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A Child's Right to Be Well Born: Venereal Disease and the Eugenic Marriage Laws, 1913–1935
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2017
An extensive literature describes the legal impact of America's eugenics movement, and the laws mandating sterilization, restriction of marriage by race, and ethnic bans on immigration. But little scholarship focuses on the laws adopted in more than 40 states that were commonly referred to as "eugenic marriage laws." Those laws conditioned marriage licenses on medical examinations and were designed to save innocent women from lives of misery, prevent stillbirth or premature death in children, and save future generations from the myriad afflictions that accompanied "venereal infection." Medical journals, legal journals, and every kind of public press outlet explained the "eugenic marriage laws" and the controversies they spawned. They were inextricably bound up in reform movements that attempted to eradicate prostitution, stamp out STIs, and reform America's sexual mores in the first third of the 20th century. This article will explain the pedigree of the eugenic marriage laws, highlight the trajectory of Wisconsin's 1913 eugenic enactment, and explore how the Wisconsin Supreme Court case upholding the law paved the way for the majority of states to regulate marriage on eugenic grounds. F or nearly a century, and until very recently, the majority of U.S. states required a blood test for marriage license applicants. The tests identified people with conditions formerly designated as "venereal diseases," most importantly gonorrhea and syphilis. Those who tested positive were barred from civil mar
Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2024
This article places the landmark 1986 Supreme Court of Canada decision E. (Mrs.) v. Eve within its avowedly anti-eugenic context. Then it compares the trial record and appellate documents of Eve to the notorious 1927 American case Buck v. Bell. It outlines the legal reasoning of the Eve decision, its reception, and the different trajectories of law in the US, the UK, and Australia. These multiple points of historical comparison expose a series of unresolved eugenic continuities in the politics of youth, sex, and disability. The interpretation challenges more conventional definitions, periodization, and understandings of eugenics, drawing attention to the formation of “liberal” eugenics in the late twentieth century.
Eugenic Family Politics and Social Democrats: "Positive" Eugenics and Marriage Advice Bureaus
Journal of Historical Sociology, 2006
Abstract During the first half of the twentieth century eugenics became a mainstream body of thinking and an approach to the solution of social problems across Europe and North America. Fears of degeneration and certain notions of heredity and fertility had produced widespread discourses regarding threats to the nation's health and its reproductive capacities. Governing nations' procreative activities shaped social policies and practices thus placing gender and sexuality at the centre of analysis. The article examines how eugenics became an axis of intervention in family and reproductive politics through discourses and practices of “positive” eugenics. The substantive focus here is on the eugenic content of premarital advice and family politics in Switzerland assessing the impact of the eugenics movement as well as the women's movement. The article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on comparative historical analyses of eugenics by contextualising Switzerland in a eugenic international.
Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America
History: Reviews of New Books, 2014
This book is the first comprehensive analysis of eugenics in North America focused on the second half of the twentieth century. Based on new research, Randall Hansen and Desmond King show why eugenic sterilization policies persisted after the 1940s in the United States and Canada. Through extensive archival research, King and Hansen show how both superintendents at homes for the "feebleminded" and prosterilization advocates repositioned themselves after 1945 to avoid the taint of Nazi eugenics. Drawing on interviews with victims of sterilization and primary documents, this book traces the post-1940s development of eugenic policy and shows that both eugenic arguments and committed eugenicists informed population, welfare, and birth control policy in postwar America. In providing revisionist histories of the choice movement, the anti-population growth movement, and the Great Society programs, this book contributes to public policy and political and intellectual history.
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 2023
The Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the case claimed there was a direct connection between the legalization of abortion, in the late 20th Century, and the beginnings of the birth control movement a full three quarters of a century earlier. “Many eugenicists,” Thomas argued, “supported legalizing abortion.” Justice Samuel Alito highlighted similar claims in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, citing a brief entitled “The Eugenic Era Lives on through the Abortion Movement.” That brief was an echo of Justice Thomas’ misguided attempt at history in the Box opinion. Similar claims reoccur in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion in the Texas mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. These false claims are the focus of this article. There is no evidence that early leaders of the eugenics movement supported abortion as part of the movement for birth control. It is accurate to describe those leaders as anti-abortion, and their followers as people who condemned abortion for moral, legal, and medical reasons.
Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia
1987
The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance and encouragement of Professor Walter Wadlington whose premier scholarship on Loving v. Virginia is the starting point for this Essay and who generously pointed out the existence of the John Powell Collection upon which it focuses. I The John Powell Collection (#7284) Manuscript Department, University of Virginia Library. The Powell papers are divided into material of professional interest, primarily relating to John Powell's career as a musician; and private interest, including correspondence, speeches, etc. on various political controversies such as the race question. The private material makes up a very small percentage of the collection, and access is restricted. I wish to thank Professor Earnest Mead, literary executor of the Powell estate, for his permission to study the restricted portions of the John Powell Collection [hereafter Powell Collection] (cited portions on file with the U.C. Davis Law Review). 2 The term "miscegenation" technically refers to relations between people of different races, without regard to whether the parties have the benefit of civil marriage. This Essay uses the term in reference to interracial marriage, since that was the focus of Virginia's 1924 act challenged in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). 3 For a history of miscegenation laws with particular attention to the pattern of law that was enacted in Virginia, see Wadlington,
“Actuality of Eugenics”
The Editors One of the most hotly debated concepts in contemporary bioethics, eugenics is often reduced to an evil of Nazism that should have been discarded long ago. In this video dialogue, two leading scholars of eugenics— Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson—contextualize and complicate the current discussion of eugenic practices. Beginning with a discussion of the definition of eugenics, the dialogue then examines how the history of eugenics can help us understand contemporary reproductive practice practices that are often labeled as " eugenist, " including prenatal screening and the selective abortion of fetuses with disabilities. It then examines the relationship between disability discrimination and reproductive freedom, and concludes by addressing the extent to which the association between eugenics and Nazism is useful to understanding contemporary medical practices.
Why reason-based abortion bans are not a remedy against eugenics: an empirical study
Journal of Law and the Biosciences, 2023
In Box v Planned Parenthood, Justice Thomas wrote an impassioned concurrence describing abortions based on sex, disability or race as a form of 'modern-day eugenics'. He defended the challenged Indiana reason-based abortion (RBA) ban as a necessary antidote to these practices. Inspired by this concurrence, legislatures have increasingly enacted similar bills and statutes allegedly as a prophylactic to 'eugenics', its underlying discrimination, and the racial disparities eugenics caused. This article tests my hypothesis that this legislative focus on eugenics is largely performative, rather than evidence of true concern about the discrimination and disparities underlying eugenics. My research examined state laws in several areas that fall within narrow and broad understandings of eugenics to determine whether states with RBA bans have implemented policies to counteract eugenics more broadly. My analysis shows that they generally have not. Instead, the apparent motivation is to commandeer concerns about eugenics to restrict reproductive rights. This legislative mission is hypocritical, and it harms the very groups impacted by the eugenics movements-minorities, women, people with disabilities, the LGBTQ+ community, and immigrants. Ultimately, it has led us to Dobbs, which makes everyone vulnerable to the eugenics policies Thomas condemns by undercutting previous constitutional protections against eugenics.