This led to forced sterilization and prohibition of marriage in most of the developed world and was later used by Adolf Hitler as a rationale for the mass murder of people with intellectual disability during the Holocaust. Eugenics was later abandoned as an violation of human rights, and the practice of forced sterilization and prohibition from marriage was discontinued by most of the developed world by the mid-20th century. In 1905, Alfred Binet produced the first standardized test for measuring intelligence in children.Although ancient Roman law had declared people with intellectual disability to be incapable of the deliberate intent to harm that was necessary for a person to commit a crime, during the 1920s, Western society believed they were morally degenerate.Ignoring the prevailing attitude, Civitans adopted service to people with developmental disabilities as a major organizational emphasis in 1952. Their earliest efforts included workshops for special education teachers and daycamps for children with disabilities, all at a time when such training and programs were almost nonexistent. The segregation of people with developmental disabilities was not widely questioned by academics or policy-makers until the 1969 publication of Wolf Wolfensbergers seminal work "The Origin and Nature of Our Institutional Models", drawing on some of the ideas proposed by S. G. Howe 100 years earlier. This book posited that society characterizes people with disabilities as deviant, sub-human and burdens of charity, resulting in the adoption of that "deviant" role.
Feeble-minded used to mean mild MR in the UK, and once applied in the US to the whole field. "Borderline intellectual functioning" is not currently defined, but the term may be used to apply to people with IQs in the 70s. People with IQs of 70 to 85 used to be eligible for special consideration in the US public education system on grounds of intellectual disability. United States
In North America, intellectual disability is subsumed into the broader term developmental disability, which also includes epilepsy, autism, cerebral palsy, and other disorders that develop during the developmental period (birth to age 18). Because service provision is tied to the designation "developmental disability", it is used by many parents, direct support professionals, and physicians. In the United States, however, in school-based settings, the more specific term mental retardation or, more recently (and preferably), intellectual disability, is still typically used, and is one of 13 categories of disability under which children may be identified for special education services under Public Law 108–446. The phrase intellectual disability is increasingly being used as a synonym for people with significantly below-average cognitive ability. These terms are sometimes used as a means of separating general intellectual limitations from specific, limited deficits as well as indicating that it is not an emotional or psychological disability.