Eugenics: Never Forget

There is a historical exhibit about eugenics at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. From the column by Rick Martinez, in The News and Observer, it seems the curators did a fine job. Here are few excerpts from Martinez’s reaction:

EUGENICS WAS SOLD AS THE SCIENCE of improving the human race through the procreation of people thought to have humanity’s best traits, while decreasing the birth rate of those saddled with the worst. It was a field embraced by wealthy and progressive leaders in North Carolina, including the editors of this newspaper. As proof of public support, a 1935 state sterilization manual cited an N&O editorial that read in part, “We cannot make a better world if we deliberately give our substance to subsidizing the production of the least worthy stock among men.”

The characteristics of the least worthy were explicit. In North Carolina they included promiscuity, alcoholism, criminality, drug addiction, extreme nervousness and being a pauper.

Martinez is also aware that there is a potentially even more pernicious new eugenics loose in the land:

In May 2007, Andrew J. Imparato and Anne C. Sommers of the American Association of People With Disabilities marked the Buck decision’s 80th anniversary by warning that intellectual underpinnings of eugenics still survive, particularly with regard to the disabled. They back up their claim with chilling facts and quotes.

From noted Princeton University bio-ethicist Peter Singer: “It does not seem quite wise to increase any further draining of limited resources by increasing the number of children with impairments.”

From in vitro fertilization pioneer Robert Edwards: “Soon it will be a sin for parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”

Martinez writes that he was unaware of much of this before going to the exhibit, having assumed it was another form of racism. He sure gets it now. Eugenics is evil precisely because it rejects human exceptionalism and the intrinsic value of each and every one of us. Whether a laissez faire eugenics as pushed by some new eugenicists, or a eugenics imposed by the state (and the former would eventually lead to directly to the latter), eugenics is fundamentally wrong and a profound threat to the weak and vulnerable. We should never forget. Thanks to Rick Martinez for his good column.