Many people are shocked upon discovering that tens of thousands of innocent persons in the United States were involuntarily sterilized, forced into institutions, and otherwise maltreated within the ...course of the eugenic movement (1900–30). Such social control efforts are easier to understand when we consider the variety of dehumanizing and fear-inducing rhetoric propagandists invoke to frame their potential victims. This book details the major rhetorical themes employed within the context of eugenic propaganda, drawing largely on original sources of the period. Early in the twentieth century the term “moron” was developed to describe the primary targets of eugenic control. This book demonstrates how the image of moronity in the United States was shaped by eugenicists. This book will be of interest not only to disability and eugenic scholars and historians, but to anyone who wants to explore the means by which pejorative metaphors are used to support social control efforts against vulnerable community groups.
In August 2003, North Carolina became the first U.S. state to offer restitution to victims of state-ordered sterilizations carried out by its eugenics program between 1929 and 1975. The decision was ...prompted by newspaper stories based on the research of Johanna Schoen, who was granted unique access to summaries of 7,500 case histories and the papers of the North Carolina Eugenics Board.In this book, Schoen situates the state's reproductive politics in a national and global context. Widening her focus to include birth control, sterilization, and abortion policies across the nation, she demonstrates how each method for limiting unwanted pregnancies had the potential both to expand and to limit women's reproductive choices. Such programs overwhelmingly targeted poor and nonwhite populations, yet they also extended a measure of reproductive control to poor women that was previously out of reach.On an international level, the United States has influenced reproductive health policies by, for example, tying foreign aid to the recipients' compliance with U.S. notions about family planning. The availability of U.S.-funded family planning aid has proved to be a double-edged sword, offering unprecedented opportunities to poor women while subjecting foreign patients to medical experimentation that would be considered unacceptable at home.Drawing on the voices of health and science professionals, civic benefactors, and American women themselves, Schoen's study allows deeper understandings of the modern welfare state and the lives of women.
First edition, Winner of the Arthur J. Viseltear Prize, American Public Health Association With an emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation explores the long and unsettled history of eugenics in ...the United States. This expanded second edition includes shocking details demonstrating that eugenics continues to inform institutional and reproductive injustice. Alexandra Minna Stern draws on recently uncovered historical records to reveal patterns of racial bias in Californiaâs sterilization program and documents compelling individual experiences. With the addition of radically new and relevant research, this edition connects the eugenic past to the genomic present with attention to the ethical and social implications of emerging genetic technologies.
In 1907, Indiana passed the world's first involuntary sterilization law
based on the theory of eugenics. In time, more than 30 states and a dozen foreign
countries followed suit. Although the Indiana ...statute was later declared
unconstitutional, other laws restricting immigration and regulating marriage on
eugenic grounds were still in effect in the U.S. as late as the 1970s. A
Century of Eugenics in America assesses the history of eugenics in the United States
and its status in the age of the Human Genome Project. The essays explore the early
support of compulsory sterilization by doctors and legislators; the implementation
of eugenic schemes in Indiana, Georgia, California, Minnesota, North Carolina, and
Alabama; the legal and social challenges to sterilization; and the prospects for a
eugenics movement basing its claims on modern genetic science.
The Eugenic Fortress Georgescu, Tudor
2016, 20161015, 2016-10-10, Letnik:
VII
eBook
The ever growing library on the history of eugenics and fascism focuses largely on nation states, while this monograph asks why an ethnic minority, the Transylvanian Saxons, turned to eugenics as a ...means of self-empowerment in interwar Romania. The Eugenic Fortress investigates and unpacks the eugenic movement that emerged in the early twentieth century, and focuses on its conceptual and methodological evolution during the interwar period. Further on, the book analyzes the gradual process of politicisation and radicalisation at the hands of a second generation of Saxon eugenicists in conjunction with the rise of an equally indigenous fascist movement. The Saxon case study offers valuable insights into why an ethnic minority would seek to re-entrench itself behind the race-hygienic walls of a ‘eugenic fortress’, as well as the influence host and home nations had upon its design. Georgescu’s work is ground breaking in the sense that the history of this uprooted community is usually handled with sensitivity and serious (and critical) research into Transylvanian Saxon involvement with Nazism has been energetically resisted.
Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor , Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization ...programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system. Tracing Minnesota’s eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety of worldviews and political agendas than previously understood. She describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent children without helping the undeserving poor. She also sheds new light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In Ladd-Taylor’s provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender. Drawing on institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people who were labeled feebleminded and targeted for sterilization. She chronicles the routine operation of Minnesota’s three-step policy of eugenic commitment, institutionalization, and sterilization in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how surgery became the price of freedom from a state institution. Combining innovative political analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in Minnesota’s welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization.
To compare population-based sterilization rates between Latinas/os and non-Latinas/os sterilized under California's eugenics law.
We used data from 17 362 forms recommending institutionalized ...patients for sterilization between 1920 and 1945. We abstracted patient gender, age, and institution of residence into a data set. We extracted data on institution populations from US Census microdata from 1920, 1930, and 1940 and interpolated between census years. We used Spanish surnames to identify Latinas/os in the absence of data on race/ethnicity. We used Poisson regression with a random effect for each patient's institution of residence to estimate incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and compare sterilization rates between Latinas/os and non-Latinas/os, stratifying on gender and adjusting for differences in age and year of sterilization.
Latino men were more likely to be sterilized than were non-Latino men (IRR = 1.23; 95% confidence interval CI = 1.15, 1.31), and Latina women experienced an even more disproportionate risk of sterilization relative to non-Latinas (IRR = 1.59; 95% CI = 1.48, 1.70).
Eugenic sterilization laws were disproportionately applied to Latina/o patients, particularly Latina women and girls. Understanding historical injustices in public health can inform contemporary public health practice.
This monograph places the science and ideology of eugenics in early twentieth century Portugal in the context of manifestations in other countries in the same period. The author argues that three ...factors limited the impact of eugenics in Portugal: a low level of institutionalization, opposition from Catholics and the conservative nature of the Salazar regime. In Portugal the eugenic science and movement were confined to three expressions: individualized studies on mental health, often from a ‘biotypological’ perspective; a particular stance on racial miscegenation in the context of the substantial Portuguese colonial empire; and a diffuse model of social hygiene, maternity care and puericulture.
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