Everyday Eugenics

Although the American Eugenics movement ended over 50 years ago, aspects of eugenic thinking continue to pop up from what seems like out of nowhere. Here are a few notable examples from the past few weeks.

• In late June, a Tennessee news station reported on Project Prevention, a non-profit that offers $300 cash to drug and alcohol-dependent adults to induce them to use long-term or permanent birth control. Similar to the C.R.A.C.K. program a few years ago, the moral and conceptual push behind this effort is to prevent children from being born with ravaging drug dependencies, although some studies have shown that the long term effects of prenatal drug exposure are not as significant as the epidemic predicted in the 1980s. This is not to say that maternal drug use is of no consequence to a developing fetus. Rather, it is to say that this effort to keep certain populations from reproducing may have less to do with any evidence-based concerns for child health and more to do with stereotypes that can create a false and overly broad license to limit others’ reproductive capabilities. Certainly all men and women should have access to birth control on their own terms. But paying drug-dependent individuals $300 to, in many instances, irreversibly sterilize themselves may very well fall in the shadow of past eugenic abuses.

• Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade went on an odd rant concerning a research study from Finland and Sweden showing that marriage correlates with a decreased likelihood for developing Alzheimer’s. From Kilmeade’s perspective, the study results do not apply to Americans because Swiss and Finns have “pure genes” and a “pure society” since they marry each other, while Americans intermarry with “other species and other ethnics.”

• Lastly, as a more disputed example of this trend, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was quoted in a New York Times interview in a manner that some – particularly right wing commentators such as Jonah Goldberg and Rush Limbaugh – have interpreted as revealing her belief that abortion might be used to curb the growth of undesirable populations. Discussing Harris v. McRae, the 1980 ruling in which the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid to pay for abortions, Ginsburg said,  

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

Surprisingly, interviewer Emily Bazelon did not follow up on this statement, so it’s not entirely clear what she meant. Others have argued that Ginsburg’s remarks are about right wing perspectives on abortion during the 1980s. The bottom line is that her comments just aren’t that clear. Ginsburg is a long-time supporter of abortion rights; before becoming a Supreme Court justice, she was an ACLU litigator. Since some abortion rights supporters in the past – not to mention a former Supreme Court Justice – have endorsed a eugenics worldview, the Goldberg/Limbaugh interpretation would not be unprecedented. Let’s just hope that Justice Ginsburg decides to set the record straight.