Lecture 18 - Eugenics

Question 1

Eugenics means

Answer 1

well-born (coined 1883)

Question 2

Goal of Eugenics:

Answer 2

to improve the biological quality of the human race.

Question 3

Methods of Eugenics:

Answer 3

involved controlling reproduction of

• Negative eugenics: unfit
• Positive eugenics: fit

Question 4

Eugenics was popular in

Answer 4

1900-1945 and organized in 30+ countries

Question 5

Key components of Eugenics

Answer 5

• scientific knowledge claims
• beliefs about human difference
• social and medical practices aiming to eliminate “social problem groups”

Question 6

typical attitudes of disability

Answer 6

Something that needs to be “fixed”; inferior

Question 7

the field of disability studies:

Answer 7

promotes a new framework for understanding what disability is and the lives of people with disabilities.

Question 8

disability is defined as

Answer 8

restricted participation caused by social barriers.

• people with impairments are disabled by society.
• oppressed by architectural barriers, policies, stereotypes (weak, burden, dangerous…), attitudes of pity and fear.

Question 9

Eugenicists put forward a

Answer 9

wide variety of proposals for “race betterment” in the name of “the public good.,

Question 10

Core components of Eugenics that perpetuated negative views of disability:

Answer 10

1) biological (genetic) cause of social problems
2) some people are a burden (dependent) on society/state

• Resulted in: ideas and practices that labeled many kinds of people unfit for citizenship (and unfit to be born).

Question 11

“Public good” of Eugenics

Answer 11

• Relieve: the economic burden of disability
• Charles Davenport, founder of Eugenics Record Office, 1910: “It is a reproach to our intelligence that we as a people should have to support about half a million insane, feebleminded, epileptic, blind and deaf; 80,000 prisoners and 100,000 paupers at a cost of over 100 million dollars per year”

Question 12

Eugenics target

Answer 12

• People with: disabilities

- Ex: Pedigree of “feebleminded” family

Question 13

“Feeblemindedness”

Answer 13

Believed to be the cause of: other “social ills”: crime, poverty, prostitution…

Question 14

History of state institutions for disabled people

Answer 14

• 19th century goal: of treating “lunatics” and training “idiots” gave way
• By 1900: to long-term confinement in state institutions. Ex: School for Idiotic Children: “brutes in the human shape, but without the light of human reason”
• 1886 Washington School for Defective Youth
• 1906 State School for the Deaf and Blind
• 1906 State Institution for Feebleminded (1933 Custodial School)

Question 15

Social construction of disability: Who was “feebleminded”?

Answer 15

• 1905: IQ Test invented
• 1910s: US psychologists say that intelligence is hereditary and unchangeable.
• “Menace” to society
• By 1900: in the US, there were 328 institutions housing 200,000 people labeled mentally ill or mentally deficient.

Question 16

Social construction of disability: Intelligence testing 1918

Answer 16

• Example from: the IQ tests in US Army
• For recruits: who were non-English speaking or illiterate
• “ Complete the picture”
• 40% found to be feebleminded
• Test questions, Army Alpha: People hear with their Eyes/ears/nose/mouth

Question 17

Defining disability in terms of:

Answer 17

race and ethnicity

Question 18

1924 Immigration Restriction Act:

Answer 18

• mental testing and “expert” testimony to Congress legitimized the law.
• set quotas for Eastern and Southern European immigrants allowed into the US.

Question 19

Model law for compulsory sterilization, 1922

Answer 19

• An act to prevent: the procreation of persons socially inadequate from defective inheritance.
• Persons Subject: All persons in the State who, because of degenerate or defective hereditary qualities are potential parents of socially inadequate offspring.
• Socially inadequate people: “Feebleminded, insane, criminalistics, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed, orphans, ne’er do-wells, homeless, tramps, and paupers”

Question 20

Negative eugenics

Answer 20

• By 1930s, 30 states had: compulsory sterilization laws

Question 21

Social construction of disability: Supreme Court upholds forced sterilization

Answer 21

• For: social control and “public health”
• 1927 Buck vs Bell
• – “three generations of imbeciles are enough”
• – “for the protection and health of the state,” like compulsory vaccination.
• • Story: Carrie Buck was a poor, white teen who was raped, had a child out of wedlock, was labeled feebleminded.

Question 22

“Deaf eugenics”: Alexander Graham Bell

Answer 22

1883 paper to National Academy of Science was: a focal point in the early history of the eugenics movement:

• “On the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.”
• List of “socially unfit”: people with deafness as well as “undesirable ethnic elements”
• Investigated: the heritability of deafness (looked at surnames and deaf relatives in institutional records) .
• “Deaf-mutes marry deaf-mutes” because: they are segregated by using ASL.
• “Great calamity”: of the births of deaf children.
• Educating deaf children: costs the public $1 million per year.
• Policy proposal: prevent inter-marriage of Deaf people.

Question 23

Bell’s defense of oralism

Answer 23

• Comparison with assimilating immigrants
• “english alone should be used as as the means of communication and instruction, at least in public schools”
• – Use of ASL: “is contrary to the spirit and practice of American Institutions (as foreign immigrants have found out).”
• Bell’s goal: halt the growth of Deaf culture, in order to “assimilate” Deaf people into the mainstream.
• Preferred that Deaf people should choose oralism as best way to prevent deaf marriages and offspring.
• Because: more human that forced sterilization as for disabled people.

Question 24

Deaf middle-class men’s resistance to compulsory eugenics

Answer 24

1) scientific evidence:
- most Deaf children are born to non-deaf parents and 90% of Deaf-Deaf marriages do not produce Deaf children.

2) individual rights:
- society’s interest in avoiding defective births should not outweigh the right of citizens to make private reproductive choices.

3) “normal” domestic lives:
- Deaf people are no different in their desire for love, marriage, and children.

Question 25

Deaf support for “voluntary eugenics”

Answer 25

An American Deaf leader:

• it is “self-evident” that births of Deaf children “should be avoided”
• preferably, Deaf people should voluntarily practice personal eugenics in selecting marriage partners.

Murray’s conclusion:
- “With their rights potentially at stake, Deaf leaders sought a middle ground, refusing to cede individual rights (to marry), yet rejecting any attempt to publicly defend the right to have Deaf children”

Question 26

Most extreme: eugenics in Nazi Germany

Answer 26

1993: forced sterilization law
- applied to 400,000 “hereditary defectives”
- 1939: T4 killing programs (so-called “euthanasia” or “mercy death”)
- more than 200,000 institutionalized adults and children with disabilities.
- economic logic: “lives not worth living” and “useless eaters”

1941: Final Solution
- Gas chambers from Action T4 were moved to concentration camps to murder 6 million Jewish people and other groups.

Question 27

“Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring”

Answer 27

• Date: July 14, 1993
• Doctors required to: to register all “defective” births in Germany
• Forced sterilization for: hereditary feebleminded, mentally ill, epileptic, alcoholic, blind, deaf, etc.
• • Deaf people were 4% of sterilizations = 16,000
• • In 1932, there were a total of 40,000 Deaf people in Germany
• • Commonly, deafness was associated with “idiocy”

Question 28

Deaf community responses to Nazi policies

Answer 28

Some superintendents of German deaf schools: collaborated with Nazis to implement sterilization law.

• Informed Genetic Health Court about: individual deaf students
• Gathered: family histories of deafness
• Encouraged: parents to consent to children’s surgeries.

Some Deaf school leaders: resisted the Nazis
- Refused to: to turn in deaf and/or Jewish students

To avoid persecution: some schools and deaf clubs publicized themselves as “ideal Germans” (i.e. not Jewish, not physically or mentally unfit)

Question 29

Murder of Deaf people in Nazi Germany

Answer 29

• July 26, 1941 letter to sister of deaf teenager: Had already been sterilized and Was taken from deaf school to the killing center
• First letter: “By order of the Reich Defense Commissioner [she] was transferred to another institution whose name and address are not known to me. The receiving institution will send you a letter. I would ask you to abstain from further inquiries until this notice is received”
• 5 weeks later: “We inform you with regret that your sister unexpectedly died as a consequence of pulmonary tuberculosis… [local police] ordered the immediate cremation of the remains and the disinfection of belongings”

Question 30

Conclusions: where were “disability” and “Deaf” in the history of eugenics?

Answer 30

Some shared experiences:

• marriage restriction
• institutionalization
• sterilization

Deaf eugenics:

• persecution: oralism, violate reproductive rights, murder.
• negotiated strategies of resistance within discriminatory societies.

Constructions of the category “disability”:
- intersections with class, race, gender categories. “Disability” was deployed based on ideology.