This idea was the basis of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s Supreme Court opinion upholding the right of the Commonwealth of Virginia to sterilize the feeble-minded, which ends with the immortal statement that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Let’s be clear about the results of this decision. A specific 18-year-old girl named Carrie Buck, who had been accused of no crime, was placed on a table, whereupon an agent of the state sliced open her abdomen and cut her Fallopian tubes against her will. She lived from that moment until her death with no chance of having children. All of this was done because Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was pretty sure that her children would not have been smart enough. The ironic denouement is that, just prior to this operation, Carrie Buck had actually had a daughter—whose subsequent performance in school was average at worst and often better.
This was not an aberrant case; over 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized in the 20th century. The Laughlin Model Law, which was the basis for most state statutes that regularized this practice, chillingly permitted the forcible sterilization of any “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring,” and provided tactical inspiration for relevant statutes in Nazi Germany."
If crime is ever proven to be genetic, people will look at the demographics of the prison population -- and at that point, there will be big trouble.
The movie titled “Idiocracy” comes to mind.
Not one to for under 21 crowd to watch, but the premise is true.
Are there any studies of adopted children to provide insights on this?