From: rabjab@golem.ucsd.edu (Jeff Bytof)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.clinton
Subject: Eugenics (was Socialist health care)
Date: 10 Nov 92 02:34:54 GMT
Organization: ucsd
NNTP-Posting-Host: lutherlab.ucsd.edu

Yet another social issue we may be grappling with again sooner or later,
in one form or another:

>I seem
>to recall that before WWII, California led the nation in eugenically
>inspired abortions (!). 
          ^^^^^^^^^  mistake - the correct word is *sterilizations*,
                     context, quote and references follow:

   "Eugenicists like Davenport [Charles B. Davenport, author of "Heredity
in Relation to Eugenics", 1911] knew little scientific self-doubt.
Indeed, they displayed a high degree of scientific hybris that was 
compounded by a desire to be socially authoritative and useful. They
urged the application of their putatively objective knowledge to the
social problems of their day and offered their expertise to state and
national governments for the formation of biologically sound public
policy.

   "Overall, they advised interference in human propagation so as to
increase the frequency of socially good genes in the population and 
decrease that of bad ones.  The interference was to take two forms:
one was "positive" eugenics, which meant manipulating human heredity
and/or breeding to produce superior people; the other was "negative"
eugenics, which meant improving the quality of the human race by
eliminating biologically inferior people from the population.  The
elimination might be accomplished by discouraging inferior human
beings from reproducing or entering one's own population via immigration.
In practice, little was done for positive eugenics, though eugenic
claims did figure in the advent of family-allowance policies in Britain
and Germany during the 1930s, and positive eugenic themes were certainly
implied in the "Fitter Family" competitions that were sponsored at a 
number of state fairs during the 1920s in the United States.  These
competitions were held in the "human stock" section of the fairs. At
theh 1924 Kansas Free Fair, winning families in the three categories---
small, average, and large---were awarded a Governor's Fitter Family
Trophy, which was presented by Governor Jonathan Davis, and "Grade A
Individuals" received a medal that portrayed two diaphanously garbed
parents, their arms outstretched toward their (presumably) eugenically
meritorious infant.  It is hard to know what made these families stand
out as fit, but some evidence is supplied by the fact that all entrants
had to take an IQ test---and the Wasserman test for syphilis (1).

    "Much more was done for negative eugenics, notably the passage of
eugenic sterilization laws.  By the late 1920s, some two dozen American
states had framed such laws, often with the help of the Eugenics Record
Office, and enacted them.  The laws were declared consititutional in the
1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell, in which Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes delivered himself of the opinion that three generations
of imbeciles were enough.  The leading state in this endeavor was
California, which as of 1933 had subjected more people to eugenic
sterilization that had all other states of the union combined (2).

    "The most powerful union of eugenic research and public policy 
occured in Nazi Germany. Fischer's institute trained doctors for the
SS in the intricacies of racial hygiene and analyzed data and specimens
obtained in concentration camps.  Some of the material---for example,
the internal organs of dead children and the skeletons of two murdered
Jews---came from Josef Mengele, who had been a graduate student of Otmar
von Verschuer's and was his assistant at the Institute for Anthropology,
Human Heredity, and Eugenics.  In 1942, Verschuer succeeded Fischer as
head of the institute (and would serve postwar Germany as professor of
human genetics at the University of Muenster) (3).  In German, where
sterilization measures were partly inspired by the California law,
the eugenics movement prompted the sterilization of several hundred
thousand people and helped lead, of course, to the death camps."

             ---Daniel J. Kevles, Koepfli Professor of the Humanities
                at the California Institute of Technology, "Out of
                Eugenics: the Historical Politics of the Human Genome",
                in "The Code of Codes, Scientific and Social Issues in
                the Human Genome Project", D.J. Kevles and Leoy Hood, eds.,
                Harvard U. Press, 1992, pp.9-11.

references:

(1) Kevles, "In the Name of Eugenics", pp. 61-62

(2) Obid., pp. 107-112, 114-116; Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 201-207 (1927).

(3) Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp.44, 292, 307. 
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,alt.rush-limbaugh,alt.politics.elections,alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.bush