Global+Acts+of+Eugenics

=Eugenics in the UK= toc The 20th century Eugenics Movement began in Great Britain. "Social Darwinism," the idea that undesirable human conditions can be eliminating by aiding evolution through selective breeding practices, was given its more maligned name by Sir Francis Galton in //Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development//.

"The question was then forced upon me. Could not the race of men be similarly improved? Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?"

Galton, a multidisciplinary scientist, was the first person to apply statistics to inheritance and intelligence in people. He coined the phrase nature versus nurture in his discussions of inherited intelligence and genius. in 1901, Galton classified the British into five social strata: In the UK, eugenics found many prominent supporters: HG Wells, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb (founders of the Fabian Society), George Bernard Shaw, and Winston Churchill among them.

One of the most famous rebuttals to eugenics in the UK was Aldous Huxley's Brave New Word. Huxley, a distant cousin of Galton and Darwin, presents a world in which society has been manipulated by eugenics, industrialization, and Pavlovian conditioning.

Churchill and Eugenics
As Harry H. Laughlin and the ERO pushed eugenics across the US, Churchill, then the British Home Secretary took notice. In a letter to H. H. Asquith, Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916, Churchill said, "The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate."

The social climate in the UK allowed for the passage of the Mental Deficiency Act (MDA) of 1913, drafted in part by Churchill. The MDA named four classifications of deficiency: Idiot, imbecile, feebleminded, and moral imbeciles. The MDA created institutional colonies throughout the UK. Though it was hotly debated, provisions regarding compulsory sterilization were not included.

Contemporary Eugenics in the UK
In 2013, Justice Eleanor King ruled that a 36 year old man with an intellectual disability would be sterilized. According to the Justice, the man, who had fathered a child four years prior, would not reliably use condoms or other contraceptive methods, and therefore, a vasectomy was in his best interests.

Earlier that year, another Judge in the Court of Protection (a special court that makes legal decisions regarding the care and guardianship of people with Mental Health concerns and Learning Disabilities) block an order of sterilization on behalf of a 21 year old woman with Downs Syndrome whose parents had petitioned for a tubal ligation to prevent future pregnancy. Unfortunately, the Court of Protection sees many such cases.

[|The Mental Capacity Act of 2005] safeguards decisions of people with diminished legal capacity to get married, divorced, have sexual partnerships, and make decisions regarding the termination of parental rights, but it does not include reproductive rights in this list.

In 2010, Project Prevention, a charitable organization in the US, began offering people with substance addictions 200£ to receive a vasectomy. The first person in the UK take the offer was a 38 year old man who had been a heroin addict for 15 years.