Everyone knows that the good ol' U.S. of A. participated in eugenics programs, right? No? I didn't until sometime in college, when I picked up the book Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog.

What is eugenics? Sir Francis Galton, who is credited with coining the phrase, said, "Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage."

Sounds pretty noble, doesn't it?

Read over "inborn qualities" a few more times, and consider that the determination of what is an "improvement" on the race was in the hands of fellow humans. If you've ever read the arguments on how blacks and Native Americans, and, well, anyone not-White are "subhuman" and the "scientific evidence" that "proves" it, you'll have a good idea of what improvements were deemed necessary. Ostensibly, eugenics would remove birth defects, physical and mental, from the gene pool. In practice, it was a subtle genocide.

It's not part of our far-ago past, either. It may have started around the 1870's, but it only ended in the 1970's. That's within my lifetime. If, when my mother went to the hospital to deliver me, someone decided that she was mentally deficient, promiscuous, or simply of a "tainted" race, she would have been anesthitised and given a tubal litigation right then. It happened to plenty of women, especially young women who were poor, and especially if they had been raped. Many of them never knew it had been done to them until much later, when they had married and were trying to start a family.

We're finally getting around to saying, "Oops, sorry about that". Until the next time, of course. I'd like to think there won't be, but with the national attention span being what it is (no, people, Hawaii was not one of the original colonies, and we really *did* take it over in the 50's), the "put it behind us and move on" theories, and especially human nature, it probably will.