In 2025, "health and wellness" isn't just about feeling good -- it's a status symbol, a shiny badge of moral superiority wrapped in collagen peptides and sea moss gel. Scroll through social media and you'll find influencers preaching the gospel of biohacking, so-called "clean" eating and the never-ending quest for the perfect body. Strip away the branding, and you're staring at the ghost of eugenics -- an early 20th century movement obsessed with purity, perfection and deciding who gets to count as fully human.
At the turn of the 20th century, the United States embraced eugenics, the idea that society could be improved by controlling human reproduction. Backed by prominent scientists, wealthy philanthropists and government officials, eugenics led to forced sterilizations, racialized immigration policies and widespread discrimination against the disabled, mentally ill and people of color. Kansas played a significant role in this movement, becoming one of the early adopters of state-sanctioned sterilization laws. Between 1913 and 1961, more than 3,000 Kansans -- many institutionalized for mental illness or developmental disabilities -- were sterilized without consent under eugenic policies aimed at "improving" the population.
While the word "eugenics" fell out of favor after World War II, its core principles of ideal bodies, superior genes and moral purity never fully disappeared.
Today, the supposedly benign language of wellness and self-improvement can be seen as a subtle reincarnation of eugenics thinking. Modern health trends such as the pursuit of the perfect body, the rise of clean eating and the obsession with biohacking often come packaged as empowerment and personal freedom. However, they are exclusionary, reinforcing ideals of thinness, whiteness and wealth as moral virtues. Thinness is seen not just as a physical trait but as a marker of moral worth, as though those who maintain a low weight are more disciplined, healthy or virtuous. This mirrors the early 20th century eugenic obsession with purity, control and the "ideal" body. Eugenicists believed in controlling who could reproduce based on these very same ideas of purity and superior traits, a mindset that seems to have been repackaged into today's wellness culture.
The focus on health optimization also reflects a moral judgment about worthiness. The growing trend toward viewing health as an individual responsibility plays directly into a neoliberal form of eugenics. Political figures such as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has become a prominent voice in the anti-vaccine movement, have appropriated the language of health to assert moral superiority. His movement's slogan, "Make America Healthy Again," frames health as a moral imperative and a political one.
RFK Jr.'s rhetoric echoes the eugenic ideas of the early 20th century, when people who were deemed unhealthy, mentally ill or "degenerate" were seen as burdens to society. His public statements pathologize people with neurodivergence, suggesting that certain populations (those with autism, for instance) are a problem to be solved and not a community to be supported. He claims that the rise in autism is linked to vaccines or environmental toxins, despite overwhelming scientific evidence debunking these theories. By framing autism as a tragedy that "didn't exist" before now, he reinforces a long-standing eugenic stereotype: that disabled people are not just different but defective.
The question we must ask ourselves is: Who gets to be healthy, beautiful and worthy in today's society? Why does every woman want to have the perfect pink Pilates body and lifestyle? And more important, who gets excluded from these categories? It's not about calling wellness bad. It's about interrogating who gets to define wellness, and who gets left out of the conversation.
The American eugenics movement didn't die -- it just changed outfits. Today, it struts around as wellness culture, health populism and Silicon Valley biohacking, peddling the same old judgments about who's worthy and who's disposable, now with better branding and a green juice. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might not call it eugenics, but if it quacks like superiority and walks like exclusion, well -- check your history books.