“Some Darwinian thinkers, including Charles Darwin himself, advocated more births by more people, believing that it would boost the beneficial effects of natural selection. But many believed that eugenics required the restriction of births by inferior people.”

The “eugenics” movement, which sought to protect and improve hereditary racial stock, was phenomenally popular in early 20th century America, and it has an important connection to today’s pro-abortion movement. Thomas C. Leonard explains eugenics in his 2016 book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era: 

“Eugenics” derives from the Greek for “well born” and describes the movement to improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding. The concept was ancient. Plato’s Republic asked why we breed cattle but not humans. The term was minted in 1883 by Francis Galton, a celebrated Victorian Era polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton advanced the three governing premises of any eugenic program. First, differences in human intelligence, character, and temperament were due to differences in heredity. Second, human heredity could be improved, and with reasonable dispatch. Human heredity, Galton said, was “almost as plastic as clay, under the control of the breeder’s will.”

And third, the improvement of humankind, like any kind of breeding, could not be left to happenstance. It required scientific investigation and regulation of marriage, reproduction, immigration, and labor. In other words, eugenics proposed to replace random natural selection with purposeful social selection. As Galton encapsulated it, “what nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly.”

Eugenics was popular across a wide range of political and religious persuasions, including a disheartening number of advocates out of a traditional Christian background. The eugenics movement itself took on a religious tone as its popularizers tried to convince the American people at large of the threat of racial degeneracy. Leonard notes that

Evangelizers spread the eugenics gospel far beyond the eugenics institutes and laboratories. Eugenic thinking reached deep into American popular culture, traveling through women’s magazines, the religious press, movies, and comic strips. The idea of safeguarding American hereditary, with its concomitant fear of degeneracy from within and inundation from abroad, influenced ordinary Americans far removed from the eugenics movement’s professionals and publicists.

Some Darwinian thinkers, including Charles Darwin himself, advocated more births by more people, believing that it would boost the beneficial effects of natural selection. But many believed that eugenics required the restriction of births by inferior people. This restriction could happen by sterilization (involuntary, in some cases) and birth control methods, which some like Margaret Sanger believed might include abortion in extreme cases. Most eugenicists publicly opposed abortion, however. Even Sanger regarded abortion for population control as “dangerous and vicious.”

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