Search results for sterilization law
Sterilization Laws
Jan 18th
Based on a task force recommendation, the North Carolina legislature is considering paying $50,000 to living individuals sterilized by the state against their will or without their knowledge. North Carolina reportedly sterilized 7,600 individuals between 1929 and 1974. However, other American states also passed laws legalizing sterilization; the first was passed in Indiana in 1907 with the intent of giving prison inmates vasectomies as a way to prevent the transmission of “degenerate traits.”
In 1914, eugenicist Harry Laughlin published a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that proposed to authorize More >
Involuntary Sterilization?
Apr 15th
A North Carolina-based charity’s initiative to pay drug and alcohol abusers to be sterilized or choose long-term birth control (IUD) has popped up recently in my Google “eugenics” news alert. Once an addict proves they have had a procedure to prevent pregnancy, they are given $300. Several thousand individuals have participated in the program in the US. The group argues that the policy will prevent the birth of children that will likely become a societal burden or at the very least be raised in an unstable environment. Those who oppose the initiative argue that often addicts get clean with the More >
Health Care and Eugenics
Jul 16th
Health care is the burning topic these days. Accusations are flying against government initiatives including terms like sterilization, Nazi, and eugenics.
Are these fair characterizations? Decide for yourself by exploring several topic areas in the Eugenics Archive that may sound as if they were discussed at the latest town hall meeting: Birth and Population Control, German/Nazi Eugenics, and Sterilization Laws. Once in the Archive, choose to browse by topic to read the topic essays and view the associated images.
The Continuum of Eugenics Practice
Oct 22nd
Francis Galton, the English scientist who coined the term, defined eugenics as “the agencies under social control that improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.” Charles Davenport, the father of the American eugenics movement called it simply “the self direction of human evolution.”
These definitions stress differences that occupied either end of a continuum of eugenics practice. At one end, Galton’s definition stressed social control, or laws, to control human reproduction. At the other end, Charles Davenport’s stressed an individual’s own control over their reproduction. Social control ultimately embodied “negative eugenics”– limiting mixed race marriages, More >