Eugenics

Eugenics

A practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desireable hereditary traits

Better Babies contests

pushed for infant health, but only allowed white babies to be entered

Negative eugenics

control the reproduction of the “unfit”

Compulsory sterilizations

non-consensual or forced sterilizations of the “feeble-minded”, insane, peculiar; targeted poor black women

Puerto Rico

poverty was blamed on hyperfertility; compulsory sterilizations followed

Margaret Sanger

Puerto Rican birth control study with Proctor and Gamble; women not informed of risks and 3 died

“The N*gro Study”

Proposed as a program to provide black southern families access to BC, education, and black owned clinics. Most of the funding went to white doctors and nurses.

LBJ

federally mandated free birth control to the poor; black power groups saw this as a genocide

Tuskeegee Experiment

infected black men with syphilis without their consent or knowledge; did not provide treatment; whistleblower in 1972 exposed this