“Eugenics” is a bad word (from 2018)

Team: Szymon Bocian, Katarzyna Kuś

Eugenics, from the Greek for “well-born” and also historically called racial hygiene, is a social and scientific movement seeking to improve a population through controlled reproduction, increasing the occurrence of desired hereditary traits or eliminating undesired ones. The movement emerged in the early twentieth century and is associated with F. Galton. Its assumptions and proposals had a major influence on individual rights in countries including Nazi Germany and Sweden.

Eugenicists addressed difficult bioethical questions that remain relevant, such as reproduction by people with disabilities or by people classified as socially “pathological”. The project asks whether the concept of eugenics has faded from contemporary discussions of genetic disadvantages and their consequences. Ethical intuitions seem to become more pronounced when the word “eugenics” appears in a discussion, whereas without this negatively charged term, the same issues may be judged more leniently. This is particularly problematic as advances in genetic engineering raise further ethical questions without clear answers.

We would like to investigate whether describing the same stories as “eugenic” substantially changes their reception, and how eugenic practices are perceived almost thirty years after the last eugenics laws. The project pays particular attention to Poland, where eugenics did not enjoy the same level of social support as in Sweden or the United States.