Eugenics and human rights

British Medical Journal, August 14, 1999 by Daniel J Kevles

Sterilisation rates climbed with the onset of the worldwide economic depression in 1929. In parts of Canada, in the deep south of the United States, and throughout Scandinavia, sterilisation acquired broad support. This was not primarily on eugenic grounds (though some hereditarian-minded mental health professionals continued to urge it for that purpose) but on economic ones. Sterilisation raised the prospect of reducing the cost of institutional care and of poor relief. Even geneticists who disparaged sterilisation as the remedy for degeneration held that sterilising mentally disabled people would yield a social benefit because it would prevent children being born to parents who could not care for them.

In Scandinavia, sterilisation was broadly endorsed by Social Democrats as part of the scientifically oriented planning of the new welfare state. Alva Myrdal spoke for her husband, Gunnar, and for numerous liberals like themselves when in 1941 she wrote, "In our day of highly accelerated social reforms the need for sterilization on social grounds gains new momentum. Generous social reforms may facilitate home-making and childbearing more than before among the groups of less desirable as well as more desirable parents. [Such a trend] demands some corresponding corrective."[4] On such foundations among others, sterilisation programmes continued in several American states, in Alberta, and in Scandinavia well into the 1970s.

Eugenics under fire

During the interwar years, however, eugenic doctrines were increasingly criticised on scientific grounds and for their class and racial bias. It was shown that many mental disabilities have nothing to do with genes; that those which do are not simple products of genetic make up; and that most human behaviours (including deviant ones) are shaped by environment at least as much as by biological heredity, if they are fashioned by genes at all. Science aside, eugenics became malodorous precisely because of its connection with Hitler's regime, especially after the second world war, when its complicity in the Nazi death camps was revealed.

All along, many people on both sides of the Atlantic had ethical reservations about sterilisation and were squeamish about forcibly subjecting people to the knife. Attempts to authorise eugenic sterilisation in Britain had reached their high water mark in the debates over the Mental Deficiency Act in 1913. They failed not least because of powerful objections from civil libertarians insistent on defending individual human rights. More than a third of the American states declined to pass sterilisation laws, and so did the eastern provinces of Canada. Most of the American states which passed the laws declined to enforce them, and British Columbia's law was enforced very little.

The opposition comprised coalitions that varied in composition. It came from mental health professionals who doubted the scientific underpinnings of eugenics and from civil libertarians, some of whom warned that compulsory sterilisation constituted "Hitlerisation." Sterilisation was also vigorously resisted by Roman Catholics--partly because it was contrary to church doctrine and partly because many recent immigrants to the United States were Catholics and thus disproportionately placed in jeopardy of the knife. For many people before the second world war, individual human rights mattered far more than those sanctioned by the science, law, and perceived social needs of the era.