Eugenics: The Impulse Never Dies

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http://www.counterpunch.org/eugenics.html

 

 

edited by alexander cockburn and jeffrey st. clair

 

March 6, 2000

Eugenics: The Impulse Never Dies

 

In Monroe, Louisiana, Kathy Looney, 29, convicted of abusing three of

her eight children, was ordered at the end of February to undergo

medical sterilization or face lengthy jail time. District Judge Carl

V. Sharp issued a 10-year suspended sentence and placed Looney on five

years of probation. " I don't want to have to lock you up to keep you

from having any more children, so some kind of medical procedure is

needed to make sure you don't. " Looney's lawyer asked the judge to

reconsider.

 

The eugenic impulse is always lurking. These days it's surfacing once

again, not only in old-fashioned coercive sterilization such as that

imposed by the Louisiana judge but in programs of genetic improvement,

using all the new splicing technologies. Know-how, as so often in

medicine, sprints ahead of moral considerations. In this context the

Annals of Internal Medicine has just published an interesting

comparison by Drs André N. Sofair and Lauris C. Kaldjian. of German

and US sterilization policies from 1930 to 1945.

 

During the years when Americans were being involuntarily sterilized as

part of a multi-state eugenics program dating back to l907, what did

the leading medical journals here have to say on the topic in their

editorials? The authors reviewed the relevant periodicals only in the

1930s. Even in this narrow time frame, against the backdrop of Nazi

eugenic programs (themselves deriving in part from the theories of US

eugenicists) the facts are instructive.

 

The American Journal of Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine and

the American Journal of Psychiatry had nothing to say. The American

Journal of Public Health had one anonymous editorial on mental health

that Sofair and Kaldjian describe as " relevant " probably because it

suggested that rising rates of hospitalization for the mentally infirm

didn't necessarily mean that American's mental IQ was falling, a

widely held belief that was exploited by the advocates of eugenic

sterilization. This was the most important conclusion of a influential

report on eugenic sterilization put out by the American Neurological

Association in 1935, which recommended that sterilization be voluntary.

 

But the special committee convened by the Neurological Association did

not contest the widely held view that mentally defective people were a

drain on national resources. The committee took a positive view of

" feeble-mindedness " on the grounds that it breeds " servile, useful

people who do the dirty work of the race. " The committee also pointed

out that an involuntary program such as that lawful in many American

states would have sterilized the fathers of both Mozart and Tolstoy

who are " worth more to [society] than the cost of maintenance of all

state institutions put together. " The committee reviewed the Germany

sterilization law of 1933 and praised it for precision and scientific

grounding.

 

The editorial record of the New England Journal in the early l930s was

awful. Editorials lamented the supposed increase in the rate of

American feeble-mindedness as dangerous and the economic burden of

supporting the mentally feeble as " appalling " . In 1934 The Journal's

editor, Morris Fishbein, wrote that " Germany is perhaps the most

progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit " , and

argued that the " individual must give way to the greater good " .

 

But by the mid-1930s, particularly after the report from the

Neurological Association and energetic interventions by the chairman

of its special committee, Abraham Myerson, the New England Journal had

a change of heart and declared that sterilization laws to prevent

propagation were " unwise " and sterilization should not be mandatory.

The Journal of the American Medical Association followed the same curve.

 

The authors calculate the number of people neutered here was a little

over 60,000 and that the practice stopped in the early l960s. Wrong.

In l974 US District Court Judge Gerhard Gesell said that " Over the

last few years, an estimated l00,000 to 150,000 low-income persons

have been sterilized annually in federally funded programs. " The late

Allan Chase quoted this in his great book The Legacy of Malthus, and

noted that the US rate equalled that of Nazi Germany where the 12-year

career of the Third Reich after the German Sterilization Act of l933

(in part inspired by US laws) saw 2 million Germans sterilized as

social inadequates.

 

Gesell pointed out that though Congress had decreed that family

planning programs function on a voluntary basis " an indefinite number

of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a

sterilization operation under the threat that various federally funded

benefits would be withdrawn Patients receiving Medicaid assistance at

childbirth are evidently the most frequent targets of this pressure. "

 

Starting in the early 1990s poor women were allowed Medicaid funding

to have Norplant inserted into their arms, then when they complained

of pain and other unwelcome side effects they were told no funding was

available to have the Norplant rods taken out. Here, therefore was

involuntary sterilization in a later guise. As the Louisiana report

makes clear, the eugenic impulse is never far away. Don't rely on the

medical profession to safeguard the targets of this " improving " zeal. CP

 

 

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