Prevailing Control: 21st Century Eugenics

Intro:

Hello, and welcome to “Prevailing Control: 21st Century Eugenics”. When people think of eugenics the first thing that comes to mind is probably the WWII atrocities, not the United States, but the reality is that America has a deep rooted past of eugenics and it has continued to bleed into the 21st century. Today we will be diving into the history of eugenics in this country, and more importantly, we will be talking about how this ideology is far from gone in the state of the world today. 

History of Eugenics: 

Eugenics is a topic that I’m sure most of you have at least heard of in your life, but I want to start by giving some background on what exactly eugenics is and how we have seen it in the past. The word itself comes from the combined roots of the Greek words for “good” and “origin”, and the main idea of eugenics is to strive to create the “perfect human” through selective breeding.¹ One of the main ways that this is achieved is through sterilization of those who are deemed either “unfit” or “inferior” to the ideal or “superior” people. More specifically, sterilization tactics that would specifically target women were either surgeries, such as hysterectomies, and also the pushing of birth control onto women who were a part of the communities that were seen as the inferiors. Margaret Sanger was an American birth control activist who ended up supporting eugenics as a means to push birth control. She once publicly stated in 1920 that “birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives.”² This illustrates the basic idea behind eugenics, to control the “breeding” of certain groups in order to produce more of those that society deems superior. Which shows how this concept heavily pushes racist and sexist ideas because as a society that has long been rooted in a white heteronormative patriarchy, the traits and genetics that are seen as superior are those of white cis men. 

This is made even clearer when looking at the history of eugenics specifically in America, and it’s even more concerning when you realize that this history actually doesn’t go that far back. According to a New York Times article written by Linda Villarosa, “From 1907 to 1932, 32 states passed explicit eugenics laws that allowed for the government to sterilize the ‘insane’, the ‘feebleminded’, the ‘dependent’ and the ‘diseased’ – all of whom were deemed incapable of making their own decisions about reproduction.”³ In 1907 Indiana was the first state to pass a eugenics law that legalized the involuntary sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists”.⁴ At this time, this law actually pertained more towards sterilizing men, but by the 1930s the focus shifted towards targeting women for sterilization. To little surprise, the specific women that were targeted were women of color. In fact, it was so common for doctors in the south to perform involuntary sterilization on women of color receiving surgery for completely unrelated issues, that there became a name for this, it’s called the “Mississippi appendectomy”.⁵ 

One disheartening story of the types of forced sterilization that went on within the US is the story of the Relf sisters, Mary Alice and Minnie Lee Relf from Alabama. In 1973, when Mary Alice was only 12 and Minnie Lee was only 14, the two sisters were sterilized without consent by a federally funded clinic. Neither them nor their mother gave consent for this operation, and the same clinic that sterilized them was also giving injections of Depo-Provera to black women and teenagers in the community. Depo-Provera is a type of birth control which, at the time, had not even been FDA approved.⁶ The story of the Relf sisters led to the lawsuit, Relf v. Weinberger, which is a historical case. It not only revealed the thousands of sterilizations of women of color that were occurring around the country, but it also made it so that it was finally illegal for the doctors to not receive informed consent before performing any kind of sterilization procedures.⁷  The story of the Relf sisters is only one out of the thousands that exist like it within the dark history of eugenics in America. 

Great Replacement Fear:  

Just like it’s important to know the history of eugenics, it’s also important to study what this need to control the population stems from. And the answer is pretty clear when looking at the demographics that eugenics in America has and continues to target. It’s a tool for controlling minorities, and ensuring that white people don’t become a minority themselves. This concept is explored by American activist, Loretta Ross, in what she calls “The Great Replacement Fear/Theory”, which is essentially the idea that white people see eugenics as a way to ensure that they remain the majority and can maintain their power dynamic over minorities.⁸  

How it has continued into 21st century: (archives & Loreta & NYT article)

Although people would love to think of eugenics as a thing of the past, this is far from reality. Eugenics is still alive and well in America, it is just not made as clear that that is what is happening. It is hidden behind the mask of things like new reproductive technologies or “population control”. As Betsy Hartmann says, “the power of eugenic ideology lies partly in its capacity to not draw attention to itself, to appear commonplace.”⁹ 

A key example of this is the CRACK Organization, also known as Project Prevention. This program was started by a woman named Barbara Harris, with the goal of paying women addicted to drugs to take long term birth control. One of the birth controls they offer is Depo-Provera, which you may remember is the exact one that the black women in the Relf sister’s community were forced to take. The National Gender, Eugenics & Biotechnologies Task Force, or GEB TF, was created in response to the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment, and worked to fight against organizations exactly like CRACK in the early 2000s. They outlined many reasons as to why people should oppose the CRACK organization, the main one being that it is eugenic because it is working to ensure that those who are “unfit” or “undesirable” are not able to reproduce.¹⁰ As the founder of the campaign said herself, “We don’t allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having liters of children.”(Barbara Harris)¹¹ The organization is perpetuating racist ideals by targeting predominantly POC communities with their advertisements, according to an article by Judith Scully, “The statistics produced by CRACK itself indicate that a disturbingly disproportionate number of women of color have been affected by CRACK’s sterilization campaign. Of the 158 women who were either temporarily or permanently sterilized, approximately 60% of them were Black or Latina.”¹² Not only did this project exist in the early 2000s, but it’s still active today. You can go and look up “www.ProjectPrevention.org”¹³ right now to see just how alive these essentially eugenics practices are in this country to this day.

In addition to CRACK, according to a PBS article written by Liso Ko, between 2006 and 2010 California prisons authorized sterilization of almost 150 female inmates.¹⁴ And it took until December of 2015 for the Eugenics Compensation Act to be passed, which is an act to try and aid the thousands of victims of forced sterilization across the country by paying them reparations.¹⁵ But even then, this act has not accomplished much of that, as many women still have yet to be paid. According to a New York Times article by Linda Villarosa, “In 2017, Judge Sam Benningfield of White County, Tenn., was reprimanded for promising 30-day sentence reductions to incarcerated men and women who agreed to receive vasectomies or birth-control implants.”¹⁶, “In fall 2020, a nurse at a for-profit Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in George reported that unnecessary gynecological procedures – including hysterectomies – had been performed on undocumented migrant women.”¹⁷ These are recent and extremely concerning stories that directly show that eugenics are alive and well in the US, still perpetuating the racism and white supremacy that run deep in this country. 

OUTRO: 

That’s all for this episode, I hope you enjoyed learning about the past and present threat of eugenics in the US, thank you for listening!

Bibliography

Committee on Women, Population and the Environment records. Gender, Eugenics, and Biotechnology Task Force: Anti-CRACK Packs, 2000-2006. Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History. Smith College, Northampton, MA.  https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/377586.

Ko, Lisa. “Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States.” Independent Lens, PBS. January 29, 2016. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/.

PBS. “Eugenics and Birth Control | American Experience | PBS.” PBS. 2019. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-eugenics-and-birth-control/.

Project Prevention. “Project Prevention – Children Requiring a Caring Community.” n.d. https://projectprevention.org/.

Ross, Loretta J. “Reproductive Justice and Reproductive Futurism.” Lecture at Smith College, Northampton, October 10, 2024.

Villarosa, Linda. 2022. “The Long Shadow of Eugenics in America.” The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 2022, sec. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/magazine/eugenics-movement-america.html.