(D.J.) Dylan Lintelman(FGCU): Eugenics

What if you couldn’t reproduce?

What if the reason that we are on this Earth, whether you think so or not, is to procreate and carry on our genetic identity to the next generation but you couldn’t?

There are things that have happened in our history that people cannot describe with words.  Things that we as a species have done that have scarred people, families, generations.  Some of these things we cannot take back and no amount of restitution could replace the harmful damage that is already done.  The topic I will discuss today is eugenics. Eugenics is the process in which undesirable traits are removed from a species by disabling particular specimens from reproducing.  Believe it or not, this practice has been exercised several times throughout history.  Humans have sterilized others in order to prevent a certain undesirable phenotype(trait displayed in human appearance) from carrying on to the next generation.   I recently did a case study in my Human Genetics class about eugenics and read several articles pertaining to eugenics and how we must lean from this horrible mistake in order to prevent it from happening in the future.

In the 1920s, eugenics, also known as “racial hygiene,” was a commonly accepted science in the United States, and many doctors accepted the misguided idea that “inferior” genetic traits, including low intelligence, needed to be controlled by preventing such people from having children. Eugenics became popular due to the support of many different public leaders and interest groups. They were driven by the idea that eugenics would be linked with humanitarianism. They believed they could help poor people by sterilizing them while simultaneously helping the human race eliminate “bad genes” from its gene pool. Under the eugenics laws of the day, people who made a negative impression upon social welfare and public health authorities could be branded as “feeble-minded” by court order and forced to undergo sterilization. From the implementation of sterilization laws in 1923 and through the next four decades among the 33 states that passed such legislation states with the highest recorded sterilizations were California with 20,108 sterilizations, Virginia with 7,450, North Carolina with 6,297, and Michigan with 3,786 residents sterilized. Ultimately, the 20th-century “eugenics” movement led to the sterilization of more than 67,000 Americans, before coming to an end in the 1970s. The practice was not only carried out on the feeble-minded and handicapped people.  In Nazi Germany, more than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will and another 70,000 died while resisting sterilization.  In Sweden, as recently as 1976 over 65,000 Swedes were sterilized in order to prevent defects, mixed raced individuals and those who were see as individuals who went against the mainstream norms of society such as homosexuals. 

Fred Aslin was 10 years old in 1936, when he was confined to the Lapeer State School, a closed psychiatric facility in the state of Michigan. His eight siblings were confined there as well. His father had died shortly before, and his mother was unable to care for the children on her own. Aslin, a former farmer in Indiana, had never understood exactly why he and his siblings were thrown into a psychiatric clinic, since neither he nor they were in any way mentally handicapped. “But we were poor, and we were Indians,” he notes. At the age of 18, he was sterilized against his will, as were four of his siblings.

In 1996, Aslin requested his files (to which he was entitled under the Public Information Act) and learned for the first time how the authorities had justified the forced sterilizations. “They termed us feeble-minded idiots, and wrote that our children would be like us or even worse,” he declares. He was so infuriated at the insult that he filed suit against the state of Michigan, seeking compensation. His claim was turned down last March because the statute of limitations had expired. But Aslin intends to fight on. If a higher court accepts his appeal, the consequences could be far-reaching. For Fred Aslin and his siblings were not an isolated case.

From 1907 onward, at least 60,000 Americans were sterilized against their will. The legal basis for these forced sterilizations was provided by so-called eugenics laws. Most compulsory sterilizations occurred in the 1930s and ’40s, but some states, such as Virginia, continued the practice until the late 1970s. Most of the victims were poor and members of minorities, and none of them received compensation, according to Paul Lombardo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Virginia.

   The Decline of Intelligence in America: A Strategy for National Renewal is a book written by Eugenics supporter Seymour W. Itzkoff.  It talks about how the American society will decline because of the people with lower intelligence being allowed to reproduce:  Itzkoff analyses the problems and social pathologies of America and claims that they are related to the decline of general intelligence. His central idea is that new generations are coming from the lower end of the intellectual, and thus the social, scale. As a consequence, a population of permanently poor Third World Americans is emerging. In the second part of the book, he recommends policies intended to turn the trend. The solution proposed in this book is simple: the government should stimulate the finest to form families of the traditional sort in which children are conceived, born, raised, and educated to the highest levels for which they are capable, and the helpless should be encouraged and guided not to have children that they cannot rear and educate to functional cultural levels.

     It is crazy to think that people assume the solution to the problems in society is to eliminate a social class or genre of people in order to correct social injustices.  We do however practice eugenics in modern day society.  Cows and other farm animals who exhibit undersirable traits are sterilized so that they do not reproduce.  Is it ok for us to sterilize animals that exhibit undersiable traits?  Is it wrong for us to want plump and juicy beef cows and not ones that have a gene for them to be smaller than average?  I think that there is no place for eugenics in our society in any case and we must be wary, because just think.  There might be people out there that dont like you that think YOU should be sterilized and rendered unable to reproduce.
SOURCES:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/072100-106.htm

http://www.eugenics.net/

http://www.ncpa.org/pi/internat/pdinter/pdint178.html

This entry was posted on 27. January 2009 at 05:44 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.