The age-old dreams and desires of all parents for healthy, strong, and intelligent children took a sinister turn in twentieth century, as progressive optimism and a burgeoning understanding of heredity met in the eugenics movement. As the horrors of eugenics recede into distant memory, it is easy to forget that we, too, live in an age of great optimism about our scientific powers to improve humanity -- and so we at the Bioethics and American Democracy program work to better understand and learn the lessons of the eugenics era for our own time.

Book

Preaching Eugenics
Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement
By Christine Rosen
Preaching Eugenics tells how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders confronted and, in many cases, enthusiastically embraced eugenics -- a movement that embodied progressive attitudes about modern science at the time. Christine Rosen argues that religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets. The liberals and modernists -- those who challenged their churches to embrace modernity -- became the eugenics movement's most enthusiastic supporters. Their participation played an important part in the success of the American eugenics movement. Drawing on previously unexplored archival material from the records of the American Eugenics Society, religious and scientific books and periodicals of the day, and the personal papers of numerous religious leaders and biologists, Christine Rosen has produced an intellectual history of these figures that is both lively and illuminating.

Articles

Humanizing Eugenics
A bad idea bred of good intentions.
By Christine Rosen
The "age-old passions and human desires" for improvement that Harry Bruinius describes in his new book Better for All the World exist in all of us. The stories that he highlights serve as a warning about the abuses a liberal democracy can inflict on its citizens when under the sway of "enlightened" scientific ideas. [Wall Street Journal, 28 February 2006.]

Echoes of Horror
What the eugenics movement can teach us about today’s stem-cell debates
By Christine Rosen
Although there are vast differences between the eugenics movement of the past and the stem-cell research of the present, there is an eerie similarity to their rhetoric and tactics. Like eugenics, promoters of embryonic stem-cell research talk of its endless promise, declaring it the scientific "path to the future," as two state senators from Massachusetts wrote in a recent opinion piece. Promoters claim that their science will lead to cures for a range of diseases and the alleviation of much human suffering. And they denounce those who question the ethics of their pursuit as backward or blindly religious. But as we continue to debate the ethics of embryonic stem-cell research, it is worth recalling that movements waged in the name of scientific progress often leave a troubled legacy. [Dallas Morning News, 9 April 2005.]

The Dilemmas of German Bioethics
Eric Brown
The bioethics debate in Germany is changing—with new biotechnologies like stem cell research raising new questions, and the German people forced to ask anew what human dignity is and means. Eric Brown surveys the past, present, and future of bioethics in Germany, and asks whether today’s ethical boundaries will persist or erode. [The New Atlantis, Number 5, Spring 2004, pp. 37-53.]

The Legacy of Nazi Medicine
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
The dark shadow of “Nazi Medicine” has long shaped the way we think about different ways of controlling human procreation. Naomi Schaefer reviews a current exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on the rise of German eugenics from 1933 to 1945. [The New Atlantis, Number 5, Spring 2004, pp. 54-60.]

Liberty, Equality, Eugenics
By Christine Rosen
This ought to be a welcome contribution to contemporary bioethical debates--a book, written by a well-regarded historian of science and published by a prestigious academic press, that engages the history of embryo research, stem cell research, and cloning, while promising to tackle the contentious issue of when life begins. Unfortunately, Whose View of Life? doesn't deliver on its promise. [Weekly Standard, 22 December 2003]

Eugenics—Sacred and Profane
By Christine Rosen
A Jewish organization in Brooklyn is combining the age-old techniques of Orthodox matchmaking with the brand new techniques of genetic testing in an effort to avert disease. Meanwhile, an increasing number of IVF clinics have begun testing embryos for undesired traits and discarding the unfit. Christine Rosen considers the future of eugenics in the age of genetic knowledge.