Disabilty ethics 3 pages

Eugenics

from  Keywords for Disability Studies

“Eugenics” is the modern scientific term that emerged in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century West to name the contemporary rationales and actions with which modern nation-states shaped the membership of their citizenry. The word “eugenics” itself was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a prominent English anthropologist and statistician. Derived from the Greek to describe the pursuit of the “well born,” eugenics was promoted as the new science of improving the human race through selective breeding. Galton's theories about creating a better future with a better population captivated American scientists in the industrial age. Yet the ideology and practice of controlling who reproduces, how they reproduce, and what they reproduce in the interest of shaping the composition of a particular population group long predate the industrial age.

All communities—from tribal kinship groups to modern nation-states—control the composition of their population through practices that encourage valued members to flourish and discourage less valued members of the group from thriving. Social orders create structures to control which individuals are included in or excluded from group membership, as well as the traits that appear in the individuals who make up the sanctioned population. In this way, a collective social body takes shape through the ways a community distributes resources, manages reproduction and sexuality, structures family units, builds environments, and disseminates cultural narratives. In other words, the borders of every autonomous community are both geographic and physiological.

Traditionally, social groups shape their populations primarily through regulating reproduction or excluding alien members. Such community-making measures always entail some degree of violence. Regulating reproduction through family and gender structures, for instance, requires strict control of female sexuality and male access to women. Most groups also shape their membership through overt violence, such as formal warfare, intertribal raids, rape, or killing. Wars and tribal conquest—for example, the Japanese occupation of Nanjing or the eruption of ethnic violence following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia—control both internal and external group membership. Rape throws into chaos patriarchal lineage and ownership of women and their offspring by interrupting exclusive sexual access to the women of a particular group, allowing the alien forces to literally and figuratively penetrate a community by contaminating its reproductive order. Genocide and ethnic cleansing are correlative traditional killing practices that shape future communities not only by culling present members but also by eliminating the reproducers in the enemy group. While these forms of violent tribalism do not use modern scientific means and rationales for eugenic community shaping, such acts of population control also underlie the modern eugenic logic of purification of the social body. Whatever the formal, functional, sensory, or developmental manifestations, the devalued human variations that eugenic logic targets are understood as disabilities: the flaws, excesses, deficiencies, or pathologies a particular social order disavows at a particular time.

By contrast to these methods of tribal purification, modern eugenics hides the violence of traditional population control practices behind scientific rationalism, technological pragmatism, and the ideology of progress. At the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, the United States was experiencing dramatic social change in the form of mass immigration, predominantly from southern and eastern Europe, as well as the internal migration of blacks from the South to northern cities. Such population shifts introduced an influx of labor, accompanying social changes, and new juxtapositions of ethnic and class groups arising from the increasingly rapid urbanization. By the first decades of the twentieth century, eugenics had become a modern social movement embraced by scientists throughout the modern West as well as by philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie, politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, and reproductive rights activists such as Margaret Sanger. The aim of modern eugenics was to rid society of the characteristics that dominant groups consider to be disabilities in the broadest sense and, often by extension, people with disabilities. What counts as disability and who counts as disabled change over time and across cultures, as do the social or governmental initiatives mustered to eliminate them. What we now consider racial and ethnic variations, minority sexual orientation, behavioral deviance, criminality, aspects of gender differences, chronic illness, and even atypical temperaments have all counted as forms of biological inferiority understood as disabilities under the logic of eugenic science.

Under the banner of modern progress, eugenic science became state policies. These policies included compiling records of so-called genetically inferior family lines; developing intellectual categories and measurements such as IQ, hereditary genius, and the elastic label “feebleminded”; passing antimiscegenation laws; encouraging selective reproduction counseling and rewarding supposed good breeding and fitness; and institutionalizing and forcibly sterilizing the supposedly inferior (Trent 1994; Lombardo 2008). The targets of eugenic policy were people with few resources or social capital. Eugenicists employed genetic, racist, and nativist logic to discourage reproduction by the supposedly unfit, whom they blamed for escalating crime and poverty rates. In total, more than 65,000 Americans were sterilized in these scientists’ pursuit of an improved American citizenry. Eugenicists in other nations—including Sweden, Brazil, and Germany—launched similar programs, often in consultation with American eugenicists, who conducted international conferences and world tours.

Before World War II, eugenic progress seemed to many a positive and sensible way to shape a modern nation, even though cautions generally placed limits on its practice. Faith in the scientific concept of evolution and its implementation through capitalism, technological development, and secular social progress drove swift modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries toward perpetual improvement through controlling the present in order to ensure future outcomes. Such an understanding of the present as a site for investment in a tractable, improved future differs from traditional worldviews based on acceptance or fatalism. The belief that the hand of God is ultimately at work in the world faded toward the end of the nineteenth century into the idea that human beings determine the arc of their own collective and individual history, making way for the concept of a national future intentionally peopled with the best citizens. The science of eugenics and its implementation through technology were the manifestation of this distinctly modern ambition.

The well-documented and familiar story of eugenics in our modern era begins with this now-discredited pseudoscience. Galton's theories of inheritance now seem to us misguided elitism and bad science, even while the related science of evolution pioneered by his cousin Charles Darwin remains foundational to our currently accepted understanding of human development. Our current recoil against this understanding of eugenics as an unfortunate scientific and policy mistake of the past originates from eugenics’ most intensive application of social engineering in the twentieth century: Nazi Germany's ambitious project to create a eugenically shaped German citizenry—indeed, a eugenically shaped world. In the desperate and destroyed Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Third Reich came to power and adapted U.S.-led medical-scientific theories to invent the worthy Aryan citizen and its array of devalued opposites, a wide swath of human variation termed “life unworthy of life” in an influential book by two German professors, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding, titled The Authorization for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life (1920). The Nazis fused ancient tribal anti-Semitism with modern eugenics in a reckless and ambitious attempt to shape a German national body that combined racial purity with eugenic elimination of all people—indeed, of all the human traits—they deemed inferior or alien. In doing so, they consolidated nationhood through the older model of ethnic tribal membership based on heritage and the newer model of national population-building based on the eugenic concept of biological superiority or inferiority.

The Nazi totalitarian regime's eugenic nation-building augmented traditional military warfare with modern technologies of control such as bureaucratic profiling, dissemination of racist propaganda, codification of racial difference through law and scientific research, and the implementation of medical measures to kill those who did not fit the Aryan model. Nazi Germany's eugenic project to advance the so-called Aryan race began with mandatory sterilization programs in the mid-1930s followed by a eugenic euthanasia program, beginning in 1939, in which disabled Germans of all ages living in institutions such as orphanages and medical care facilities were rounded up and transferred to extermination facilities. There, the Nazis, in cooperation with medical practitioners, developed the gas chambers and sham medical examinations that were later used in the more ambitious project to exterminate the Jews of Europe and other groups considered to be eugenically inferior (Garland-Thomson 2012). Between 1939 and 1945, several hundred thousand people with disabilities were murdered by the Nazi program of extermination (Burleigh 1995; Friedlander 1995). Thus, what was distinctly modern in the German nation-building project was using eugenic killing in addition to military killing as a way to forge a desired national population. In this sense, one could argue that the Nazi eradication of disability of any kind expanded to include the millions of Jews, Catholics, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others who were targeted in the Holocaust. By fully operationalizing eugenics to create its desired, ostensibly improved population of citizens, the Third Reich thus carried eugenic logic to its final, terrible conclusion.

The horror generated by the Holocaust, along with improved understanding of genetics and long-standing opposition from religious groups and prominent scientists, eventually discredited eugenics as a social movement, and the United States, Germany, and other nations largely abandoned eugenic programs after World War II. The Nuremberg trials, the United Nations, and, indeed, the entire array of civil rights movements and the increased democratization they brought about helped undermine the logic of eugenics. Similar to slavery or public torture, eugenics now seems part of the unenlightened historical past from which we have moved on in our progressive contemporary moment.

Nonetheless, the aspiration to shape future generations of people collectively and individually persists in reproductive practices ranging from genius sperm banks to routine genetic screening. Advanced technologies of genetic engineering, such as euphenics, aim to eliminate disease and introduce reproductive techniques to control the health and appearance of one's children. More broadly, the increasing commodification of normalizing products and processes such as cosmetic surgery has heightened the standardization of people themselves. These developments constitute what Daniel Kevles calls the “new eugenics” (1985, 267). Eliminating disability and disabled people is the primary aim of this new eugenics of enhancement, health, and normalization.

Reproductive technology is now the most robust new eugenic practice. Authorized by science and sanctioned as health care, medical control of reproduction through birth control, sterilization, embryological manipulation, prenatal and genetic testing, and selective abortion shapes populations in developed societies today. Understood as voluntary rather than imposed, the use of reproductive technology to sculpt individuals, families, and larger groups responds to cultural attitudes and ideologies about what kinds of people are valuable and desirable and what kinds are not (Parens and Asch 2007).

Proponents of eliminating disability and disabled people under various rationales and practices such as selective abortion, euthanasia, the right to die, and genetic engineering contend that reproductive technology and euthanasia are not eugenic because they are voluntary and noncoercive, a blend of pragmatism, liberalism, and consumerism (Rose 2007; Cowan 2008). Although some of these proponents of “liberal eugenics” ostensibly resist the intrusion of medical institutions into private life while others welcome it, together they support a velvet eugenics that goes largely uncontested in comparison to the violent eugenics of militarism (Agar 2004). One prominent example of a contemporary disability targeted by the new velvet eugenics is the collection of traits we think of as Down syndrome. This highly stigmatized way of being in the world is understood as medically abnormal and highly undesirable even though it is a regularly occurring, albeit minority, form of embodiment. Prenatal screening and other forms of reproductive technology have enabled the precise targeting of this group for exclusion from our shared community: recent studies suggest that up to 90 percent of fetuses with Down syndrome are selectively aborted (Mansfield, Hopfer, and Marteau 1999). Meanwhile, the shaping of populations in non-Western societies through sex selection abortion to produce culturally valued sons rather than devalued daughters raises alarm (Hvistendahl 2011).

Since the 1970s, counter-eugenic arguments based on civil and human rights, ethics, social justice, and the desire to preserve diversity have come from unlikely allies including scientists, religious conservatives, and disability rights groups such as Not Dead Yet (Hubbard 1990; Johnson 2003; Sandel 2007; Scully 2008; Garland-Thomson 2012). The counter-eugenic initiative arises from the egalitarian value of diversity and a rights-based understanding of disability enacted in policies and legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities of 2008, which mandate accommodation of disability and integration of people with disabilities as full citizens. Yet an uneasy cultural contradiction exists in the United States and across the developed, democratized world between counter-eugenics and liberal eugenics, between inclusion and elimination of people with disabilities. A social and legislative counter-eugenic initiative works to integrate people with disabilities into the public world by creating an accessible, barrier-free material environment. In contrast, the eugenic initiative to eliminate disability and disabled people arises from the liberal ideal that social improvement and freedom of choice authorize shaping individuals, families, and communities of people by eliminating devalued human traits in the interest of reducing suffering, increasing life quality, and building a more desirable citizenry. These contradictory cultural logics are manifest in a wide variety of policies, institutional practices, and individual actions that occur within the particular historical contexts of nations and communities across the modernizing world.

A dynamic tension thus perpetually operates in the United States and the increasingly developed world between eugenic and egalitarian aspirations for shaping a citizenry. In the United States, for example, progressive politics shifted beginning in the 1950s and 1960s from the eugenic project of eliminating stigmatized groups to including a wider variation of people who had previously been excluded by segregation laws, discriminatory attitudes, and structural barriers. The larger civil and human rights movements emerged in various forms at midcentury, creating legislation, changing practices, and demanding the inclusion of previously excluded groups, including women, African Americans, people with disabilities, sexual minorities, and other ethnic and minority groups. The disability rights movement that also emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s focused on integrating people with disabilities into the public sphere by removing architectural barriers, creating an accessible built environment, desegregating public education and the workplace, and providing antidiscrimination legislation (Scotch 1984; Shapiro 1994). The inclusive built environment that began to appear during and after that time made it possible for people with disabilities, who had previously been the targets of eugenic elimination, to enter into the public sphere—as well as the public spaces on which access to that sphere depends—to exercise the rights and obligations of democratic citizenship.

The contradiction between disability rights and liberal eugenics is manifest in beliefs, practices, and policies that determine who inhabits our shared public world. The counter-eugenic initiative, for instance, enables wheelchair users to inhabit public spaces, transportation, employment, and commercial culture on a scale impossible before the legal mandates of the 1970s began to change the built environment. At the same time, the eugenic initiative increasingly produces medical technologies that identify and eliminate through selective reproductive procedures potential wheelchair users born with traits such as spina bifida. Similarly, people with developmental and cognitive disabilities are now integrated into mainstream educational settings that accommodate their specific needs rather than being segregated in separate and unequal institutions. Simultaneously, medical technology routinely identifies fetuses indicating physical, cognitive, or developmental impairment to be evaluated for termination. This struggle between the new liberal eugenics and the egalitarian principle of full access to the rights and privileges of citizenship in a democratic order is central to the organization of human communities in the twenty-first century. Eugenics, understood in this way, is one of the most urgent and fundamental issues of our current historical time and place.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

 © 2015 by New York University

Citation

Garland-Thomson, R. (2015). Eugenics. In R. Adams, B. Reiss, & D. Serlin (Eds.), Keywords for disability studies. New York University Press.

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