E10/EF7 Eugenics

Eugenics is the applied science which advocates practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population.  Eugenics was widely popular in the early decades of the 20th century.

By the mid-20th century eugenics had fallen into disfavor, having become associated with Nazi Germany. Both the public and some elements of the scientific community have associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, such as enforced "racial hygiene", human experimentation, and the extermination of "undesired" population groups.

In Canada, the eugenics movement gained support early in the 20th century as prominent physicians drew a direct link between heredity and public health.  In Alberta, the Sexual Sterilization Act was enacted in 1928, focusing the movement on the sterilization of mentally deficient individuals, as determined by the Alberta Eugenics Board.  The Act, drafted to protect the gene pool, allowed for sterilization of mentally disabled persons in order to prevent the transmission of undesirable traits to offspring.  At that time, eugenicists argued that mental illness, mental retardation, epilepsy, alcoholism, pauperism, certain criminal behaviours, and social defects, such as prostitution and sexual perversion, were genetically determined and inherited. Further, it was widely believed that persons with these disorders had a higher reproduction rate than the normal population. As a result, it was feared the gene pool in the general population was weakening.

Individuals were assessed using IQ tests like the Stanford-Binet.  This posed a problem to new immigrants arriving in Canada, as many had not mastered the English language, and often their scores denoted them as having impaired intellectual functioning.  As a result, many of those sterilized under the Sexual Sterilization Act were immigrants who were unfairly categorized.  The province of British Columbia enacted its own Sexual Sterilization Act in 1933. As in Alberta, the British Columbia Eugenics Board could recommend the sterilization of those it considered to be suffering from "mental disease or mental deficiency".

The Sexual Sterilization Acts of Alberta and British Columbia were not repealed until 1972.  During the time the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act was in effect, 4,725 cases were proposed for sterilization in the Province of Alberta, of which over 2,800 received approval.

Adapted from wikipedia.org