Also, some here may be interested in reading this article which is titled "A Weapon of Eugenics: Sterilization as a Means to Better the Race"

http://www.umw.edu/hisa/resources/Student%20Projects/Cincinnati/students.umw.edu/_ncinc5ce/eugenics.html


Here is an except of that article:

"It was no coincidence that modern sterilization procedures were developed as the science of eugenics emerged in Western thought. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term "eugenics" in 1883. This pseudo-science, an outgrowth of social Darwinism and Gregor Mendel's laws of inheritance, stressed that heredity was law and that those with good genes should be harnessed while those with "defective" genes should be eliminated. Positive eugenics was the science of nourishing those fit to reproduce while negative eugenics developed methods to eradicate undesirable elements. This elitist science, which targeted the poor, the mentally and physically handicapped, and certain racial groups, found fertile ground in the United States where upper and middle class professionals feared "race suicide" among the fit. Indeed, the United States shaped and transformed eugenics into a movement which was mimicked all over the world—including in Nazi Germany.

The mid to late nineteenth century was a time when birth control knowledge and use was still very taboo and very illegal, thus doctors were not interested in developing sterilization for middle and upper class Americans but rather for those elements causing "degeneracy." At a time when many American scientific and medical circles believed criminality, poverty, depravity, and mental illness were genetically inherited, a technique to prevent reproduction of these qualities was greatly desired. Sterilization offered the "surgical solution." With a perceived sense that defective Americans reproduced much faster than normal ones, eugenicists, like Ochsner and others, viewed sterilization as a panacea.Sterilization become an integral part of a population control system where eugenicists, doctors, and politicians worked together to ensure the sterilization of the unfit. Eugenic sterilization laws legalizing the involuntary sterilization of the mentally ill, criminals, and other defectives, came to being in close to thirty states with more than 70,000 Americans losing the ability to reproduce by the mid-twentieth century."

-snip-

All of this to say, Keith A of Hertford, that for what it's worth, I definitely don't agree with you that "The Eugenics Society, a British charity now called the Galton Institute, has only ever done good things."