ABSTRACT
Prejudices against people who have noticeable disabilities have resulted in needless social and economic barriers to their participation in society. In Germany under the Nazis, a movement for eugenics, or "racial hygiene", led to the sterilization and, later, the elimination of people with particular mental or physical disabilities. In the United States, earlier in the century, the eugenics movement produced compulsory sterilization laws. The term eugenics was coined by Francis Galton in 1883. A eugenic ideology prevails in this and other countries that find its political expression in a neglect of the needs and civil rights of people with disabilities. As a result, people who have a disability confront unnecessary and arbitrary barriers to education and employment, which make it difficult for them to live ordinary lives. Physicians and scientists need merely provide the techniques that make individual women, and parents, responsible for implementing the society's prejudices, so to speak, by choice.
