Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through social intervention. The goals have variously been to create healthier, more intelligent people, save society resources, and lessen human suffering. Proposed means of achieving these goals most commonly include prenatal testing and screening, genetic counseling, birth control, selective breeding, In vitro fertilisation, and genetic engineering. Critics argue that eugenics is a pseudoscience. Historically, eugenics in fact has been a means where such thinking culminated in coercive state-sponsored discrimination, and severe human rights violations, such as forced sterilization and even genocide.

Selective breeding of human beings was suggested at least as far back as Plato, but the modern field was first formulated by Sir Francis Galton in 1865, drawing on the recent work of his cousin, Charles Darwin. From its inception, eugenics (derived from the Greek "well born" or "good breeding") was supported by prominent thinkers (including Alexander Graham Bell and W.E.B. DuBois) and was an academic discipline at many colleges and universities. Its scientific reputation tumbled in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin began incorporating eugenic rhetoric into the racial policies of Nazi Germany. During the postwar period both the public and the scientific community largely associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, which included enforced "racial hygiene" and extermination, although a variety of regional and national governments maintained eugenic programs until the 1970s.