Lynch, William T. (Advisor)
McEuen, Branden (Author)
Contemporary concerns with technologies like CRISPR and the proliferation of state laws restricting abortion have led people to wonder if we are witnessing a return of eugenics. I analyze the development and evolution of eugenic ideas and policies throughout the 20th century, using the state of Michigan as a frame of reference. In examining the eugenic theories and policies psychiatrists and physicians endorsed, I demonstrate that eugenics was a key component of preventive public medicine in the first two decades of the 20th century. I show how they educated the public on eugenics based on both environmentalist and hereditarian ideas and stressed that the suppression of individual rights to reproductive autonomy were necessary to improve the general welfare of society, an argument that influenced American jurists to endorse sterilization as a justifiable police power measure. I then reveal how these core principles remained embedded in both medical genetics and population control. Although medical geneticists shunned research on the inheritance of social behaviors, they remained committed to applying preventive genetic medicine for genetic physical and mental diseases and counseling individuals to not have children based on their genes. Population planners feared the catastrophic consequences of overpopulation and suppressed poor women’s right to reproductive autonomy around the world to address what they believed were crucial issues of resource depletion, economic development, and political stability during the Cold War. I conclude by looking at how eugenic ideas continue to suppress the reproductive rights of individuals while Michigan leaders have failed to adequately address the state’s eugenic past. Although contemporary notions of individualism in relation to reproduction prevent a resurgence of eugenics like that in the first half of the 20th century, current attempts to restrict reproductive rights are a cause for concern, and addressing our eugenic past is crucial to ensuring these rights are not violated.
...More
Book
Maurizio Meloni;
(2016)
Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics
(/isis/citation/CBB133358389/)
Book
Müller-Wille, Staffan;
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg;
(2012)
A Cultural History of Heredity
(/isis/citation/CBB001251195/)
Book
Bernardino Fantini;
Fabrizio Rufo;
(2017)
Il codice della vita. Una storia della genetica tra scienza e bioetica
(/isis/citation/CBB297801530/)
Article
Dejong-Lambert, William;
(2009)
From Eugenics to Lysenkoism: The Evolution of Stanislaw Skowron
(/isis/citation/CBB001022626/)
Article
Tucker, William H.;
(2007)
Burt's Separated Twins: The Larger Picture
(/isis/citation/CBB000771319/)
Thesis
Evans, Suzanne Elizabeth;
(2008)
Parental Eugenics: Congenitally Anomalous Newborns and the Continuing Debate over Selective Non-Treatment and Neonatal Euthanasia in the United States, 1915--2008
(/isis/citation/CBB001561233/)
Book
Carlson, Elof Axel;
(2001)
The Unfit: The History of a Bad Idea
(/isis/citation/CBB000600017/)
Article
Snelders, Stephen;
Pieters, Toine;
(2003)
Van degeneratie tot individuele gezondheidsopties. Het maatschappelijk gebruik van erfelijkheidsconcepten in de twintigste eeuw
(/isis/citation/CBB000770574/)
Book
Dennis L. Durst;
(2017)
Eugenics and Protestant Social Reform: Hereditary Science and Religion in America, 1860–1940
(/isis/citation/CBB376484628/)
Article
Valles, Sean A.;
(2012)
Lionel Penrose and the Concept of Normal Variation in Human Intelligence
(/isis/citation/CBB001221611/)
Article
Santiago Stucchi-Portocarrero;
(2018)
Eugenics, medicine and psychiatry in Peru
(/isis/citation/CBB864800904/)
Book
Witkowski, J. A.;
Inglis, J. R.;
(2008)
Davenport's Dream: 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics
(/isis/citation/CBB000774895/)
Chapter
Larson, Edward J.;
(2010)
Biology and the Emergence of the Anglo-American Eugenics Movement
(/isis/citation/CBB001020302/)
Essay Review
Sarah Chan;
(2018)
In Search of a Post-Genomic Bioethics: Lessons from Political Biology
(/isis/citation/CBB258650708/)
Essay Review
Chris Renwick;
(2018)
The Task of Sisyphus? Biological and Social Temporality in Maurizio Meloni’s Political Biology
(/isis/citation/CBB275358400/)
Book
Holloway, Karla F. C.;
(2011)
Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics
(/isis/citation/CBB001200198/)
Book
Eugeniusz Nowak;
Brian Hillcoat;
(2018)
Biologists in the Age of Totalitarianism
(/isis/citation/CBB452565241/)
Book
Sebastiano Serafini;
(2019)
La bioetica in Italia: da una storia di battaglie etico-politiche a spiragli di dialogo tra pensiero cattolico e pensiero laico
(/isis/citation/CBB039016702/)
Book
Gaudillière, Jean-Paul;
Löwy, Ilana;
(2001)
Heredity and Infection: The History of Disease Transmission
(/isis/citation/CBB000101679/)
Article
Vailly, Joëlle;
(2014)
Genetic Testing, Birth, and the Quest for Health
(/isis/citation/CBB001421197/)
Be the first to comment!