Eugenics Then and Now
YORK, BYRON
Eugenics Then and Now Two weeks ago, Americans were briefly alerted to a history of state-coerced sterilization in modern Sweden. A series of articles in Dagens Nyheter, the leading Stockholm...
...Good had earlier been operated on for pancreatic cancer...
...On August 13, Kevorkian dispatched another MS patient, Karen Shoffstall of Long Beach, New York, in a Holiday Inn...
...On July 2, Kevorkian supervised two more Detroit-area motel deaths...
...But the spirit of those laws—the unreflective conviction that there are spheres of human existence, actual and potential, that are worse than useless—is everywhere still with us...
...But at the time of her death, an autopsy indicated, she was cancer-free...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...When last we met Jack Kevorkian, the Supreme Court was deciding that it wasn't quite ready to identify a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide...
...Now she, too, is dead...
...No jury is willing to convict...
...She'd been suffering from "chronic fatigue syndrome...
...This was an irresistible scandal for American newspapers, which reported Sweden's embarrassment with more than a hint of satisfaction, the kind you get when you catch the preacher with a call girl...
...All the time...
...On August 26, he took care of Janet Good, his longtime technical assistant and propagandist...
...While we may always have resisted socialism here in the States, we are nevertheless marked among free peoples by a eugenic past that's second to none...
...These were manly men, Europe's early lefties...
...Just last week, on September 3, Kevorkian set up his suicide machine in a Bloomfield Township Quality Inn...
...American culture currently embraces an icy scientism about "lives not worth living"—an attitude so thoroughgoing as virtually to escape notice...
...The American cultural bias against irregular life has become so deep-rooted that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists officially recommends pre-natal Down-syndrome screening for all pregnant women, though that screening's only practical purpose is to trigger a choice for abortion...
...Michigan police no longer even bother to arrest the good "doctor...
...Where she was dismissed, out of hand, by no less than Oliver Wendell Holmes...
...Private health insurance and Medicaid and state-based health programs now typically pay for amniocentesis—and for a raft of comparable tests for other incurable fetal anomalies...
...something even worse...
...The world's first eugenic ster-ilization—a prophylactic vasecto-my for "genetic inferiority"—was performed in 1899 on a state prison inmate in Indiana, which eight years later enacted the world's first compulsory sterilization law...
...Quite the contrary...
...In 1924, under a law governing "mental defectives" passed earlier that year, she was scheduled for a court-ordered "salpingectomy," or tubal ligation...
...In at least four states, beginning with a 1982 California trial involving a child born deaf, juries have gone so far as to accept a claim for something called "wrongful life...
...As the likely future parent of "socially inadequate offspring," Holmes wrote for an 8-1 majority, Carrie Buck had a positive duty to submit to the knife—lest the nation be "swamped with incompetence...
...And the jury, speaking for state and society, agrees that this is a reasonable conclusion...
...Dorinda Scheipsmeier of Oceanside, California, and Lynne Lennox of Lakewood, New Jersey, each had multiple sclerosis, which is not a fatal illness—though it is quite often associated with clinical depression...
...The alleged tort, in such a case, is life per se...
...Kevorkian has been on a tear ever since, though after what his lawyer says are "nearly 100" such treatments, the national press has largely lost interest and stopped reporting them...
...Between 1907 and 1960, according to the best available research, at least 60,000 Americans were sterilized under such statutes...
...Disabled newborns are becoming a relative rarity in the United States, because American OB/GYNs routinely and automatically recommend these tests to their patients, many or most of whom routinely and automatically elect to end their pregnancies at the merest hint of "risk...
...And they were fully enforced by the high priests of progressive jurisprudence...
...Here, the disabled child himself sues, through his parents...
...What's more broadly startling about current obstetrical practice is what happens in those circumstances when risk becomes reality...
...In the industrialized world, where intolerance of biological imperfection is concerned, the United States may yet be Number One—recent disclosures from Sweden notwithstanding...
...Carrie Buck of Charlottesville, Virginia, was allegedly retarded...
...If you count unwitting victims and undocumented or inaccurately recorded surgeries, the number might be as high as 100,000...
...They have tried repeatedly to prosecute him over the years...
...But truth be told, Americans cannot now scold the Swedes without hypocrisy...
...Now, we hold no brief for Sweden...
...Note the subtext: Even the Scandinavians, who have been preening about their superior humanism for decades, sometimes behave very, very badly...
...Thirty other states, in an attempt to arrest the generational transmission of criminal or "feeble minded" tendencies, followed suit over the next few decades...
...In Sweden, most sterilizations were at least putatively consensual...
...Parents make a tort claim for something called "wrongful birth," arguing that they would have aborted the child had they been properly advised during gestation—in essence, that their parenthood represents a net injury that warrants compensation...
...That was 70 years ago...
...Dozens of times, in at least 16 states in recent years, juries have affirmed such complaints...
...A series of articles in Dagens Nyheter, the leading Stockholm daily, had recently detailed the program under which nearly 60,000 "socially inferior" and "subnormal" Swedish women were targeted for hysterectomies, from 1934 to 1975...
...Carol Fox had flown in from Pennsylvania with a so-far-unconfirmed case of ovarian cancer...
...And there is more...
...Amazingly enough, there are American juries, more than a few, now willing to assign damages against certain doctors who fail to kill their patients...
...It is an established fact that for half a century—until the example of Nazi Germany prompted a quickie divorce—socialism and eugenics were married to each other in the "advanced" Western mind...
...They did not shrink from the notion that eliminating social misery might also involve eliminating procreation by the miserable...
...Doctors who deliver disabled infants get sued...
...On August 29, Kevorkian helped MS patient Thomas Summerlee of Colorado Springs to a lethal injection...
...The relevant laws are long gone...
...The plaintiff newborn argues, essentially, that he has been denied a right to be aborted—that his undesired life is less valuable to him than nonexis-tence would be...
...This is not simply an argument about abortion...
...The United States, Holmes concluded, in what must be the most hideous high-court pronouncement in our history, can "prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...
...Buck fought her sterilization sentence for three years, all the way to the Supreme Court...
...That morning, June 26, Kevorkian saw to it that Janis Murphy of Nevada died in a motel room near Detroit...
...Three generations of imbeciles are enough...
...And it is really no accident that it was a succession of "enlightened" Social Democratic governments in Stockholm that worked most vigorously to purify the Nordic bloodline...
...What is all this if it is not eugenics...
...In the United States, the vast majority were entirely involuntary...
Vol. 3 • September 1997 • No. 1
