Editing Eugenics (section)

=== Ancient and medieval origins===
{{See also|Sparta#Birth and death}}
[[File:The selection of the infant Spartans, Giuseppe Diotti.jpg|thumb|250px|Giuseppe Diotti's ''The selection of the infant Spartans'' (1840)]]
 
According to [[Plutarch#Spartan lives and sayings|Plutarch]], in [[Sparta]] every proper citizen's child was inspected by the council of elders, the [[Gerousia]], which determined whether or not the child was fit to live.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hughes |first1=Bill |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_R6yDwAAQBAJ |title=A Historical Sociology of Disability: Human Validity and Invalidity from Antiquity to Early Modernity |date=26 September 2019 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=9780429615207 |series=Routledge Advances in Disability Studies |location=Abingdon |quote=The Spartan Council of Elders or Gerousia decided whether a new-born child brought before them would live or die. Impairment, deformity, even puny appearance was enough to condemn a child to death.|access-date=21 July 2023}}</ref> If the child was deemed unfit, the child was thrown into a chasm.<ref>''Making Patriots'' by [[Walter Berns]], 2001, page 12, "and whose infants, if they chanced to be puny or ill-formed, were exposed in a chasm (the Apothetae) and left to die;"</ref><ref>{{cite book | author-link=Plutarch | url=https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/lives/lycurgus*.html | last=Plutarch | title=Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans}}</ref> Plutarch is the sole historical source for the Spartan practice of systemic infanticide motivated by eugenics.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bayliss |first1=Andrew J. |title=4. Raising a Spartan |journal=The Spartans: A Very Short Introduction |date=26 May 2022 |pages=59–76 |doi=10.1093/actrade/9780198787600.003.0004|isbn=978-0-19-878760-0 }}</ref> While [[infanticide]] was practiced by Greeks, no contemporary sources support Plutarch's claims of mass infanticide motivated by eugenics.<ref>{{cite journal |title=Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece |journal=Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens |date=2021 |volume=90 |issue=4 |pages=747 |doi=10.2972/hesperia.90.4.0747 |last1=Sneed |s2cid=245045967 }}</ref> In 2007 the suggestion that infants were dumped near Mount Taygete was called into question due to a lack of physical evidence. Anthropologist Theodoros Pitsios' research found only bodies from adolescence up to the age of approximately 35.<ref>{{Cite news |date=2007-12-10 |title=Study finds no evidence of discarded Spartan babies |language=en-AU |work=ABC News |url=https://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-12-11/study-finds-no-evidence-of-discarded-spartan-babies/983848 |access-date=2023-10-12}}</ref><ref>"Ancient Sparta – Research Program of Keadas Cavern" https://web.archive.org/web/20131002192630/http://www.anthropologie.ch/d/publikationen/archiv/2010/documents/03PITSIOSreprint.pdf</ref>

[[Plato's political philosophy]] included the belief that human reproduction should be cautiously monitored and controlled by the state through [[selective breeding]].<ref>[[Galton, David J.]] (1998). "Greek theories on eugenics." ''Journal of Medical Ethics'', 24(4), 263–267. doi:10.1136/jme.24.4.263</ref><ref>The Republic, 457c10-d3</ref>

According to [[Tacitus]] ({{circa |56}} – {{circa |120}}), a Roman of the [[Roman Empire|Imperial Period]], the [[Germanic peoples|Germanic]] tribes of his day killed any member of their community they deemed cowardly, unwarlike or "stained with abominable vices", usually by drowning them in swamps.<ref>[[Tacitus]]. [[wikisource:Germania (Church & Brodribb)#XII|Germania.XII]] "Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees; the coward, the unwarlike, the man stained with abominable vices, is plunged into the mire of the morass, with a hurdle put over him."</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Sanders |first=Karin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FU4H-JKPbhkC&pg=PA62 |title=Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination |date=2009 |publisher=[[University of Chicago Press]] |isbn=9780226734040 |page=62 |quote=Tacitus's Germania, read through this kind of filter, became a manual for racial and sexual eugenics |access-date=23 August 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200801132652/https://books.google.com/books?id=FU4H-JKPbhkC&pg=PA62 |archive-date=1 August 2020 |url-status=live}}</ref> Modern historians see Tacitus' ethnographic writing as unreliable in such details.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Krebs |first=Christopher |title=A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich |date=2011 |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |isbn=9780393062656 |location=New York |pages=48–49}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Simon |first=Emily T. |date=21 February 2008 |title=Ancient text has long and dangerous reach |url=https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/02/ancient-text-has-long-and-dangerous-reach/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200626023142/https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/02/ancient-text-has-long-and-dangerous-reach/ |archive-date=26 June 2020 |access-date=24 June 2020 |website=The Harvard Gazette}}</ref>