Even vegetables didn't follow Galton's simplistic model.
But Mendel's ability to measure patterns of inheritance spurred on Galton's disciples, and eugenics took hold of the academic mainstream, so that by the twenties and thirties nearly all geneticists assumed mentally retarded people and other “degenerates” should be actively prevented from breeding.
These views made their way into public policy on both sides of the Atlantic, and by 1917, a Harvard geneticist named East was actively promoting the reduction of “defective germ plasm” through segregation and sterilization.
One of East's main influences was someone I'd considered a sage of my chosen field.
I'd been taught that Henry H. Goddard, of the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, had been a pioneer of psychological testing. What I hadn't known was that Goddard claimed “feeblemindedness” was due to a single defective gene and enthusiastically volunteered to administer IQ tests to thousands of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in order to weed out undesirables.
Goddard's bizarre finding- that over 80 percent of Italians, Hungarians, Russians, and Jews were mentally retarded- was accepted without question by a wide range of intellectuals and legislators, and in 1924 the U.S. Congress approved an immigration act curtailing the entry of Southern and Eastern Europeans. The bill was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, who declared, “America must be kept American. Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”
And Goddard wasn't alone. Chasing down footnotes and citations, I came across the writings of another giant of psychology: Lewis Terman of Stanford, developer of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Though the French Binet test had been developed to help identify children with learning problems so they could be tutored, its American modifier declared his major goal to be “curtailing the reproduction of feeblemindedness” with a subsequent reduction in “industrial inefficiency.”
According to Terman, intellectual weakness was “very, very common among Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among Negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial… children of this group should be segregated in special classes… They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers… from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.”
But the prime mover of the U.S. eugenics movement was University of Chicago professor Charles Davenport, who believed that prostitutes chose their profession because of a dominant gene for “innate eroticism.”
Davenport's method of preserving the future of white America was castration of males of inferior ethnic groups.
Castration,
Davenport's views influenced the law well beyond immigration statutes, embraced as they were by many social-welfare groups, including some pioneers of the family-planning movement. The term
Most enthusiastic among the self-appointed genetic janitors was the State of California, where in 1909, an order to compulsorily sterilize all inmates of state hospitals judged “sexually or morally perverted, mentally ill or feebleminded” got scalpels clicking. Four years later, the law was broadened to include noninstitutionalized people suffering from “marked departure from normal mentality.”
In 1927, forced sterilization reached its highest sanction when a young unwed mother named Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will in Virginia, by virtue of a U.S. Supreme Court decision, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes's decision not only allowed the procedure to be carried out, but also praised it “in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence… the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Carrie Buck's baby- the “third generation of imbeciles” in question- grew up to be an honor student. Carrie Buck, herself, was eventually paroled from the Virginia Colony for Feebleminded and Epileptics, and lived out her life quietly as the wife of a small-town sheriff. She was later found out not to be retarded.
The Buck decision sped up the pace of forced sterilization and more than sixty thousand people, mostly residents of state hospitals, were operated on all across the U.S., as late as the 1970s.
In 1933, the Carrie Buck opinion was adopted as law in Germany and within one year, fifty-six thousand German “patients” had been sterilized. By 1945, under the aegis of the Nazis, the number had climbed to two million. For as Hitler wrote in
After World War II, the tide began turning. Revulsion at the Nazi atrocities- but more important, the demands of wartime service upon surgeons- slowed down the rate of eugenic sterilization, and though the practice continued for decades, most eugenics laws were eventually reversed in the face of scientific debunking.
But the cause hadn't been abandoned.
Far from it.
And sterilization seemed tame compared to some of the ideas being tossed about now. I found myself swimming in an ethical cesspool.
Calls for assisted suicide sliding quickly into recommendations that those with nothing to live for be put out of their misery.
A report from Holland, where physician-assisted suicide had been liberalized, that as many as one-third of euthanasias-“mercy killings”- had been carried out without patients' consent.
An Australian “bioethicist” proclaiming religion no longer the basis for making moral judgments and the sanctity of human life no longer a valid concept. His alternative: Fellow ethicists should assign numerical “quality of life” measurements to people and parcel out health care based upon scores.
The retarded, the handicapped, the elderly, the infirm, would find themselves low on the list and be treated accordingly. In the case of deformed and retarded babies, a twenty-eight-day waiting period would be offered so parents could choose infanticide for “a life that has begun very badly.”
Anyone who fell short on objective criteria of “personhood: rational thought and self-consciousness,” could be killed without fear of penalty. Humanely.
Gentle strangulation, indeed.
Britain's National Health Insurance had recently put forth a policy offering free abortions to mothers of genetically defective babies- rescinding the usual twenty-four-week limit and allowing termination til shortly before birth.
Also in England, the Green party's annual conference proposed a very deliberate 25 percent reduction in the U.K.'s population in the name of saving the planet, leading critics to evoke memories of the Nazi party's infatuation with ecology, natural purity, and antiurbanism.
The government of China was ahead of all this, having long enforced population control through coerced abortion, sterilization, and starving orphans to death in state-run facilities.
In the U.S., calls for prioritizing health-care services in the age of tight dollars and managed care had led many to question whether the seriously ill and the genetically disadvantaged should be allowed to “dominate” health-care expenditure.
I found a
It reminded me of a case I'd seen years ago, while working with child cancer patients at Western Pediatrics Hospital. A fourteen-year-old boy diagnosed with acute leukemia, by then a treatable disease with an excellent prognosis for remission. But this leukemia patient was retarded and several interns and residents began grumbling about wasting their precious time.
I lectured to them, with meager results- because I wasn't an M.D., wouldn't be administering chemotherapy
