It was for their own good, the government said again and again. Nine out of 10 sterilization petitions reviewed by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina during its 40 years of existence were approved — in all more than 7,600 cases. Many were institutionalized mental patients, but most were not. By the time the program was halted in 1974, several thousand citizens had been sterilized under the pretext that it was good for them and good for society.
from the Winston-Salem Journal
They were “unfit” to reproduce, according to the government — for being poor and illiterate, hypersexual or homosexual, promiscuous, even lazy. These and other “undesirable” characteristics led them to be classified as “feebleminded.” What followed was swift and irreversible.
That the eugenics movement in North Carolina, as in more than 30 other states, was ultimately ruled by history as misguided does not begin to tell the full story.
Eugenics is the reason for the fear of cloning humans. There’s a fear that people would try to ‘weed out’ the undesired people by creating a race of “perfect” folks.