Disability, Feminism and Eugenics:

[BrklynLiberal]

Disability, Feminism and Eugenics: Who has the right to decide who should or should not inhabit the world?

The subtitle of this paper "who has the right to decide who or who should not inhabit this world" is the rephrasing of a question asked by Hannah Arendt in her book about Adolf Eichmann and the Nazi extermination programme.

Whenever the question of Nazi eugenics is raised in any discussion about ethics and their application to contemporary issues such as the development of recent reproductive technologies, people recoil in horror and accusingly declare: Extremism! That is not relevant to enlightened western democratic health policies and legislative platforms.

The linkages between German so-called "health" programmes in the 1930s-1940s originating in British and US eugenics theories, and the practice in Australia in 1996 of modern reproductive technologies, especially pre-natal screening for foetal abnormalities and genetic engineering, reverberate tellingly today.

In this paper I wish to explore the implications of the resurgence of the "new eugenics" as a philosophy underpinning modern reproductive practices from the perspective of the abuse and denigration of the rights in people with disabilities in general and women with disabilities in particular. These practices, I believe also infringe women's rights and should be a matter of grave concern for all feminists. The following discussion is not about the rights and wrongs of the abortion debate but adopts a disability rights interpretation of new reproductive and genetic technologies.

Firstly, let us examine what is meant by eugenics. Eugenics has been defined recently as:
"the doctrine which claims that it is possible and desirable, through selective breeding and the elimination of undesirable individuals, to alter the hereditary qualities of a race or population".

Eugenics policies originated in the late 19th century in Britain and the United States. The term derives from the Greek word for "wellborn" and in 1883 was first coined by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and was certainly influenced by Social Darwinism: the idea that life is a struggle between the fit and the unfit. The eugenics movement was based on the mistaken notion that all disabilities were inherited and that the "unfit" - people who were "feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, diseased, blind, deaf deformed" were to be bred out of existence. A major factor in the growth of this movement was the prevalent assumption of 19th century science that human perfection could be achieved through a combination of technological and social manipulation, an increased understanding of heredity, and the fact that surgical techniques for sterilisation had become available.
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more...
http://www.wwda.org.au/eugen.htm