The Pros and Cons of Practicing Eugenics

Eugenics is the belief that the human population can be improved by “breeding” people with desirable traits such as: emotional and physical health, good character and superior intellect. While on the other hand, forcing those who have less desirable traits including, downs syndrome, physical handicaps and various other perceived “limitations” to be sterilized and left unable to have children.

In my opinion, the practice of eugenics is, in-humane and encroaches on people’s rights as an individual. Imagine someone showing up on your doorstep one day and saying, “You have been deemed un-fit to reproduce, you did not score high enough on your IQ test.” It’s not right for some organization to decide whether people can reproduce or not. It is the individual’s choice and their right to decide if they want children or not.

Eugenics puts people on the same level as an animal. If you think about it, we breed animals according to what we want their offspring to be like. Say that we have a female horse that is white, and not quite as fast as you want her to be, and you want her foal to be brown and fast. You would breed her with a fast, brown stallion, and chances are, that the foal would be born brown, and grow up to be fast. What I’m saying is that eugenics is an immoral practice that demeans humans to the point of putting them on the same level as an animal. It would take away our dignity, our compassion and our basic human rights and should not be practiced.

There are many reasons I believe we should practice eugenics. Foremost is that fact that we will have an overall healthier population. Think about it, we will have the most physically able of the human population reproducing and in turn, their children will be healthier and it will just keep getting better and the quality of the population as a whole goes up. But if we allow those who are less physically capable to reproduce, their children might be born with severe physical limitations, and we don’t want that, we want every citizen to live life to the fullest with a body that won’t hold them back due to physical conditions they inherited from their parents. If eugenics is put into practice everyone will lead much happier, healthier, fulfilling lives.