If there is one thing that casts a pall over the rise of genomic technology and its applications, it is the eugenics movement. This article highlights a new exhibit which surveys the historical development of this movement. Of course we all know about the abominations of the Nazi regime, but eugenics was a mainstream movement at one point. Consider:
For over 40 years, young socially marginalised working class women in Sweden faced the danger of forced sterilisation. This was carried out under laws intended to purify the Swedish race, prevent the mentally ill from reproducing and stamp out social activities classed as deviant. The last sterilisation took place in 1975.
Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for "crimes" such as going to dance halls.
The founder of Planned Parenthood was, famously, but not exceptionally, a eugenicist. Though the racial aspects of eugenics have been widely emphasized, it is important to remember that in many ways it was also a class issue. In Better for All the World, a history of American eugenics, it is pretty clear that in some parts of the American South the movement and legal process was spearheaded by the local gentry who were intent on marginalizing and exterminating the local "white trash" population, whose evangelical religion militated against evolutionary theory and its applied sciences on principle.
I believe that the lessons of the eugenics movement have to be revisited, because genomic technology means that we will all be making choices about the nature of the next generation to come in a less spontaneous and more "scientific" manner than over the past few generations. You know what they say about learning from history....
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Eugenics was once popular all over the political landscape.
Leon Trotsky, 'If America Should Go Communist'
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1935/1935-ame.htm
"(Y)ou Americans, after taking a firm grip on your economic machinery and your culture, will apply genuine scientific methods to the problem of eugenics. Within a century, out of your melting pot of races there will come a new breed of men -- the first worthy of the name of Man."
Leon Trotsky, 'Literature and Revolution,' 1924
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch08.htm
"The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! ...
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness ... to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. ...
The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise."
haldane & fisher were both eugenicists. atheist communist & anglican tory.
An interesting Kropotkin quote:
http://bad.eserver.org/reviews/2001/2001-6-21-2.17PM.html
"Peter Kropotkin's lecture to the Eugenics Congress in London in August of 1912 critiques scientists advocating sterilization concluding, "and then, once these questions have been raised, don't you think that the question as to who are the unfit must necessarily come to the front? Who, indeed? The workers or the idlers? The women of the people, who suckle their children themselves, or the ladies who are unfit for maternity because they cannot perform all the duties of a mother...Those who produce degenerates in the slums, or those who produce degenerates in palaces?""
...prevent "the" mentally ill from reproducing
Curious metaphor, that. Who are "the" mentally ill?
CBC's "Greatest Canadian" and first leader of the democratic socialist NDP Tommy Douglas wrote his master's thesis on the benefits of negative eugenics.
Don't forget that the history of eugenics in the last 50 years or so has been written mainly by Marxists or crypto-Marxists, and therefore may not be 100% balanced and reliable!
Take for example the sterilization of the 'feeble-minded'. This was in an era when effective female contraception did not exist, and sterilization for non-eugenic reasons was often prohibited. Sterilization for allegedly 'eugenic' reasons was therefore often the only way of ensuring that mentally defective girls did not get pregnant, other than locking them up without male visitors or staff, so it was generally welcomed by their parents and society at large as a more humane alternative. The introduction of reliable contraceptives (the pill, IUDs, etc) has made sterilization unnecessary, but it is still often practiced (with the consent of parents or guardians) as a cheap and permanent form of contraception - it just isn't given a eugenic justification any more.