Yale Study: U.S. Eugenics Paralleled Nazi Germany

[Guest guest]

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/021500-02.htm

 

 

 

 

 

Published on Tuesday, February 15, 2000 in the Chicago Tribune

 

 

 

 

Yale Study: U.S. Eugenics Paralleled Nazi Germany

by David Morgan

 

 

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - U.S. doctors who once believed that

sterilization could help rid society of mental illness and crime

launched a 20th century eugenics movement that in some ways paralleled

the policies of Nazi Germany, researchers said on Monday.

 

A Yale study tracing a once-popular movement aimed at improving

society through selective breeding, indicates that state-authorized

sterilizations were carried out longer and on a larger scale in the

United States than previously believed, beginning with the first state

eugenics law in Indiana in 1907.

 

Despite modern assumptions that American interest in eugenics waned

during the 1920s, researchers said sterilization laws had authorized

the neutering of more than 40,000 people classed as insane or

``feebleminded'' in 30 states by 1944.

 

Another 22,000 underwent sterilization from the mid-1940s to 1963,

despite weakening public support and revelations of Nazi atrocities,

according to the study, funded by the United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum and the Merck Co. Foundation.

 

Forced sterilization was legal in 18 U.S. states, and most states with

eugenics laws allowed people to be sterilized without their consent by

leaving the decision to a third party.

 

``The comparative histories of the eugenical sterilization campaigns

in the United States and Nazi Germany reveal important similarities of

motivation, intent and strategy,'' the study's authors wrote in the

Annals of Internal Medicine, a journal published by the American

College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine.

 

Eugenics sprang from the philosophy of social Darwinism, which

envisioned human society in terms of natural selection and suggested

that science could engineer progress by attacking supposedly

hereditary problems including moral decadence, crime, venereal

disease, tuberculosis and alcoholism.

 

``The eugenics laws in the United States were virulent, just as they

were in Sweden, France and Australia,'' said Art Caplan, head of the

University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

 

The U.S. practice ended in the 1960s after being overwhelmed by court

challenges and the civil rights movement.

 

German and American eugenics advocates both believed science could

solve social problems, tended to measure the worth of the individual

in economic terms and felt mental illness a threat to society grave

enough to warrant compulsive sterilization.

 

And while Nazi claims of Aryan superiority are well known, researchers

said U.S. advocates of sterilization worried that the survival of

old-stock America was being threatened by the influx of ``lower

races'' from southern and eastern Europe.

 

There was also mutual admiration, with early U.S. policies drawing

glowing reviews from authorities in pre-Nazi Germany.

 

``Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting

fecundity among the unfit,'' editors of the New England Journal of

Medicine wrote in 1934, a year after Hitler became chancellor.

 

U.S. Eugenics Movement Waned

 

But the study, based partly on old editorials from the New England

journal and the Journal of the American Medical Association, also

demonstrated how the U.S. eugenics movement gradually waned while its

Nazi counterpart carried out 360,000 to 375,000 sterilizations during

the 1930s and grew to encompass so-called ``mercy'' killings.

 

``In the United States, a combination of public unease, Roman Catholic

opposition, federal democracy, judicial review and critical scrutiny

by the medical profession reversed the momentum,'' the article said.

 

The U.S. practice of neutering ``mentally defective'' individuals was

backed by most leading geneticists and often justified on grounds that

it would relieve the public of the cost of caring for future

generations of the mentally ill.

 

Sterilizations also took place mainly in public mental institutions,

where the poor and ethnic or racial minorities were housed in

disproportionately high numbers.

 

``It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute

degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their

imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from

continuing their kind,'' Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

wrote in the majority opinion of a landmark eugenics case in 1926.

 

###

 

2000 Reuters Limited