Human eugenics

Practices leading to human racial improvement based on judicious mating, ensuring that some attributes (selected as superior) prevail, and taking measures to prevent the dilution of the improved stock by those carrying attributes identified as qualitatively inferior.

Governments continue to adopt policies with eugenic objectives. In Singapore, the government has actively encouraged the academically educated members of the population to increase the number of their children. In Romania, under the Ceausescu regime, women were obliged to have extra children, of whom some were separated from their parents at a very early age for a special upbringing within state orphanages. In 1993 China envisaged using abortion and sterilization to "avoid new births of inferior quality and heighten the standards of the whole population". Marriage was to be forbidden to those with hepatitis, venereal disease or hereditary mental illness. Termination of pregnancies would be recommended in the case of certain infectious diseases or abnormal foetal development. China estimates that from 300,000 to 460,000 congenitally disabled children are born each year.