eugenic sterilization

1997. The international medicolegal status of sterilization for mentally handicapped people. I have learned about a handful of patients who were sterilized in state institutions through relatives who tracked me down upon learning about my research. The stakes were high as parents sought to make an impossible choice between familial separation through long-term institutionalization or the prospect of reproductive surgery foreclosing the possibility of future generations. To clothe legislative agencies with this plenary power, withholding as it does any opportunity for a hearing or any opportunity for recourse to the courts, to my mind partakes of the essence of slavery and outrages constitutional guaranties (Garcia, 1939). Mexican-origin parents were not the only ones who fought sterilization. 1987 Jun;62(2):153-70. doi: 10.1086/415404. White, who was sympathetic to Marcus’s argument, excoriated the existing law in a terse dissent. Get the latest public health information from CDC: https://www.coronavirus.gov. [ Links ], MENNEL, Eric. According to the health officer, Mr. Romero was “violently opposed” to sterilization and rebuffed the classification of his son as feebleminded. Clipboard, Search History, and several other advanced features are temporarily unavailable. The hour of eugenics: race, gender, and nation in Latin America. PLoS One. Find NCBI SARS-CoV-2 literature, sequence, and clinical content: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sars-cov-2/. [ Links ], FUTURE… Future past: disability, eugenics, and brave new worlds. Please enable it to take advantage of the complete set of features! For example, in February 2015 Virginia became the second state to establish a compensation plan for living victims of a forced sterilization program (Robertson, 26 Feb. 2015). The profound implications of sterilization as an act of bodily desecration that infringed on legal rights, familial integrity, and religious beliefs was not lost on Mexican-origin patients and their parents, who waged the most vocal resistance to California’s sterilization regime. [ Links ], HANSEN, Randall; KING, Desmond. I suggest that some of the conditions that facilitated forced sterilization still exist in our contemporary era; in addition, that we can trace continuities from the eugenic past to the genomic present in terms of the assumptions about normality and disability that can undergird prenatal genetic testing. [ Links ], EDGERTON, Robert B. [ Links ], EVANS, Meghann. Am J Dis Child. Over the past decade, there has been periodic and sometimes intense reflection among scholars and advocates and in the media on California’s eugenic past. Facing eugenics: reproduction, sterilization, and the politics of choice. See Future… (2013). -, Md State Med J. Reframing rights: bioconstitutionalism in the genetic age. 1 On Georgia’s law, see Lombardo (2011, p.45-67). However they also lobbied officials who had been involved in their children’s committal. [ Links ], PAUL, Diane B. 16 Mar. Third, preliminary statistical analysis reveals elevated rates of sterilization of Spanish-surnamed patients, most of Mexican origin. Although such programs have been made illegal in most countries of the world, instances of forced or coerced sterilizations persist. 1991. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. The 1917 amendment, for example, reworded the description of a diagnosis warranting surgery from “hereditary insanity or incurable chronic mania or dementia” to a “mental disease which may have been inherited and is likely to be transmitted to descendants” (quoted in Braslow, 1997). 29 Nov. 1930. This article presents several of our important initial findings related to ethnic and gender bias in sterilization policies, and reflects on the relevance of the history for contemporary issues in genomics and social justice. 2015. p.45-67. JAMA. As the lead justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., famously opined in this case, “three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Lombardo, 2008). Indiana History Magazine, v.103, n.1, p.3-38. Statutes of California 1985-1986 regular session. COVID-19 is an emerging, rapidly evolving situation. 2007. For example, the mean age of non-Spanish-surnamed patients in all the institutions from 1935 to 1944 was 26 (the median was 25), whereas the mean of Spanish-surnamed patients was 23 (the median was 19). 14 Also, Robert B. Edgerton email correspondence with the author, 27 Jan. 2004. [ Links ], STERN, Alexandra Minna. Virginia lawmakers OK payout to forced sterilization survivors. Sacramento, CA. All too often, eugenic or forced sterilization are remembered with excessive hubris and proclamations that today, in the twenty-first century, we are immune to such misguided uses of science. Mexican-origin parents were struggling against an inimical system that sought to disarticulate families, many of which coped with the strain of seasonal migration and poverty. 1919-1953. [ Links ], NO MONEY… No money to bury man sterilized by force. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. First and foremost, we can reconstruct in broad strokes and elucidate in detail stories and patterns of sterilization in state institutions. In its “positive” or gentler form, eugenics manifested in activities such as better babies contests, infant welfare programs, or pronatalist programs directed at groups deemed superior (Kline, 2001; Stepan, 1991). Despite these noble intentions, the sterilization of vulnerable populations in state institutions did not end in California with the erosion of the eugenics era. Unlike in Virginia, Oregon, and North Carolina, where sterilization victims have unveiled plaques, recounted their experiences to reporters, or participated in the establishment of agencies such as North Carolina’s Office of Justice for Sterilization Victims, in California there has been a void (Zitner, 16 Mar. In 1942, the father of Ignacio Dominguez, a 15-year-old boy diagnosed with a borderline IQ of 75, responded negatively to Butler’s request for sterilization through the intermediation of his priest. Legal implications of sterilization of the mentally retarded. Sterilized in the name of public health: race, immigration, and reproductive control in modern California. 2003. [ Links ] EVANS, Meghann. Eugenics, sterilization, and historical memory in the United States, Eugenia, esterilização e memória histórica nos EUA, 1Professor, Department of American Culture/University of Michigan. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. p.29-58. She had been classed as a high moron with an IQ of 68 and had a long case history that involved repeated running away and institutional escapes. 3700 Haven Hall 48103 – Ann Arbor – MI – USA. Access on: 10 June 2015. Although all patients were labeled as mentally deficient or insane, only Mexican-origin parents were so consistently derided as “low-grade,” or “inferior stock” in formulations that condemned both their biological and social capacity to parent. Parental resistance to sterilization was a persistent feature of California’s sterilization regime. 16 July 2003. In England during the late nineteenth century, intellectuals, especially Francis Galton, called for a variety of eugenic policies aimed at ensuring the health of the human species. State programs targeted institutionalized, mentally disabled women. No.12027, Court of Appeal of California, Third Appellate District, 274 Cal. Trabalhando com uma fonte singular – um conjunto de dados contendo 19 mil recomendações para esterilização –, minha equipe e eu reconstruímos padrões e experiências que concorreram para a institucionalização das esterilizações. In 1931, Sonoma’s superintendent, Fred O. Butler, recommended the vasectomy of Juan Romero, who had been transferred from the Preston School of Industry, so that he would never “reproduce his kind, for we know from experience that individuals of his mentality should never bear off-spring, as they are usually defective in some manner” (Butler, 21 Nov. 1931). 16 July 2003. Dyck (2013) offers compelling illustrative profiles of sterilizations in Alberta that followed similar patterns. [Pseudonyms used per CSA confidentiality agreement.] 1977 Sep;82(2):117-29 Butler’s petition was granted and the salpingectomy was performed in 1938 (Eugenic Sterilization Data Set, 1919-1953, Sterilization index card 361-4551). Since that flurry of political activity, advocates and academicians have organized virtual and in-person meetings to discuss the relevance and importance of remembering California’s eugenic past and evaluating its implications and echoes today.13 While gratified by gubernatorial and legislative statements that acknowledge how eugenic sterilization trampled on human rights and reproductive autonomy, some of us involved in these events took pause. Access on: 30 Apr. 1979 Jul;133(7):697-9. doi: 10.1001/archpedi.1979.02130070033006. [ Links ], BUTLER, Fred O. Moreover, as a growing body of scholarship suggests, eugenics encompassed more than strict hereditary control, extending into strategies of reproductive regulation such as institutional segregation (as in Illinois or New York, which had no sterilization statutes), patriarchal containment of women who transgressed gender and sexual norms, or remedial vasectomies on men classed as homosexual who posed little threat of unrestrained procreation.2 Patients and families that accepted sterilization as a therapeutic procedure or as a condition for release did so under the parameters of eugenic policies. Published by University of California Press. In 1909, two years after Indiana and a few weeks after the state of Washington, California passed the third sterilization bill in the nation (Stern, 2005b; Wellerstein, 2011). June 2016. Her attorneys argued that Ruiz’s 14th Amendment rights to due process had been violated (Girl..., 29 Nov. 1930; Arguments…, 5 Jan. 1931). 2003). 1919-1953. [ Links ], NOVAK, Nicole et al. From the 1920s to the 1950s, with increasing intensity starting in the mid-1930s in institutions for the “feebleminded” (Pacific Colony and Sonoma), Spanish-surnamed individuals were sterilized at elevated rates. National Center for Biotechnology Information, Unable to load your collection due to an error, Unable to load your delegates due to an error. June 2014. American eugenics refers inter alia to compulsory sterilization laws adopted by over 30 states that led to more than 60,000 sterilizations of disabled individuals. Berkeley: University of California Press. Access on: 30 Apr. Some superintendents believed that the principal motivation of sterilization was to improve a patient’s psychiatric delusions; others recommended reproductive surgery because of a concern about the financial burden of any future children of patients deemed feebleminded; and others unreservedly advocated the operation as a preventive measure that would ensure the “unfit” would not beget more of their kind. Beginning in the late 1930s, proponents rationalized involuntary sterilization as protecting vulnerable women from unwanted pregnancy. Ramirez’s records suggest that she was gang-raped at age 9 by five men, including her uncle. While eugenic principles have been practiced as early as ancient Greece, ... Adolf Hitler had praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf in 1925 and emulated eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States once he took power. 1991. Apalachicola, FL: Gray Oak Books. My team of researchers is prototyping a digital archive that links story telling to data visualization, with the objective of producing of an interactive online resource that will be of value to students and other researchers, and that can restore historical knowledge to the communities most harmed by eugenic sterilization.

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