Eugenics Research Articles

Disability training for genetic counseling students: Theadvocates' perspective.

The genetics and disability communities have had a complicated relationship that is rooted in the history of the eugenics movement. Disability scholars claim that in order for healthcare professionals to provide optimal services to disabled patients, disability education must be implemented into healthcare training programs. No studies have explored the perspectives of disability advocates regarding the implementation and use of disability training in genetic counseling. This exploratory study recruited 13 advocates with lived experience of disability and genetic counseling exposure to participate in a semi-structured interview to share their recommendations for disability education opportunities in genetic counseling training programs and their perceived benefits of increased student exposure to disability. All advocates received genetic counseling themselves and four advocates reported working with genetic counselors in the advocacy setting. Advocates recounted their experiences working with genetic counselors, identifying qualities they deemed critical for effective counseling. All the advocates expressed interest in participating in experiential opportunities, with few concerns noted. The most frequently discussed recommendations for disability training included inviting advocates to speak in classrooms, and having students shadow disabled individuals. Advocates noted barriers to consider when implementing such educational opportunities, such as accessibility issues. Potential benefits of implementing disability education for students included providing students with a broader scope of knowledge and a deeper understanding of disability and resources available to the disability community. This novel study found that advocates are interested in participating in genetic counseling education, with recommendations on preferred experiential learning. By increasing a genetic counseling student's exposure to a disability, they may develop a comprehensive understanding of life with a disability, which may improve genetic counseling services to those with newly diagnosed disabilities.

Street-Arab Literature

In his paper, "Eugenics and Other Evils" (1922), G.K Chesterton condemns the eugenics movement and argues that eugenic laws were designed by the upper-classes to control and discipline the lower-classes. Building upon the existing scholarship on eugenics and class, I argue that ‘Street-Arab’ literature provides an additional source of information in understanding the socio-political climate that favored the eugenics movement in early twentieth century. I explore a range of fictional and non-fictional sources from the late nineteenth century to demonstrate that the poor were already treated as a separate race before the advent of the eugenics movement. The article establishes that the understanding of eugenics, one of the defining movements of the twentieth century which in part led to the great wars, can be furthered by the study of Street-Arab literature.

Teaching the Difficult Past of Statistics to Improve the Future

In recent years, the discipline of statistics has begun reckoning with its difficult history. Institutions are reconsidering names that have honored key historical figures in statistics who have deep ties to eugenics movements and racial and class prejudice. These names, however, continue to appear in our classrooms, where we teach the methods created by these individuals, raising the question of how instructors should address their legacies. Three examples of famous statisticians and their work—Francis Galton’s use of conditional probabilities to demonstrate “hereditary talent,” Karl Pearson’s attempt to quantify the intelligence of Jewish immigrant students, and Ronald A. Fisher’s creation of the analysis of variance to de-emphasize environment in human development—highlight the intimate ties between statistics and eugenics. These examples, along with a discussion of the context of these men, eugenics movements, and the statisticians and scientists who opposed their eugenic programs, can humanize the field for students, teach them about the challenges in accurate and unbiased data collection and analysis, and connect historical mistakes to contemporary ethical issues. Confronting this history in the classroom can both improve the teaching of the statistical methodologies themselves and begin a broader conversation about the role of statistics in the world. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Consciousness and enlightenment in the Boletim de Eugenia (1929-1933): Rethinking the concept of eugenic education in Brazil

This article analyzes the concept of eugenic education in the Boletim de Eugenia (1929-1933), the biggest specialized newspaper in the science of racial improvement and the main means of scientific racism's dissemination in Brazil. Edited in Rio de Janeiro by the doctor and pharmacist Renato Kehl between 1929 and 1931, its direction was assumed from 1932 by the professors of the Escola Superior de Agricultura “Luiz de Queiroz” (ESALQ) Octavio Domingues and Salvador de Toledo Piza Júnior. Besides changing the periodical's characteristics, losing the aspect of a propaganda newspaper, and assuming the format of a scientific journal, the two renowned geneticists from Piracicaba scientifically supported Kehl's Mendelian eugenics, ensuring the continuity and radicalization of his project. Taking as a theoretical-methodological framework documentary research in dialogue with Critical Theory, we investigate the mobilization and the interrelation between the concepts of consciousness and enlightenment in the articles published in the Boletim de Eugenia. We found that the concept of eugenic education was presented in an ambiguous and contradictory way in these texts, reflecting the broad sense in which the term was structured by Francis Galton, but also how the notions of enlightenment and eugenic consciousness were interpreted by the journal's directors. We conclude that the term eugenic education, used in a generalizing form in the historiography of eugenics, is insufficient for a critical understanding of the narrow and broad meanings of education developed from Galton to the most radical members of the Brazilian eugenic movement.

Rebuilding a Reproductive Future Informed by Disability and Reproductive Justice.

Rebuilding a Reproductive Future Informed by Disability and Reproductive Justice.

About Carrie Buck and the Eugenics Movement - #How Pseudoscience Dictates Reproductive Rights Policy in the United States of America (U.S.A) - #Michael Ayele (a.k.a) W

About Carrie Buck and the Eugenics Movement - #How Pseudoscience Dictates Reproductive Rights Policy in the United States of America (U.S.A) - #Michael Ayele (a.k.a) W

HF01-04 THE VIRGINIA STERILIZATION ACT: A CATALYST FOR AMERICAN EUGENICS

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 Apr 2023HF01-04 THE VIRGINIA STERILIZATION ACT: A CATALYST FOR AMERICAN EUGENICS Davis Moore, Theodore Cisu, and Adam Klausner Davis MooreDavis Moore More articles by this author , Theodore CisuTheodore Cisu More articles by this author , and Adam KlausnerAdam Klausner More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000003243.04AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: The origins of the American eugenics movement are rooted in the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924. This set a historic precedent that led to the Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell (1927), which legitimized sterilization to prevent the birth of more “defective” individuals. More than 3,000 men underwent forced sterilization via vasectomy in Virginia alone. METHODS: A review of historical and medical literature was undertaken, as well as analysis of academic texts on American sterilization and eugenics. RESULTS: In the early 20th century, an increasing number of physicians promoted forced sterilization of “feebleminded” men and women to prevent the propagation of undesirable character traits in American society. One notable early proponent of eugenics was Harvey E. Jordan, dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia and president of the American Genetic Association. The movement gained support from other prominent physicians including acclaimed urologist and birth control advocate William J. Robinson who wrote the early seminal books on contraception, including Eugenics, Marriage, and Birth Control in 1917. Although the first eugenic sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907, it was not until the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 that the practice of eugenic sterilization was codified as a legitimate medical practice. In its historic Buck v. Bell decision of 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization did not violate the 14th Amendment. The case centered around Carrie Buck in Charlottesville, VA who was deemed “defective” and “feebleminded” after being raped by the nephew of her foster parents. She was institutionalized after giving birth, and later sterilized in October 1927 as a result of the Supreme Court decision. Over the next four decades, the rate of eugenic sterilization soared nationwide. Estimates of the number of men and women undergoing forced vasectomies and salpingectomies in Virginia range from 7,300 to 8,300 between 1924 and 1979, with historical estimates of more than 60,000 sterilizations across the US. The American eugenics movement has been credited with lending inspiration to Adolf Hitler and the architects of the Holocaust. CONCLUSIONS: Virginia remained the last state to practice eugenic sterilization, repealing the statute in 1974. More than 3,000 forced vasectomies were performed in the state, and tens of thousands others across the country. The now infamous Buck v. Bell decision has yet to be overturned. Virginia Gov. Mark Warner issued a formal apology in 2002 for Virginia’s embrace of eugenics for more than five decades. Source of Funding: N/A © 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 209Issue Supplement 4April 2023Page: e257 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Davis Moore More articles by this author Theodore Cisu More articles by this author Adam Klausner More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Curiously Cured by Sterilization: Charles Carrington and the Sterilization of African American Men in Virginia, 1902–1910

This article examines the roles race, gender, and disability played in the medical sterilization of African American men in Virginia during the opening decade of the twentieth century. Using the experimental work of Dr. Charles Carrington as a window into the negative eugenics movement, it describes how state actors worked to create a barrier between Blackness and white society. Highlighting the cases of Hiram Steele, Frank Baylor and Richard Mills, this article looks closely at how African American men were characterized by medical professionals. Further, it analyzes medical professionals' strategic use of racialized and gendered stereotypes to legitimize their actions. Finally, it places African American men at the forefront of the state's first sterilization program.

The Kindness of Strangers: Eugenics and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire

This article argues that Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire offers a broad critique of eugenic ideology, epitomized in Williams’s choice to end the play with Blanche DuBois’s forced institutionalization. By comparing the published 1947 play with eight distinct draft Streetcar scenes archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I recover Williams’s dramatic critiques of the cruelty of twentieth-century American eugenic social policy. Over the course of Streetcar’s drafts, Williams accentuates Blanche’s increasing loss of reproductive and bodily control, emphasizes the stigmatization of her mental health, exposes pervasive eugenic assumptions articulated by Blanche herself, and explores the eugenic potential of a DuBois-Kowalski child born to either Blanche or her sister Stella. This article thus proposes a feminist, anti-eugenic reading of Streetcar attuned to the impact of the sexist, ableist, racist, and classist rhetoric of the American eugenics movement on the play and then-contemporary US social policy.

Featured Poet Kiki Petrosino: “The Red Earth of Terra”

Featured Poet Kiki Petrosino: “The Red Earth of Terra”

Revisiting psychiatric support for the National Socialist Agenda in Germany: Implications for medical and residency training

The transition of power from a failing Weimer Republic to the National Socialist (Nazi) government was characterized by many economic and politically-motivated changes. Economic crises and the overcrowding of psychiatric hospitals in Germany were the setting for these events. The eugenics movement, although not unique to Germany in the 1920s, would eventually culminate in the compulsory sterilization, euthanasia, and extermination in concentration camps. Historical accounts tend to focus on political and military leaders with the role of medical professionals often overlooked or forgotten. Additionally, there are connections between these programs and medical research. This article aims to elucidate the factors that influenced their role in this historical tragedy and their current implications on how physicians train, learn, and practice role of the medical professionals.

"A Vigorous Campaign against Abortion": Views of American Leaders of Eugenics v. Supreme Court Distortions.

The Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas's opinion in the case claimed there was a direct connection between the legalization of abortion, in the late 20th Century, and the beginnings of the birth control movement a full three quarters of a century earlier. "Many eugenicists," Thomas argued, "supported legalizing abortion."Justice Samuel Alito highlighted similar claims in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, citing a brief entitled "The Eugenic Era Lives on through the Abortion Movement." That brief was an echo of Justice Thomas' misguided attempt at history in the Box opinion. Similar claims reoccur in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk's opinion in the Texas mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.These false claims are the focus of this article. There is no evidence that early leaders of the eugenics movement supported abortion as part of the movement for birth control. It is accurate to describe those leaders as anti-abortion, and their followers as people who condemned abortion for moral, legal, and medical reasons.

Why reason-based abortion bans are not a remedy against eugenics: an empirical study.

In Box v Planned Parenthood, Justice Thomas wrote an impassioned concurrence describing abortions based on sex, disability or race as a form of 'modern-day eugenics'. He defended the challengedIndiana reason-based abortion (RBA) ban as a necessary antidote to these practices. Inspired by this concurrence, legislatures have increasingly enacted similar bills and statutes allegedly as a prophylactic to 'eugenics', its underlying discrimination, and the racial disparities eugenics caused. This article tests my hypothesis that this legislative focus on eugenics is largely performative, rather than evidence of true concern about the discrimination and disparities underlying eugenics. My research examined state laws in several areas that fall within narrow and broad understandings of eugenics to determine whether states with RBA bans have implemented policies to counteract eugenics more broadly. My analysis shows that they generally have not. Instead, the apparent motivation is to commandeer concerns about eugenics to restrict reproductive rights. This legislative mission is hypocritical, andit harms the very groups impacted by the eugenics movements-minorities, women, people with disabilities, the LGBTQ+ community, and immigrants. Ultimately, it has led us to Dobbs, which makes everyone vulnerable to the eugenics policies Thomas condemns by undercutting previous constitutional protections against eugenics.

Social Impact of the American Eugenics Movement

This paper explores the American eugenics movement and the manifestation of its ideas in society. Americaneugenics thought is mainly characterized by its strong focus on the elimination of socially undesirable individuals. The two main targets of American eugenics, the feebleminded and new immigrants, are discussed in this text, with the main focus legally implemented measures such as forced sterilization and restrictions on immigration, along with the legacy of these actions. This examination of American eugenics points out a clear continuity with Nazi ideology, an association which in the end also contributed to the fall of the official American eugenics movement. To explore the theoretical framework of the movement, works by Charles Davenport and Madison Grant are examined.

“From The Kallikaks to The Kallikaks: <i>Hillbilly Elegy</i> and the Legacy of Eugenics”

Ron Howard’s popular adaptation of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy treated the New York Times bestselling book as an answer to the politics of Appalachia, offering insight into understanding Trump’s popularity. Yet with Trump’s recent endorsement of Vance for a Senate run, this reading of Vance’s text requires an update. One that looks to the larger context of hillbilly-themed representations. American eugenics offers such a view. For over 100 years the American eugenics movement used the hillbilly stereotype to justify its surveillance, categorization, institutionalization, and sterilization of what they called “defectives” in promoting its image of “whiteness.” Popular media was an integral part of these efforts. The foundational narrative of the American eugenics movement, Goddard’s 1912 text The Kallikaks is also the name of a hillbilly-themed sitcom produced in 1977. Utilizing Lisa Cartwright’s Screening the Body, Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, this article argues that the narrative of the hillbilly stereotype in American eugenics has been an integral part of cinema and television history, extending back to the motion studies. A history that finds its extension in Howard’s adaptation of JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy.

A Blueprint for Genetic Determinism

A Blueprint for Genetic Determinism

The ruse of impurity: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and the politics of hybridity

ABSTRACT Placing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) within a larger historical and transnational context, this essay interrogates Gilroy’s uncritical deployment of mestizaje and hybridity to theorize Black subject formation and Black cultural productions. In doing so, it shows that the exclusion of Afro-Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean has crucial consequences for the work’s conceptualization of the Black Atlantic and its broader racial politics. While Gilroy seeks to repudiate what he calls ‘the dangerous obsessions with ‘racial’ purity which are circulating inside and outside black politics,’ I argue that the obsession with hybridity that animates Gilroy’s work is no less dangerous. Contrary to Gilroy’s assumption, ‘creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity’ do not ‘exceed racial discourse,’ but are rather embedded in the history and logics of the Latin American eugenics movement. As it fails to contend with the material histories of racial mixture as a white supremacist technology, The Black Atlantic echoes some of these eugenicist logics, colluding with the anti-Black agenda that it seeks to contest. In the process, the book prefigures the racial disavowal of Gilroy's later work and leaves us with inadequate tools for understanding the workings of racial power.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920

To sanitize is to eugenize: the "preventive" eugenics of Belisário Penna at the service of sanitation in Brazil, 1920-1930.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the eugenics model used by the medical-sanitarist Belisário Penna during the sanitation campaign in Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s. The article addresses two fundamental concepts for his thinking: "Brazilian race" and "preventive" eugenics. The way in which Penna saw the Brazilian racial issue was fundamental to adhere to the eugenic conception combined with social medicine and its project of "health awareness." The text offers a perspective of how Penna's eugenics was conceived and the dialogue established with the Brazilian eugenic movement, especially with the eugenicist Renato Kehl. Thus, the defense of an eugenics classified as "preventive" established a coherence for a social reform project through the sanitation defended by Penna.

The Return of Race Science and Why It Matters for Family Science.

Race science attributes differences in human populations to biology and genetics that reflect a hierarchy of human races with whiteness at its pinnacle. This article examining the history of race science and current family scholarship and practice contends that race science matters for family science. We discuss 1) white supremacy, the development of race science, and the eugenics movement in the U.S.; 2) racism, racialized experiences, and oppression of Black families in the U.S.; 3) the construction of whiteness in family science and re-envisioning theories to make racism's impact visible; 4) racial reckonings for professional organizations; and 5) why race science matters for family science and a call to action. Clarity about the meaning of race can ensure that family science addresses white supremacy and racism embedded in scholarship, training, and practice, and promotes work that supports the well-being of families that are most vulnerable and marginalized.