From Sir Francis Galton to Margaret Sanger, the erroneous theory of "selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits", popularised in the early 20th century
Mondadori Portfolio
Sir Francis Galton was a British scholar and founder of the science of eugenics. He is believed to have coined the word eugenics in his 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. However, before him was the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote about developing a greater society by marrying high-class individuals and forbidding marriages between lower-class people.
Galton on the one hand was the first to hold stoutly to the view that genetics and race determined health and sickness, as well as social and intellectual traits. His egregious belief that humans could be made perfect through genetics, heredity and elimination of the supposed "social ills", was the argument behind his push for involuntary sterilisation and segregation, a method he believed would establish the "perfect race". His was the seed that set the stage for the most heinous crime of the 20th century.
The term eugenics come from the Greek word eugenes which means "well-born, of good stock, or of noble race":
From eu- "good" + genos "birth"
The founder of eugenics defined it as:
the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.
Galton may have been credited for inventing the term eugenics, the scientific sinking sand on which this ideology was theorised came from Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity in 1865. This is the very basis for the creation of the American Breeder’s Association in 1903.
Mendel, through his many years of research uncovered the rules of inheritance while working on pea plants. He determined that genes - also known as alleles and come in different versions - are inherited in pairs and as unique units, one from each parent. Mendel studied the segregation of parental genes and how they manifested in offspring as dominant or recessive characteristics. He concluded that, a dominant allele hides a recessive allele and determines the organism's appearance.
As early as the 1920s, Galton's theories surrounding eugenics and its possible implementation stated to garner support all around the world; both from the elite and the government. Adolf Hitler's Germany became the first country to actually put into practice the morally flawed ideology theorised years earlier.
History points a touch on the years preceding World War II and the Holocaust, how Nazi Germany used eugenics in one of the world's most notorious genocides. In his 1934 book Mein Kampf, Hitler made non-ambiguous reference to American eugenics.
First, through dehumanising propaganda, Hitler classified the human race into superior and inferior, between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi German racial state employed its resources to "cleanse" Germany of individuals they believed to be "unworthy of life", "impure" or "non-Aryan".
Before this morally crippled ideology was implemented in Hitler's Germany, it was first popularised in America. Beginning with Connecticut marriage laws in 1896, also know as eugenics legislation, it became unlawful for anyone who suffered from epilepsy or considered "feeble-minded", to be married. In California's State mental hospitals, between 1909 and 1979, almost 20,000 sterilisations were performed under the pretence of safeguarding society from the progeny of mentally ill persons. Although this practice ended in 1979 for state hospitals; it continued in prisons until eugenics was ruled unlawful in 2010.
To further the research and implementation of eugenics, in 1910 The Eugenics Record Office, dedicated to gathering and analysing American family genetic and trait history information, was opened in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. It gathered data such as inborn physical, mental, and behavioural characteristics.
Margaret Sanger was a well-known proponent of eugenics. She believed that America was lacking intellectually as a result of uncontrolled reproduction, particularly the unstable majority of "feeble-minded" people living in city slums plagued by sickness, poverty, and other difficulties. She concluded that it was crucial to preserve and protect the intelligence of Americans by putting into practice methods of controlled reproduction. In a 1921 article, Sanger wrote:
the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.
Sanger was born in 1879 into an Irish catholic family in Corning, New York. She was one of eleven children. Sanger's mother died of tuberculosis after 11 births and 6 miscarriages. In 1920, she challenged the Comstock Act of 1873 which made it illegal to use the United States Postal Service to deliver materials such as obscenity, contraception, abortifacients; by publishing articles in her magazine Women Rebel about birth control. She founded the American birth
control league in 1921, of which she was president until 1928.
Harriet Washington outlined medical apartheid in her book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, in it she explains how Sanger backed the field of eugenics and saw birth control as an innovative means to medically reduce/or limit the abilities of certain populations to reproduce, hence the Negro Project. Merging her American Birth Control League and the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA), in 1939, the Negro Project was created with the goal of opening family planning centres in regions densely populated by black Americans, to conduct birth control experiments and medically limit reproduction.
Concerned her actions would be rightly interpreted for what they truly were, Sanger sought the help of religious leaders in the black community like, W.E.B. DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, to deter the public from questioning the true motives behind her clinics. She also haired black doctors, nurses and social workers to join her team. In The Pivot of Civilisation she writes:
The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal … we do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members
History often remembers Margaret Sanger as the nurse who opened the first ambiguously named clinic: birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which became Planned Parenthood. She was also one of the first feminists in the suffragette movement. What shouldn't be left out of her credentials is her participation in and support of eugenics, which she detailed in her magazine Women Rebel. Sanger, for her convictions, openly supported the 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling, which gave States the power to forcefully sterilise those regarded "unfit" without their permission and occasionally without their knowledge.
Has eugenics morphed into "Reproductive Technology"?
It isn't farfetched to see the underlying similarities between eugenics and modern-day technologies such as Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) which permit people to pass on or avoid passing on particular genes to their off springs, including those for chronic disease and, perhaps, height and eye colour in the near future. Prospective parents can now pick the gender of their future child as well as whether or not they want to have twins.
CRISPR, a new gene-editing tool, enables for much more direct modification of embryonic genes. This fast-evolving technology continues to grow in a remarkable manner with little to no regulations, especially in the United States. There is also a significant commercial sector for buying and selling human eggs.
Now, what?
When did man get to decide who is deserving of life and who isn't? Shouldn't we be analysing the issues with reproductive technology from an ethical, social, and policy perspective?
Comments