If there is one thing that casts a pall over the rise of genomic technology and its applications, it is the eugenics movement. This article highlights a new exhibit which surveys the historical development of this movement. Of course we all know about the abominations of the Nazi regime, but eugenics was a mainstream movement at one point. Consider:
For over 40 years, young socially marginalised working class women in Sweden faced the danger of forced sterilisation. This was carried out under laws intended to purify the Swedish race, prevent the mentally ill from reproducing and stamp out social activities classed as deviant. The last sterilisation took place in 1975.
Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for “crimes” such as going to dance halls.
The founder of Planned Parenthood was, famously, but not exceptionally, a eugenicist. Though the racial aspects of eugenics have been widely emphasized, it is important to remember that in many ways it was also a class issue. In Better for All the World, a history of American eugenics, it is pretty clear that in some parts of the American South the movement and legal process was spearheaded by the local gentry who were intent on marginalizing and exterminating the local “white trash” population, whose evangelical religion militated against evolutionary theory and its applied sciences on principle.
I believe that the lessons of the eugenics movement have to be revisited, because genomic technology means that we will all be making choices about the nature of the next generation to come in a less spontaneous and more “scientific” manner than over the past few generations. You know what they say about learning from history….
Comments are closed.