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Where eugenics philosophy was still practiced; sterilisation continues today - C C - Jun 7, 2018
https://aeon.co/essays/eugenics-today-where-eugenic-sterilisation-continues-now
EXCERPT: . . . Both in popular culture and in academia, eugenics is thought of as long-past, going extinct shortly after 1945 due to the extreme forms it took in fascist Germany. The Nazi enthusiasm for eugenics led to concentration camps, involuntary euthanasia, and genocide. Once the rest of the world recognised this, eugenics was done – not simply as a social movement with state support, but as an endorsable idea guiding social policy.
But this view doesn’t capture what eugenics feels like from where I have stood for the past 20 years.
For most of the past two decades, I have lived in the Canadian province of Alberta, which practiced legal eugenic sterilisation. The Sexual Sterilization Act, passed in 1928, was robustly used by the government until its repeal in 1972. The Act called for a four-person Eugenics Board, which was empowered to approve the sterilisation of people living in designated state institutions, often mental hospitals. In this practice, they joined a small number of the 32 American states that passed eugenic sterilisation laws prior to 1939: North Carolina, Georgia and Oregon. Those states continued to sterilise their citizens on the basis of those laws into the 1960s and ’70s.
But there was a more direct reason for my feeling of proximity to eugenics. I found myself working in a university department whose first head – a university-employed academic philosopher, like me – served for the last third of his long life as chair of the Alberta Eugenics Board from 1928 until 1965. John MacEachran was a long-serving provost at the University of Alberta and among the institution’s most celebrated administrative leaders. During his time on the Eugenics Board, MacEachran’s signature authorised 2,832 sterilisation orders. Roughly half of these sterilisation-approvals were given during the post-eugenics era that, on the standard view, began with the fall of the Nazis.
This history and MacEachran’s role in it had come to light shortly before I moved to Alberta [...]
[...] In Scandinavia, active eugenic sterilisation was practised until the early to mid-1970s, as in Alberta.
[...] In 2012, the Senate of Australia launched an inquiry into contemporary, often non-consensual sterilisation of girls and women with disabilities. Unlike Canada and the United States, Australia never passed eugenic sterilisation laws.
[...] At the end of 2014, at least a dozen women in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh died after undergoing sexual sterilisation as part of a paid incentive programme aimed to control poverty through population containment.
[...] The ongoing eugenic sterilisation of people with disabilities, prisoners, poor people, people from certain racialised ethnic groups and indigenous people (especially women) affects precisely the same sorts of people explicitly targeted by eugenics before 1945....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/eugenics-today-where-eugenic-sterilisation-continues-now
RE: Where eugenics philosophy was still practiced; sterilisation continues today - Syne - Jun 7, 2018
Not to mention the modern eugenics of abortion, especially as used to preemptively euthanize children with down syndrome and selective-sex abortions.