Eugenics never went away

Robert A Wilson

aeon.com

Originally posted June 5, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Eugenics survivors are those who have lived through eugenic interventions, which typically begin with being categorised as less than fully human – as ‘feeble-minded’, as belonging to a racialised ethnic group assumed to be inferior, or as having a medical condition, such as epilepsy, presumed to be heritable. That categorisation enters them into a eugenics pipeline.

Each such pipeline has a distinctive shape. The Alberta pipeline involved institutionalisation at training schools for the ‘feeble-minded’ or mentally deficient, followed by a recommendation of sterilisation by a medical superintendent, which was then approved by the Eugenics Board, and executed without consent. Alberta’s introduction of guidance clinics also allowed eugenic sterilisation to reach into the non-institutionalised population, particularly schools.

What roles have the stories of eugenics survivors played in understanding eugenics? For the most part and until recently, these first-person narratives have been absent from the historical study of eugenics. On its traditional view, according to which eugenics ended around 1945, this is entirely understandable. The number of survivors dwindles over time, and those who survived often chose, as did many in Alberta, to bracket off rather than re-live their past. Yet the limited presence of survivor narratives in the study of eugenics also stems from a corresponding limit in the safe and receptive audience for those narratives.

The article is here.

'They stole my life away': women forcibly sterilised by Japan speak out

Daniel Hurst
The Guardian
Originally published April 3, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Between 1948 and 1996, about 25,000 people were sterilised under the law, including 16,500 who did not consent to the procedure. The youngest known patients were just nine or 10 years old. About 70% of the cases involved women or girls.

Yasutaka Ichinokawa, a sociology professor at the University of Tokyo, says psychiatrists identified patients whom they thought needed sterilisation. Carers at nursing homes for people with intellectual disabilities also had sterilisation initiatives. Outside such institutions, the key people were local welfare officers known as Minsei-iin.

“All of them worked with goodwill, and they thought sterilisations were for the interests of the people for whom they cared, but today we must see this as a violation of the reproductive rights of people with disabilities,” Ichinokawa says.

After peaking at 1,362 cases in a single year in the mid-1950s, the figures began to decline in tandem with a shift in public attitudes.

In 1972, the government triggered protests by proposing an amendment to the Eugenic Protection Law to allow pregnant women with disabled foetuses to have induced abortions.

The information is here.

That Time The United States Sterilized 60,000 Of Its Citizens

By Alexandra Minna Stern
The Huffington Post
Originally published January 7, 2016

Not too long ago, more than 60,000 people were sterilized in the United States based on eugenic laws. Most of these operations were performed before the 1960s in institutions for the so-called “mentally ill” or “mentally deficient.” In the early 20th century across the country, medical superintendents, legislators, and social reformers affiliated with an emerging eugenics movement joined forces to put sterilization laws on the books. Such legislation was motivated by crude theories of human heredity that posited the wholesale inheritance of traits associated with a panoply of feared conditions such as criminality, feeblemindedness, and sexual deviance. Many sterilization advocates viewed reproductive surgery as a necessary public health intervention that would protect society from deleterious genes and the social and economic costs of managing “degenerate stock.” From today’s vantage point, compulsory sterilization looks patently like reproductive coercion and unethical medical practice.

At the time, however, sterilization both was countenanced by the U.S. Supreme Court (in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case) and supported by many scientists, reformers, and lawmakers as one prong of a larger strategy to improve society by encouraging the reproduction of the “fit” and restricting the procreation of the “unfit.” In total, 32 U.S. states passed sterilization laws between 1907 and 1937, and surgeries reached their highest numbers in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Beginning in the 1970s, state legislatures began to repeal these laws, finding them antiquated and discriminatory, particularly towards people with disabilities.

The article is here.

Is Individuality the Savior of Eugenics?

By Nathaniel Comfort
Scientific American Blog
Originally published August 23, 2013

Is eugenics a historical evil poised for a comeback? Or is it a noble but oft-abused concept, finally being done correctly?

Once defined as “the science of human improvement through better breeding,” eugenics has roared back into the headlines in recent weeks in both Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll personae. The close observer may well wonder which will prevail. The snarling Mr. Hyde is the state control over reproduction. Although this idea may evoke visions of Nazi genocide, the U.S. itself has a long, unsavory eugenic history, peaking between 1910 and the mid-thirties but tailing out through the 20th century. And now into the 21st: the recent investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting, which showed that between 2006 and 2010 nearly 150 pregnant prisoners had been sterilized against their will in California, was a stunning reminder that traces of the old eugenics remain in our own time.

The entire blog post is here.

Massachusetts Appeals Court rules that judge was wrong to order mentally ill woman to have an abortion and to then be sterilized

By Peter Schworm
The Boston Globe

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today reversed a probate judge’s decision to order a schizophrenic woman to undergo an abortion and to then be sterilized, saying the woman had consistently expressed her opposition to the practice as a Catholic.

In October, the state Department of Mental Health filed a petition to have the woman’s parents named as guardians for the woman, who is only known as “Mary Moe,’’ so they could give consent for an abortion, according to the court.

Norfolk Probate and Family Court Judge Christina Harms, declared that the 32-year-old woman was not competent to make a decision about an abortion, citing “substantial delusional beliefs,” and concluded she would choose to abort her pregnancy if she were competent.

Earlier this month, Harms ordered that the woman’s parents be appointed as coguardians and that Moe could be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed ... by ruse” into a hospital where she would be sedated and an abortion would then be performed, the ruling stated.

The judge also ordered the facility that performed the abortion to sterilize the woman “to avoid this painful situation from recurring in the future.”

The Appeal Court’s decision, released today, reversed the sterilization order in unusually strong terms.

“No party requested this measure, none of the attendant procedural requirements has been met, and the judge appears to have simply produced the requirement out of thin air,” wrote Appeals Court Judge Andrew Grainger.

The entire story is here.