Diabetes and the ‘cascade of complexity’
Helen Cooper, Robert Geyer, Ian Botham in Riding the Diabetes Rollercoaster, 2018
This concept of smooth movement towards equilibrium runs throughout the natural, health and social sciences. In biology, mechanistic interpretations of Darwinian theory saw the evolution of life on earth as a calm and stately development from ‘lower’ life forms to the highest life form, human beings. From this perspective it didn’t take much of an intellectual leap to view humans racially along the same lines. This became the widespread science of eugenics that was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If animals evolve smoothly from lowest to highest, then humans must do the same (evolving from ‘backwards’ non-white tribal peoples to ‘advanced’ white Anglo-Europeans). The parallel is obvious. From the mechanical perspective, with the evolution of ‘advanced’ human beings, evolution reached its point of final equilibrium of human superiority.1
Can kinship be designed and still be normal?
Waltraud Ernst in Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal, 2006
Determining objectively whether children were adoptable was the first goal of normalisation in modern adoption. During the early part of the century, eugenic worries about the quality of available children drove efforts to distinguish between normal children, who were qualified for family membership, and feeble-minded and defective children, who were not. Stories of superficially adorable children who turned out to be tragically flawed, breaking the hearts of well-meaning adoptive parents, were common. One baby girl, ‘in the “cute” stage of development which conceals her limitations … was just the kind of child who would smite the heart of questing adoptive parents,’ noted Arnold Gesell. Gesell was a Yale psychologist whose standardisation of developmental norms, beginning at birth, during the 1920s and 1930s transformed him from a talented technologist into the most popular childrearing celebrity in the country during the era before Benjamin Spock.36 Gesell predicted that this baby would probably never complete high school and that ‘there may be genuine pangs of regret’ in store for any parents foolish enough to adopt her.37
Philosophical Basis for Moral Analysis
Howard Winet in Ethics for Bioengineering Scientists, 2021
Eugenics took two main forms—positive and negative. Positive eugenics focused on policies that would encourage carriers of desirable traits to reproduce more. Negative eugenics focused on policies that would discourage carriers of undesirable traits from reproducing at all. The movement was rather popular prior to WWII and resulted in the passage in the United States of legislation at the federal level to reduce immigration of “undesirables” and at the state level to restrict their reproduction. In some 15 states, this included nonvoluntary sterilization (Cohen 2017). One of the conditions targeted as undesirable in all legislation was “feeblemindedness” (the range of definitions for this condition was so wide that it included genetic, infectious, and traumatic causes). Since the “gene” was not defined by science in general until after 1900, it was difficult for early eugenicists to differentiate genetic from environmental causes of a given condition.
Classless: Classism in Social Work Practice and the Example of White Rural Proverty
Published in Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2020
Dominica F. Lizzi
Eugenics is defined as the scientific belief and practice of improving the genetic composition of humanity, asserting that certain genetic traits are superior or more favorable than others (Schoen, 2011). The eugenics movement originated in the United States during the late 1880’s and was widely accepted in both scientific and academic settings (Lombardo, 2008). The white rural poor were the most studied and targeted of what became a state funded eugenics movement in over thirty states (Schoen, 2005; Wray, 2006). White poverty was an affront to the notion of white supremacy. The poor white “degenerates” needed to be weeded out to achieve the racial superiority that Social Darwinism heralded. Eugenic sterilization asserted that certain groups were “biologically unfit” and their behavior threatened the social and economic well- being of the entire population of whites (Schoen, 2005; Waller, 2008).
Intersectional and Relational Frameworks:Confronting Anti-Blackness, Settler Colonialism, and Neoliberalism in U.S. Social Work
Published in Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2020
Jennifer Maree Stanley
Race is a social construct involving practices of colonialism and White normative cultural privileging to differentiate, exclude, and stigmatize racialized others (Henry & Tator, 2012). Scholarship on the history of social work has largely ignored the role of race and racialization throughout the development of the profession. The language of “respectability/degeneracy” is a racialized language that reveals the discourse of eugenics as a mechanism of control used by leaders in the Charity and Settlement House movements (Ou Jin Lee & Ferrer, 2014). Galton states eugenics was defined in the Minutes of the University of London as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally” (1908). Eugenics discourse served to legitimize White supremacy and shaped the future sterilization efforts carried out against Indigenous women and Women of Color in the 1940s–1970s in Puerto Rico and the mainland US (Briggs, 2002). White women social workers administered experimental birth control trials and sterilization programs funded by the Rockefellers’ Tropical Medicine efforts to control and prevent “overpopulation” of racialized others who were scientifically classified as being too deviant to assimilate into White settler society (Briggs, 2002). Tracking White philanthropist’s funding of housing programs to assimilate racialized others into White settler society in the late 1800s exposes the biopolitics of genocide and eugenics as enacted on large groups of people classified as degenerates into the 1970s.
The Prevention of Thalassemia Revisited: A Historical and Ethical Perspective by the Thalassemia International Federation
Published in Hemoglobin, 2021
Michael Angastiniotis, Mary Petrou, Dimitrios Loukopoulos, Bernadette Modell, Dimitrios Farmakis, Panos Englezos, Androulla Eleftheriou
Therefore, offering people the possibility to choose and even prevent the birth of affected children, remains a less painful alternative to experiencing multiple medical complications and early death. For such countries, limiting affected births remains a policy that may be regarded as justified. The concept of eugenics, often cited as a criticism of the prevention of any genetic disease, cannot be sustained when the overall picture of severe and lifelong suffering is understood. When Galton first used this term [48] he had in mind the ‘the improvement of the inborn qualities or stock of the human population.’ In medical genetics, the aim of hereditary disease programs is to offer improvement in the lives of patients and their families, along with measures to support those affected [49].
Related Knowledge Centers
- Bioethics
- Compulsory Sterilization
- Genetic Testing
- Intellectual Disability
- Selective Breeding
- Genetics
- Crispr Gene Editing
- Scientific Racism
- New Eugenics
- History of Eugenics