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Sir Francis Galton first used the word eugenics in his 1883 book titled, ‘Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development' (Wikipedia); it is derived from the Greek words eu (good) and gen (birth). Eugenics was historically used to refer to everything from forced sterilization and infanticide to prenatal care for mothers; present day eugenics includes reproductive genetics such as genetic counseling, genetic screening, preemptive abortions and "designer babies". Broadly speaking, eugenics is a study of selective breeding of "good" traits and improving human genetics. Eugenicists encouraged specific social policies that they believed would lead to an improvement of the human gene pool.
The suggestion of selective breeding in humans is rooted as far back as Plato, whom in The Republic noted that "The best men must have intercourse with the best women as frequently as possible, and the opposite is true of the very inferior." (Wikipedia). Eugenics has strong roots in 19th Century's......

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