelligent. Galton's formulation of eugenics was based on a strong statistical approach.
Eugenics eventually referred to human selective reproduction with intent to create children with desirable traits, generally through the approach of influencing differential birth rates. These policies were mostly divided into two categories: positive eugenics, the increased reproduction of those seen to have advantageous hereditary traits; and negative eugenics, the discouragement of reproduction by those with hereditary traits perceived as poor. Negative eugenic policies in the past have ranged from attempts at segregation to sterilization and even genocide. Positive eugenic policies have typically taken the form of awards or bonuses for "fit" parents who have another child. Relatively innocuous practices like marriage counseling had early links with eugenic ideology.
One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenics (before it was labeled as such) was Alexander Graham Bell. In 1881 Bell investigated the rate of deafness on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. From this he concluded that deafness was hereditary in nature and, through noting that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children, tentatively suggested that couples where both were deaf should not marry. Bell warned that boarding schools for the deaf could possibly be considered as breeding places of a deaf human race.
Eugenics was supported by Woodrow Wilson, and, in 1907, helped to make Indiana the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.
Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying.
During the 20th century, researchers conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. State laws were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation. By 1945 over 45,000 mentally ill individuals in the United States had been forcibly sterilized. All in all, 60,000 Americans suffered from sterilization.
After the experience of Nazi Germany, many ideas about "racial hygiene" and "unfit" members of society were publicly renounced by politicians and members of the scientific community. The Nuremberg Trials against former Nazi leaders revealed to the world many of the regime's genocidal practices and resulted in formalized policies of medical ethics under the name of eugenics and the 1950 UNESCO statement on race. Many scientific societies released their own similar "race statements" over the years, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, developed in response to abuses during the Second World War, was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and affirmed, "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.
Beginning in the 1980s, the history and concept of eugenics were widely discussed as knowledge about genetics advanced significantly. Endeavors such as the Human Genome Project made the effective modification of the human species seem possible again (as did Darwin's initial theory of evolution in the 1860s, along with the rediscovery of Mendel's laws in the early 20th century). The difference at the beginning of the 21st century was the guarded attitude towards eugenics, which had become a watchword to be feared rather than embraced.
A few scientific researchers such as psychologist Richard Lynn, psychologist Raymond Cattell, and doctor Gregory Stock have openly called for eugenic policies using modern technology. One attempted implementation of a form of eugenics was a "genius sperm bank" (1980–99) created by Robert Klark Graham, from which nearly 230 children were conceived (the best known donors were Nobel Prize winners William Shockley and J.D. Watson).
Eugenicists have argued that immigration from countries with low national IQ is undesirable. According to Raymond Cattell "when a country is opening its doors to immigration from diverse countries, it is like a farmer who buys his seeds from different sources by the sack, with sacks of different average quality of contents."
A similar screening policy (including prenatal screening and abortion) intended to reduce the incidence of thalassemia exists on island of Cyprus. Since the program's implementation in the 1970s, it has reduced the ratio of children born with the hereditary blood disease from 1 out of every 158 births to almost zero. Tests for the gene are compulsory for both partners, prior to church wedding.
There are some US states that require a blood test prior to marriage. While these tests are typically restricted to the detection of the sexually transmitted disease Syphilis, some partners will voluntarily test for other diseases and genetic incompatibilities. In 1971, the US organization The International Association for Voluntary Sterilization (AVS), called voluntary sterilization of low income Americans for birth-control purposes. AVS also focused on the International community, to encourage Third World/Developing World countries to utilise abortion and sterilization in order to control their population growth.
Dor Yeshorim, a screening program which seeks to reduce the incidence of many hereditary diseases among certain Jewish communities. In Israel, at the expense of the state, the general public is advised to carry out genetic tests to diagnose these diseases before the birth of a baby. If an unborn baby is diagnosed with one of these diseases among which Tay-Sachs is the most commonly known, the pregnancy may be terminate.
Most other Ashkenazi Jewish communities also run screening programs because of the higher incidence of genetic diseases. In some Jewish communities, the ancient custom of matchmaking is still practiced, and in order to attempt to prevent the tragedy of infant death which always results from being homozygous for Tay-Sachs, associations such as the strongly observant Dor Yeshorim test young couples to check whether they carry a risk of passing on fatal conditions. If both the young man and woman are Tay-Sachs carriers, it is common for the match to be broken off. The actual impact of this program on allele frequencies is unknown, but little impact would be expected because the program does not impose genetic selection. Instead, it encourages disassortative mating.
In modern bioethics literature, the history of eugenics presents many moral and ethical questions. Commentators have suggested the new eugenics will come from reproductive technologies that will allow parents to create "designer babies"
It has been argued that this non-coercive form of biological improvement will be predominantly motivated by individual competitiveness and the desire to create the best opportunities for children, rather than an urge to improve the species as a whole, which characterized the early 20th-century forms of eugenics.
While the science of genetics has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology there is, at this point, no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Eugenic manipulations that reduce the propensity for criminality and violence, for example, might result in the population being enslaved by an outside aggressor it can no longer defend itself against. On the other hand, genetic diseases like hemochromatosis can increase susceptibility to illness, cause physical deformities, and other dysfunctions. Eugenic measures against many of these diseases are already being undertaken in societies around the world, while measures against traits that affect more subtle, poorly understood traits, such as criminality, are relegated to the realm of speculation and science fiction. The effects of diseases are essentially wholly negative, and societies everywhere seek to reduce their impact by various means, some of which are eugenic in all but name. The other traits that are discussed have positive as well as negative effects and are not generally targeted at present anywhere.
To conclude, Eugenic theories have prevailed for more than a century and been practiced by most of the world countries at one time or other either directly (eliminating the unfit) or indirectly (contraception methods for financially backward countries).
So, does Eugenics is a right way to follow the base rule of “Survival of the fittest” or nature will take its own course on selecting a species to survive on the planet earth?
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Action-T4
The idea of enforcing “racial hygiene” had been an essential element if Hitler’s ideology from its earliest days. The Nazi regime began to implement "racial hygienist" policies as soon as it came to power.
Adolf Hitler had read some racial-hygiene tracts during his period of imprisonment in Landsberg Prison. The future leader considered that Germany could only become strong again if the state applied to German society the basic principles of racial hygiene and eugenics. Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream. In his opinion, these had to be removed as quickly as possible. He also believed that the strong and the racially pure had to be encouraged to have more children, and the weak and the racially impure had to be neutralized by one means or another.
The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilization for people with a range of conditions thought to be hereditary such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea and "imbecility". Sterilization was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. This law was administered by the Interior Ministry which examined the inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged care homes and special schools to select those to be sterilized.
It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilized under this law between 1933 and 1939. The law was used punitively in some cases, against women convicted of prostitution.
It may be noted that racial hygienist ideas were far from unique to the Nazi movement, although Hitler expressed them in an extreme form. The eugenics movement had many followers among educated people, being particularly strong in the United States. Between 1935 and 1975, for example, 63,000 people were sterilized on eugenicist grounds in Sweden.
Hitler had always been in favor of killing those whose lives he judged to be "unworthy of life." The outbreak of war thus opened up for Hitler the possibility of carrying out a policy he had long favored. People with severe disabilities, even when sterilized, still needed institutional care. They occupied places in facilities which would soon be needed for wounded soldiers and people evacuated from bombed cities. They were housed and fed at the expense of the state and took up the time of doctors and nurses. All this the Nazis found barely tolerable even in peacetime, and totally unacceptable in wartime. Leading Nazi doctor, Dr Hermann Pfannmüller, said: "The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that feebleminded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum."
Initially, the Interior Ministry required doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe disabilities. Those to be killed were "all children under three years of age in whom any of the following 'serious hereditary diseases' were 'suspected': idiocy and mongolism (especially when associated with blindness and deafness); microcephaly; hydrocephaly; malformations of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column; and paralysis, including spastic conditions.
Once war broke out in September 1939, the program expanded to include older children and adolescents. The conditions covered also expanded and came to include "various borderline or limited impairments in children of different ages, culminating in the killing of those designated as juvenile delinquents. Jewish children could be placed in the net primarily because they were Jewish; and at one of the institutions, a special department was set up for 'minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds'". At the same time increased pressure was placed on parents to agree to their children being sent away. Many parents suspected what was really happening, especially when it became apparent that institutions for children with disabilities were being systematically cleared out, and refused consent. They were threatened that they would lose custody of all their children, and if that did not suffice the parents themselves could be threatened with call-up for "labour duty."[26] By 1941 over 5,000 children had been killed.
Soon plans developed to expand the program to adults, made preliminary arrangements for a national register of all institutionalized people with mental illnesses or physical disabilities.
Hundreds of patients were shot dead or killed by means of carbon monoxide gas in an improvised gas chamber. The idea of killing "useless" mental patients soon spread as Germans wounded from the Polish campaign were expected to be accommodated, creating a demand for hospital space.
Rhineland Bastard was a derogatory term used in Nazi Germany to describe children of mixed German and African parentage. Under Nazism's racial theories, these children were considered inferior to "pure Aryans" and consigned to sterilization. The program began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all "Rhineland Bastards" under their jurisdiction. All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilized.
In December 1946, an American military tribunal (commonly called the Doctors Trial) tried 23 doctors and administrators for their roles in war crimes and crimes against humanity. These crimes included the systematic killing of those deemed "unworthy of life," including the mentally retarded, the institutionalized mentally ill, and the physically impaired. After 140 days of proceedings, including the testimony of 85 witnesses and the submission of 1,500 documents, in August 1947 the court pronounced 16 of the defendants guilty.
The program is commonly described as one of "euthanasia," and this expression was used at the time by some of the officials responsible for carrying the program out, but it had little in common with euthanasia as this term is usually defined. It was not motivated by concern for the welfare of the people concerned or by a desire to release them from suffering – most of those killed were not suffering. It was carried out primarily according to the dictates of "racial hygiene" ideology, and secondarily to reduce the cost to the state of maintaining people with disabilities at a time when the overwhelming financial priority of the regime was rearmament. It was nearly always carried out without the consent of the people concerned or their families.
The Nazi's based their eugenics program on the United States' programs of forced sterilization.
The Nazi eugenics policy led to Germans suffering from cerebral palsy and other physical impairments being killed. Action T4 (German Aktion T4) was the official name of the Nazi Germany eugenics program which forcefully conducted euthanasia on Germans who were institutionalized or suffering from birth defects. In total, an estimated 200,000 people were killed as a result of the program.
Now the question is - what was that common among euthanasia, capital punishment, eugenics theory, Action-T4? All of them have been followed or are being followed all over the world irrespective of civilized / developed / third world / Nazi / pre-world war / post world war countries? They all are interconnected and form the basis for each of the other theory.
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