From: Anna M* 
Subject: IUFO: 'Defective' People
Date: 26 Mar 2001 18:05:26 -0500
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Blaming the 'Defective' People
by Kristen Philipkoski

2:00 a.m. Mar. 26, 2001 PST



Many things concern us during an economic downturn: stock prices, savings
and job security, to name a few. Some historians say we can add one more to
the list: eugenics.
Believing the human species could be improved through the control of
hereditary factors in mating, eugenicists during the Great Depression blamed
immigrants, the mentally disabled and incarcerated people for society's
woes -- and advocated the sterilization of people they considered defective.
Now that economic times are turning bad again, some wonder whether the
eugenics movement, in one form or another, may return.

   Many things concern us during an economic downturn: stock prices, savings
and job security, to name a few. Some historians say we can add one more to
the list: eugenics.
Believing the human species could be improved through the control of
hereditary factors in mating, eugenicists during the Great Depression blamed
immigrants, the mentally disabled and incarcerated people for society's
woes -- and advocated the sterilization of people they considered defective.
Now that economic times are turning bad again, some wonder whether the
eugenics movement, in one form or another, may return

"As a country, we have not outgrown bigotry, nor our regular desire to find
scapegoats for economic conditions, nor the need to enlist science as the
panacea for social conditions," said Paul Lombardo, an attorney and director
at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia.
Eugenics was supposedly based on scientific theories that more recent
genetic studies have proven false. Lombardo worries that if today's economic
problems get worse, eugenics -- not as it was in the '20s and '30s but in
another form -- could reappear.
He cites the recent California political campaigns, where one of the major
themes was to close the borders and enforce immigration restrictions for
Latinos.
"We do not need to look too far back in time to see ideas embraced by the
eugenicists rearing their ugly heads again," Lombardo said. "If the economy
really dives, my bet is it won't be long before the same kind of bigotry
that percolated up into political debate in the 1990s comes back again."
The first legislative documentation of eugenics was a law passed in Indiana
in 1907 that allowed the involuntary sterilization of patients in mental
institutions, whom eugenicists called "defective people."
"The rationale was, if these people have become wards of the state because
they're genetically defective ... (it makes) most economic sense to
sterilize and cut off these problems at the source," Garland Allen, a
professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, said.
By 1913, more than 29 states had laws against interracial marriages.
Penalties included fines up to $2,000 and a prison sentence of up to 10
years.
Papers with titles like "The Deviation of Idiot Boys from Normal Boys in
Bodily Proportion," and "Do Races Differ in Mental Capacity?" were published
in the Eugenical News.
In 1927, the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell upheld a ruling that institutions
could sterilize people considered "mentally defective" without their
consent. Lombardo is writing a book about the case.
By 1930, at least 15,000 Americans had been involuntarily sterilized. The
number totaled nearly 50,000 before the last eugenics law was taken off the
books in the 1970s.
Even in 1927 there were many serious critics of eugenics, Lombardo said.
Still, because those beliefs were supposedly based on science, they became
part of the law for over 50 years in the United States.


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