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Francis Galton (pictured), Charles Darwins cousin, derived the term eugenics from the Greek word eugenes, meaning good in birth or good in stock. Galton first used the term in an 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development. Francis Galton (pictured), Charles Darwins cousin, derived the term eugenics from the Greek word eugenes, meaning good in birth or good in stock. Galton first used the term in an 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development.

We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.

Galton believed that eugenics could control human evolution and development. In his writings, he argued that abstract social traits, such as intelligence, were a result of heredity. In his book, he claimed that only higher races could be successful. Galtons writings reflected prejudiced notions about race, class, gender and the overwhelming power of heredity.

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Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883 - Present)

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Eugenics is the practice or advocacyof improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by breeding out disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population. Early supporters of eugenics believed people inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies and even poverty, and that these conditions could be bred out of the gene pool.

Historically, eugenics encouraged people of so-called healthy, superior stock to reproduce and discouraged reproduction of the mentally challenged or anyone who fell outside the social norm. Eugenics was popular in America during much of the first half of the twentieth century, yet it earned its negative association mainly from Adolf Hitlers obsessive attempts to create a superior Aryan race.

Modern eugenics, more often called human genetic engineering, has come a long wayscientifically and ethicallyand offers hope for treating many devastating genetic illnesses. Even so, it remains controversial.

Eugenics literally means good creation. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato may have been the first person to promote the idea, although the term eugenics didnt come on the scene until British scholar Sir Francis Galton coined it in 1883 in his book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

In one of Platos best-known literary works, The Republic, he wrote about creating a superior society by procreating high-class people together and discouraging coupling between the lower classes. He also suggested a variety of mating rules to help create an optimal society.

For instance, men should only have relations with a woman when arranged by their ruler, and incestuous relationships between parents and children were forbidden but not between brother and sister. While Platos ideas may be considered a form of ancient eugenics, he received little credit from Galton.

In the late 19th century, Galtonwhose cousin was Charles Darwinhoped to better humankind through the propagation of the British elite. His plan never really took hold in his own country, but in America it was more widely embraced.

Eugenics made its first official appearance in American history through marriage laws. In 1896, Connecticut made it illegal for people with epilepsy or who were feeble-minded to marry. In 1903, the American Breeders Association was created to study eugenics.

John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg cereal fame, organized the Race Betterment Foundation in 1911 and established a pedigree registry. The foundation hosted national conferences on eugenics in 1914, 1915 and 1928.

As the concept of eugenics took hold, prominent citizens, scientists and socialists championed the cause and established the Eugenics Record Office. The office tracked families and their genetic traits, claiming most people considered unfit were immigrants, minorities or poor.

The Eugenics Record Office also maintained there was clear evidence that supposed negative family traits were caused by bad genes, not racism, economics or the social views of the time.

Eugenics in America took a dark turn in the early 20th century, led by California. From 1909 to 1979, around 20,000 sterilizations occurred in California state mental institutions under the guise of protecting society from the offspring of people with mental illness.

Many sterilizations were forced and performed on minorities. Thirty-three states would eventually allow involuntary sterilization in whomever lawmakers deemed unworthy to procreate.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization of the handicapped does not violate the U.S. Constitution. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, three generations of imbeciles are enough. In 1942, the ruling was overturned, but not before thousands of people underwent the procedure.

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In the 1930s, the governor of Puerto Rico, Menendez Ramos, implemented sterilization programs for Puerto Rican women. Ramos claimed the action was needed to battle rampant poverty and economic strife; however, it may have also been a way to prevent the so-called superior Aryan gene pool from becoming tainted with Latino blood.

According to a 1976 Government Accountability Office investigation, between 25 and 50 percent of Native Americans were sterilized between 1970 and 1976. Its thought some sterilizations happened without consent during other surgical procedures such as an appendectomy.

In some cases, health care for living children was denied unless their mothers agreed to sterilization.

As horrific as forced sterilization in America was, nothing compared to Adolf Hitlers eugenic experiments leading up to and during World War II. And Hitler didnt come up with the concept of a superior Aryan race all on his own. In fact, he referred to American eugenics in his 1934 book, Mein Kampf.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler declares non-Aryan races such as Jews and gypsies as inferior. He believed Germans should do everything possible, including genocide, to make sure their gene pool stayed pure. And in 1933, the Nazis created the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring which resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations.

By 1940, Hitlers master-race mania took a terrible turn as hundreds of thousands of Germans with mental or physical disabilities were euthanized by gas or lethal injection.

During World War II, concentration camp prisoners endured horrific medical tests under the guise of helping Hitler create the perfect race. Josef Mengele, an SS doctor at Auschwitz, oversaw many experiments on both adult and child twins.

He used chemical eyedrops to try and create blue eyes, injected prisoners with devastating diseases and performed surgery without anesthesia. Many of his patients died or suffered permanent disability, and his gruesome experiments earned him the nickname, Angel of Death.

In all, its estimated eleven million people died during the Holocaust, most of them because they didnt fit Hitlers definition of a superior race.

Thanks to the unspeakable atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis, eugenics lost momentum in after World War II, although forced sterilizations still happened. But as medical technology advanced, a new form of eugenics came on the scene.

Modern eugenics, better known as human genetic engineering, changes or removes genes to prevent disease, cure disease or improve your body in some significant way. The potential health benefits of human gene therapy are staggering since many devastating or life-threatening illnesses could be cured.

But modern genetic engineering also comes with a potential cost. As technology advances, people could routinely weed-out what they consider undesirable traits in their offspring. Genetic testing already allows parents to identify some diseases in their child in utero which may cause them to terminate the pregnancy.

This is controversial since what exactly constitutes negative traits is open to interpretation, and many people feel that all humans have the right to be born regardless of disease, or that the laws of nature shouldnt be tampered with.

Much of Americas historical eugenics efforts such as forced sterilizations have gone unpunished, although some states offered reparations to victims or their survivors. For the most part, though, its a largely unknown stain on Americas history. And no amount of money can ever repair the devastation of Hitlers eugenics programs.

As scientists embark on a new eugenics frontier, past failings can serve as a warning to approach modern genetic research with care and compassion.

American Breeders Association. University of Missouri.Charles Davenport and the Eugenics Record Office. University of Missouri.Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies. The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.Greek Theories on Eugenics. Journal of Medical Ethics.Josef Mengele. Holocaust Encyclopedia.Latina Women: Forced Sterilization. University of Michigan.Modern Eugenics: Building a Better Person? Helix.Nazi Medical Experiments. Holocaust Encyclopedia.Plato. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States. PBS.

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Eugenics - HISTORY

ince the start of eugenics in the 19th century, it has been one of the most debated ideologies within modern history, at least from an ethical perspective. The idea of human sterilization was invented by British explorerFrancis Galton who was inspired by Charles Darwins theory of natural selection. Due to the rise of hereditary diseases, natural selection in his eyes seemed like the best medical practice in combating these diseases and a way to remove these diseases for future generations.

During the same period of time, people around the world started to combat racism and fight for human equality as one racial prejudice seen among minorities was the higher chance of diseases or hereditary diseases being spread although medicine within the 19th century didnt permit an accurate check of hereditary diseases within ones organism.

The world of medicine (especially western) has its own section of racial prejudice where it seems to treat patients of different color differently, as if they are a totally different species, presenting (in the eyes of the western doctors at the time) more vulnerability towards hereditary diseases whilst having a higher resilience to pain, as presented in some of my works: The Myth of Black People Not Feeling Pain Is Still Believed to This Day

The biggest efforts for the eugenics program took place in America and mostly pointed toward African American and Hispanic citizens as well as mainly towards the female population. In my eyes, taking away a womans ability to give birth is pretty much like taking away her femininity and the most beautiful gift that God has given to women.

The 20th century was a long-lasting fight for the African American citizens of the United States as well as other minority groups that were seen as different due to their physical appearance. Racial prejudice and the fight for equality had become the tensest during the 1960s, especially with Martin Luther Kings movement within the United States.

Sterilization within the United States publicity began around the 1910s, and aimed to be applied by all the States of America. Although it was very much supported by the government, this program was very much influenced by racial groups such as theNeo-Malthusianswho believed that the world is overpopulated and that is what will lead to its ecological collapse.

By 1913 many norther states were already allowed by law to perform eugenics sterilization purely based on eugenic motives (avoidance of hereditary diseases).By 1913, many states had or were on their way to having eugenic sterilization laws. (Source: Boston Medical Library)

Within the eugenics program, their idea was that poverty is created due to overpopulation, and since most African Americans at the time were part of the lower class, it should be them to be sterilized above everyone else. The focus was not just on poverty, but on the finest genes and having the finest baby be born. The white population within America really made a big thing out of it by even having contests such as the Fitter Family contest or Better Baby contests.

The idea was not so much focused on creating or having the perfect race, but more like developing and reproducing the perfect white human.

At first, the group focused more on educating people below the poverty line aboutcontraceptives and sexual education. Seeing that it wasnt working, the people within the group being quite powerful, influenced the government towards a eugenics program (amongst many other external influencers).

The population was really easy to influence and indoctrinate with the idea behind the eugenics program, especially with the rise of all diseases and epidemics within the US during the 20th century. Another issue was that the population didnt really understand with exactitude in what conditions hereditary disease can be transmitted. This gave them another reason to become more racially inclined in the late 1940s and approve on an ethical level of the eugenics program when it came to people of a different color.Hereditary Genius 1869 by Francis Galton (Source: The British Library)

People did not care about the history of eugenics, such as the use of eugenics by the Nazis to remove the Jewish population within Germany in the late 1930s, early 1940s, something which also focused on the correlation between eugenics and racism. The idea of human sterilization started by Francis Galton has racism at its pillars, as with the idea of eugenics,he wanted to create the perfect race, this argument is presented by him in his bookHereditary Geniuspublished in 1869.

Since 1933 and up to 1974, between 100,000 and 150,000 black women have taken part within the eugenics program, most of them being forced and threatened by doctors and other racist groups. A small number were actually persuaded to deliberately take part in the program with small incentives or via other persuasive means. This is very much an argued number as many of the women that took part were forced and done off the record.

What is even more interesting is that the eugenics program continued even after forcing people into the eugenics program became illegal within the United States in 1974. This just adds up to the long list of human rights that have been taken from women of color within America, but the main focus should be on how the world was ok with eugenics in the first place.

Forceful sterilizationstill endures today within America, mainly in female prisons. A survey taken in 2011 by the state of California showed thatbetween 1997 and 2010 approximately 1,400 women within California prisons were forcedinto the eugenics program.

Having the ability to give life is the most human ability in my opinion, just like everything in this world has the right to reproduce and retain its legacy, so we should all. Sadly, knowing that forceful eugenics still takes place in some parts of the world and seeing the world wanting to take away a womans ability to give birth just makes me want to lose hope in humanity.

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150000 Black Women Were Forced Into the Eugenics Program - History of Yesterday

Theproduction of death under capitalism is well understood. Innumerable terms and theoretical formulations exist to define the endpoint of capitals immiseration, the one constant to human life that our political economy is particularly adept at expediting. Social murder is the term used by Engels and his contemporaries. Its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. Likewise statistical genocide, or democide. Lauren Berlant called this slow deathmass physical attenuation under global/national regimes of capitalist structural subordination.

The finality of death in the social imaginary as the ultimate conclusion of capitals violence can produce fantasies of a moral or ethical capitalism. This is arguably the dream chased by capitals true believers: with modifications to its systems, we can slow slow death to a crawl, render statistical genocide statistically insignificant. With premature death the imagined enemy of capitals internal narrative of its own beneficence, minor reforms become enshrined as a legible mirage. But the primary sites of violence under capitalism are not those that lead directly to death. They are instead the quotidian forms that situate capitalist belonging; the reproduction of norms socially as well as legally and administratively, abetted by a cynical din of knowledge production that institutionalizes logics of eugenics and austerity.

For this reason, we focus not on how capitalism reproduces death but on how and why capital keeps you alive. We consider what is elsewhere called administrative violence; in the words of Dean Spade, how law structures and reproduces vulnerability. We follow how those marked as vulnerable by administrative violence are not only immiserated, but also become the object of capital accumulation.

Central to this is the figure of the surplus population(s), the necessarily amorphous and indefinable category that is the focus of our project. How the political economy has evolved in the last century to maximize its exploitation of the surplus populationspathologizing with one hand while generating capital with the otheris a process that must be understood by those mobilizing for health justice or health communism, and to begin to imagine a world free of the eugenic philosophy of capitalism. It is toward this understanding that Health Communism begins.

The surplus population was initially defined in economic terms in separate writings by Engels and Marx in response to the moralizing, demographic panics of industrial capitalisms early philosophers, among them Adam Smith and Robert Malthus. (Smith: The demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men; Malthus: A distinction will in this case occur, between the number of hands which the stock of society could employ, and the number which its territory can maintain.) Both Engels and Marx, in referring to the surplus populations as capitals general reserve army, make clear that their formulation has to do in large part with the population of unemployed people who could otherwise be a part of the labor force. Engels refers to the surplus populations as keep[ing] body and soul together by begging, stealing, streetsweeping. . . It is astonishing in what devices this surplus population takes refuge.

Health, disability, and debility are largely absent from early discourses around the surplus populations that Marx and Engels responded to, except in cases of characteristic pathologizing of the poor. (Malthus again: The labouring poor . . .seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future.) Engels and Marx do, however, share concerns for the public health of the surplus population and the disablement wrought by industrial production. Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England can be regarded as an early work of social epidemiology, locating capitals impact on the social determinants of health just as the idea of public health was at its formation. Marx notes of the relationship between health, private sector industrialization, and the state, that

health officers, the industrial inquiry commissioners, the factory inspectors, all repeat, over and over again, that it is both necessary for [factory] workers to have these 500 cubic feet [of space per person], and impossible to impose this rule on capital. They are, in reality, declaring that consumption and the other pulmonary diseases of the workers are conditions necessary to the existence of capital.

A contemporary understanding of what it is to be surplus is necessarily more expansive. Major societal shifts in the late modern period, discussed at length in our chapter LABOR, solidified the worker/surplus binary in public consciousness in part by incorporating a conception of workers health or disability as a central facet in their certification as surplus.

The surplus, or surplus populations, can therefore be defined as a collective of those who fall outside of the normative principles for which state policies are designed, as well as those who are excluded from the attendant entitlements of capital. It is a fluid and uncertifiable population who in fact should not be rigidly defined, for reasons we discuss below. Crucially, this definition also elides traditional left conceptions of the working class or the worker. As we will describe at length throughout Health Communism, the idea that the worker is not a part of the surplus populations, yet faces constant threat of becoming certified as surplus, is one of the central social constructions wielded in support of capitalist hegemony. Similarly, the methods the state employs to certify delineations between surplus populations constitute effective tactics in maintaining this hegemony. An understanding of the intersectional demands of those subjected or excluded by capital constitutes the potential for building solidarity, which is definitionally a threat to capital. An understanding that the marking and biocertification of bodies as non-normative or surplus constitutes a false, socially constructed imposition of negative value is also a threat to capital. An understanding that illness, disability, and debility are driven by the social determinants of health, with capital as the central social determinant, itself constitutes such a threat. We argue therefore that in order to truly mount a challenge to capitalism it is necessary that our political projects have and maintain the surplus at their center.

While the surplus population does contain those who are disabled, impaired, sick, mad, or chronically ill, the characteristic vulnerability of the surplus is not inherent to their existencethat is, it is not any illness, disability, or pathologized characteristic that itself makes the surplus vulnerable. Their vulnerability is instead constructed by the operations of the capitalist state. The precarity of the surplus population is made through what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organized abandonment, the deliberate manipulation and disproportionate dispossession of resources from Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, and poor communities, rendering them more vulnerable to adverse health.

Understanding the shifting social constructions of surplus under capitalism, and the organization of this organized abandonment, is uniquely illustrative of the imbrication of health and capital. At the time of its initial formulation, surplus populations are largely discussed in the sense of surplus constituting superfluous (another term wielded synonymously for this population at the time) or otherwise irrelevance, waste. We can see this literalized in early American labor benefits: the few national unions that offered a permanent disability benefit paid a sum equal to the meager benefit a workers family would receive on the workers death. A worker becoming disabled thus not only constitutively passed the boundary from worker to surplustheir social value following disablement was, effectively, as good as dead.

This categorization and certification of surplus has become a focal struggle in the history of capitalism, socially reproducing a collective imaginary of who is a worker, who is property, and who is surplusand to what degree of personhood each category is entitled under the scope of law. Those who are deemed to be surplus are rendered excess by the systems of capitalist production and have been consequently framed as a drain or a burden on society. But the surplus population has become an essential component of capitalist society, with many industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, confinement, study, cure, measurement, treatment, extermination, housing, transportation, and care of the surplus. In this way, those discarded as non-valuable life are maintained as a source of extraction and profit for capital.

This rather hypocritical stancethe surplus are at once nothing and everything to capitalismis an essential contradiction Liat Ben-Moshe identifies this characteristic through the intersection of disability and incarceration: Surplus populations are spun into gold. Disability is commodified through [a] matrix of incarceration (prisons, hospitals, nursing homes). Jasbir Puar, in The Right to Maim: Debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves . . . Maiming is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable.

Inmuch of the following, we situate our analysis of the social construction of surplus through the lens of disability, as one of the many contingent embodiments of surplus identities. Disability not only operates as one perceived extreme of the worker/surplus binary but is also understood within the capitalist political economy as constituting, or at least including, a state of being irremediably ill or unwell. In this sense, it is a total ideological reduction of the subject into a valuation of what role they are certified as capable to adopt under capitalism. Far from being left as an abstract category, the state, including the constituent social-reproductive apparatuses upholding it, has developed over time an array of tools to certify the exact boundaries of what qualifies an individual as surplus. For the surplus, this regime of biocertification shapes both how the state interacts with them and the boundaries of their participation in social life. In Fantasies of Identification, Ellen Samuels analyzes how certain forms of state assistance, resource allocation, or support are often understood within the popular imaginary as a kind of currency. These benefits are gatekept by abstract bureaucratic systems of eligibility predicated on the verifiability of someones biological state and identity. As such, Samuels argues, the role of biocertification, namely the process of assuring that only legitimate claimants receive this currency-in-kind, is reinscribed with a simulated social banking function, reinforcing the idea that the process of biocertification itself is an efficient means of allocating economic resources. Biocertification is assumed to be a necessary gatekeeping mechanism or checkpoint to prevent the wasting of resources on fakers, cheats, imposters, and malingerers: invoking both a model of scarcity, in which resources must be reserved for those who truly deserve them, and a distrust of self-identification, in which statements of identity are automatically suspect unless and until validated by an outside authority.

The generosity of these currencies-in-kind is often extraordinarily overstated in the social-reproductive imaginary. Cultural perceptions dictate a picture of disability, illness, and marginalization which is not reflective of the material gains that come as a result of being biocertified for social welfare supports like the United States Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or Medicare/Medicaid. This is what Samuels describes as a tendency to commonly perceive these [eligible] identities as lucrative commodities. The boundaries and borders of qualification are guarded by a combined medical-legal authority and rest on the understanding that identities are readily measurable, verifiable, and fixed, ascribing meaning to biological observation and institutions of authority which seek to standardize the line between social citizenship and exclusion.

This constructed preference for standardization and biocertification arises out of the imbrication of health and capital. If the economy of health is to be bled for excess profit, then the fundamentally inefficient process of facilitating our mutual survival must be made to be efficient. The modern welfare state measures and quantifies metrics of individual health against a picture of the individuals economic resources and labor power in order to restrict the administration of aid. To determine eligibility for SSDI in the United States, for example, the Social Security Administration (SSA) uses formulas and charts to transform bodily conditions into percentages of ability. Physical conditions of the body and its organs are clinically evaluated to determine their relative distance or deviance from an abstract ideal normal body (worker). To the SSA, all impairments, symptoms, circumstances, and conditions are of equal value and attention; all health is equally neutral. This is because the severity of illness, impairment, or disability is not actually the metric the SSA uses to determine eligibility. The crucial axis is instead the individuals relationship to work. What emerges from these phenomena is a shadow biocertification regime that hides in plain sight as a means test to ward off would-be waste, fraud, and abuse. Labor power is equated to bodily state, and health is measured through this contradictory lens.

To the SSA, illness is only relevant in relation to whether and to what degree it impacts a persons capacity to work. As Rosemarie Garland Thompson argues, this presumes that ill-health, disability, and impairment are located only in the body and not also in the broader social, political, and geographical context that comprises the individuals social determinants of health. Impairments and disabilities are reduced to numbers on a page: On one scale, for example, limb amputation translates as a 70% reduction in ability to work, while amputation of the little finger at the distal joint reduces the capacity for labor by a single percentage point. Garland Thompsons critique of the disability eligibility schema in the US questions the ability of the state to meaningfully measure such complex and dynamic situations as a persons health and worth using a precise mathematical relation. Labor power, social and material conditions, and bodily states are collapsed into a single metric, measuring all health along a continuum of relative currency.

The ideological framing of wage work as a mitigating factor in an individuals eligibility for health and welfare benefits attempts to map economic valuations of life onto regimes of biocertification, as is readily evident in SSDI determinations. Social Security disability eligibility is a legal process of decertifying a body for work, not the certification of a body for any type of qualifying disability or impairment demonstrating need for care and additional social supports. These notions have become replicated in social security and social insurance programs internationally. Countless states limit or adjust their benefits dependent on the amount of productive labor the individual has already participated in during their life. This has become particularly prevalent alongside the spread of social insurance privatization schemes by international financial firms, as discussed at length in BORDER.

The authority of medical opinion is widely used as a means to measure the truth of a bodys impairment and certify to the states satisfaction that the benefit applicant is truly biologically incapable for work, through no fault of their own. This arguably subjective perspective of medical authority is treated as if it is a visible and clearly quantifiable fact. The state relies upon the signifier of medical authority as a means of depersonalizing and depoliticizing the biocertifi cation process writ large. Relying on claimed scientific or medical frameworks, biocertification schemes seek to identify and sort bodies, placing each within the context of their correct category, which is reflective of the intersections of their race, gender, citizenship, wealth, or ability, as a means of validating the social truth of a persons identity. This framework assumes that a persons biological identity can in fact be scientifically measured, rendering their ultimate categorization or eligibility as if depoliticizeda procedural, objective, binary decision. An individuals material conditions or identity cannot be understood as in any way fluid or abstract under this biocertification preference. Existing outside of certification means categoric exclusion.

Biocertification regimes assume that validating characteristics are readily obvious or apparent, falling squarely in the category of common sense generalizations, meaningful or not, about various observed metrics. Despite little scientific basis, strategies of biocertification are treated as fact and reinscribed through law and policy, leveraging medical authority to consolidate the power of the state to determine life chanceswho lives and who dies. Importantly, none of this is to say that states of being, conditions, ailments, and so on do not exist. Far from it. Instead, it is to say that the intersection of those conditions of healthor simply of being, of states of existencehave become of signifi cant use to capital in its demarcation of ontological boundaries within society and the resulting distribution of resources. Resisting biocertification does not mean resisting diagnosis or identification. It means resisting the leveraging of these certifications by capital and the state.

***

Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant is now available from Verso.

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SURPLUS The New Inquiry - The New Inquiry

Thursday, October 13, 5p.m., Graham Hall, Brown Fine Arts Center

Jacqueline D. Antonovich is Assistant Professor of History at Muhlenberg College. Professor Antonovich is a historian of health and medicine in the United States, with particular interests in how race, genderand politics shape the medical field and access to health care. Professor Antonovich also founded Nursing Clio, a public-facing academic blog that explores intersections of medicines history (and present) and identity, especially race and gender.

Between 1900 and 1930, efforts to curb abortion, restrict contraceptionand promote eugenics dominated public and legal discourse on marriage, pregnancyand childbirth in the United States. This talk examines the role of women physicians in driving discourse, circulating ideasand setting policy agendas on reproductive surveillance and restrictions during this period. Through two case studies, we will explore how women physicians became an effective force for bringing eugenics to the massesbecoming the middleman between scientist and mother, researcher and reformer.

Antonovichs lecture is in conjunction with the Kahn Institute yearlong project Health and Medicine, Culture and Society: Crossroads in a Liberal Arts Education.

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A Desire to Cure, Not to Punish: Women Physicians and Eugenics in the American West, 19001930 by Jacqueline D. Antonovich - Smith College Grcourt Gate

Published 8:00 am Sunday, October 16, 2022

By Jeff Justice

January 1933, the month and year of my birth, witnessed the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man of privilege who brought us out of a depression through social programs and an understanding of the needs of the American people. At the same time, in Europe, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. There were many good people who remained silent during his rise to power as their neighbors were taken in by Hitlers rhetoric and lies. Responding to a fire of questionable origin in the Reichstag, within four weeks he had instituted the Reich Fire Policies and later an Enabling Act, assuring that he would have the power to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag, thus bypassing the system of checks and balances. This ultimately led to the loss of individual rights and since the German people were constantly bombarded with lies about the Jewish people, the superiority of Aryans and because too many remained silent, there was tacit acceptance of immoral policies: Kristallnacht, Eugenics and the Holocaust.

There are disturbing parallels in our current political environment. I think the persistent racial and religious rumors surrounding our first black president and echoed by Donald Trump (Obama is a Muslim and was born in Africa) have been accepted by a surprisingly large number of Americans whose judgment has been clouded and confused by politicians more interested in their personal agendas than in the well-being of our democracy.

Why have so many Americans accepted Trumps lie that his election was stolen despite physical evidence that proves otherwise? Through his rhetoric and actions, he has condoned and encouraged, violence to the end of saving the country from an illegal presidency and from an invasion of aliens and the scourge of replacement of the white race.

Just as German citizens remained silent in the 1930s, many Americans, nearly 100 years later, remain silent when neighbors, friends, and family seem to accept lies concerning the 2020 election and the insurrection of January 6. Unfortunately, silence will not protect our constitutional democracy and should no longer be an option in our Reichstag moment. There should be no shame assigned to the many people who voted for Trump in the 2016 or 2020 election and, as with Bush v Gore, no one should be blamed for demanding a recount, but once that had been accomplished and the result was in, the candidate and his supporters should have accepted the result and participated in the constitutionally mandated peaceful transfer of power. Otherwise, our democracy will be lost.

Jeff Justice

Oxford

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Silence will not protect our democracy - The Oxford Eagle - Oxford Eagle

"The imaginative power of 'The World Without Us' is compulsive and nearly hypnotic - make sure you have time to be kidnapped into Alan Weisman's alternative world before you sit down with the book because you will not soon return. This is a text that has a chance to change people, and so make a real difference for the planet," wrote award-winning author Charles Wohlforth in a review of the New York Times bestseller 'The World Without Us' by Alan Weisman.

Alan Weisman, the journalist, author of six books, and a professor of journalism, recently visited Bangladesh.

Although not 'kidnapped,' we were indeed captivated by the writer's lifetime of experience and wisdom when Weisman sat down in an interview with The Business Standard.

We managed 'to return' to produce an abridged version of the interview with Weisman.

What brought you to Bangladesh?

I am working on a book with kind of a vast topic, which is what are humanity's best and most realistic hopes for getting through this very difficult century that we have.

I am looking at energy issues, food production, and how to preserve nature in the teeth of a major extinction event.

I am particularly looking at individuals who, despite the long odds and despite what they know about the change in climate, or other problems - problems with their governments or political problems - are still determined to find us a way to the future.

I have been doing this in several different countries. I started my research in Colombia and I was in Honduras, in Mexico along the Mesoamerican reef which is the longest coral reef in the world outside of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

I was looking at the reef system; I was with scientists and local coastal managers looking at how to protect the coast from climate change by using reefs and dunes and mangroves - things like that.

I have also been to Spain, I have been to the Netherlands. I went to the latter because New York City was talking to Dutch consultants on how to protect the city from rising sea levels using barriers. The same thing is happening in Miami, in New Orleans, in Jakarta and Manila, [and] places all over the world including Bangladesh.

And that was interesting to me because like Bangladesh, the Netherlands is kind of the drain of Europe- the two major rivers the Meuse and the Rhine enter the sea there. The Netherlands, for 800 years, have devised water policies to keep from drowning but how would that translate to a country four times bigger with much more powerful rivers - the Brahmaputra and the Padma and the Meghna? Could Bangladesh afford it? How would it work?

But other things had also occurred to me about Bangladesh that were very important for my book. One was biodiversity in the Sundarbans -the most important mangrove forest in the world and one of the most important tiger reserves in the world.

I had also done some research for my book on jaguars in the Americas so looking at tigers was like a very nice compliment. And then the decision to build a coal-fired plant in Rampal, right at the edge of the Sundarbans!

So those were the three reasons that I wanted to come to Bangladesh: the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100, the Sundarbans, and to see why coal is still being burnt here while the rest of the world is turning away from it or at least was before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Is this new book a sequel to your last book, 'Countdown: Our last, best hope for a future on earth?'

Some people have said that. 'Countdown' was about how our species would suddenly quadruple in a single century, which never happened before for any large species, and what position that would leave us in.

Many people have asked me if I think that overpopulation is the biggest environmental problem and my reply is, well, if there were not so many people would we even have environmental problems?

Then in my previous book 'The world without us', which was kind of a backward way of looking at the environment, I tricked people into reading an environmental book because people are always scared that oh these books are so grim and scary and they say well we are all gonna die anyway, so I just killed everybody right off in the beginning and they (readers) did not have to worry about that anymore and everybody loves to look at the future, so that is what the book was about- a future without us.

My hope was, and I think it worked, that people were just fascinated by how quickly nature would recover things and how quickly it would break down our infrastructure.

What I really hoped was that readers would say oh, that is such a beautiful world now! Is there some way we could still have that world and also keep human beings as part of it so we could live in harmony with nature instead of in what I call Mortal Kombat with nature?

Someone I had an interview with thought that we should just stop having babies and let the human race die off in 100 years because now we are making such a mess of things that if we just let ourselves gradually vanish over a century then at least we would not be bringing all these other species down with us.

So, knowing that I wrote the book because I do want a world with us and not without us, I had to find out how many babies we are producing now; and then I found out that the numbers are astonishing - we add about one million people every four days and that is clearly not sustainable.

But that caused me to write 'Countdown'. And so many people have said that the current book I am working on - which is going to be called 'Hope dies last' - is kind of the last one of a trilogy.

When anyone talks about family planning in the context of population control, the first thing that may come to their mind is eugenics. This kind of discourses have been used to oppress working class and low caste women all around the world. So is there a way to do population control without it being used to justify eugenics and oppression of women?

First of all, the phrase population control has turned out to be a very uncomfortable phrase because this sounds like controlling women and women do not want it. The very first big applied eugenics was not an experiment, it was a programme done by the United States on the island of Puerto Rico.

It was in the 1930s when the population was starting to explode. The United States has shamefully treated Puerto Rico like a colony. There, women would go into the clinic sometimes because they were sick, they had the flu, [and] they would come out with a tubal ligation. They had no idea this was gonna happen. It was a shameful process.

The next big one was in India during the 1970s.About seven to eight million women were forcibly sterilised there. About the same number of men were also forcibly vasectomised.

It was terrible and it happened at the same time that the feminist movement was growing in the world so anything having to do with population control became a way of men controlling women's bodies and they were violently opposed to it.

Then in 1980, China's one child policy came in and there was more forced sterilisation and forced abortion there. And I wrote about this in 'Countdown' and it was a very surprising chapter to particularly readers in my country: the solution, to answer to your question, came from a Muslim country.

During the Iraq-Iran war, NATO was supplying armaments and even the raw materials for nerve gas to the Iraqis. All Iran had were (dead) bodies, so Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa asking every fertile woman in Iran to do her patriotic duty and get pregnant to produce a 20 million person army to fight the invaders. And so the fertility rate in Iran was at one point probably the highest in human history.

But at the end of the war, the economist who was the head of the budget went to the Ayatollah and said all these children who were born during the war, they are gonna grow up in the next 10 to 15 years and they were not going to be able to employ all of them.

(The new) Ayatollah issued a fatwa saying there is nothing in the Quran that prohibits having a tubal ligation or a vasectomy if you have the number of children you believe you can responsibly care for.

They left the decision to everybody but the only thing that was obligatory was premarital classes where if you are getting married, you have to go to either the mosque or a clinic and learn, among other things, how much it costs to raise, feed, and clothe a child.

A lot of people got the message that way. They also made contraception - everything from condoms to operations - free and accessible throughout the country. And they did not call it population control, they called it family planning.

Leaving the decision to women is empowering, that is not eugenics. Giving women reproductive rights, that is the way to go.

Is the solution you envision for climate change compatible with capitalism, that is, with the relentless pursuit for profit that animates multinational corporations and monopolies?

Two things got us into the trouble that we are at. One is overpopulation, which happened for two main reasons: 1. modern medicine reduced infant mortality and 2. the average lifespan of human beings is almost double of what it was before the smallpox vaccine started all these medical improvements.

But much more important than that was we learned how to produce much more food than nature ever could by force feeding cultivation with chemical and nitrate synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.

This fertiliser also produces a lot of problems: greenhouse gases when it is made because it is very energy intensive, and then when it breaks down it produces nitrous oxide, which, after methane, is the third most powerful greenhouse gas.

Secondly, big population has been a boon to capitalism because it meant more consumers, and companies got richer. The other reason that capitalism thrives on big populations is that the more people there are the cheaper labour is.

This is why we hear economists say that it is dangerous to have family planning programmes. One of the excesses of capitalism is now the very top one-tenth of 1% has most of the money in the world and that is wrong.

Businesses got us into this trouble, partly, along with the population, and now we need businesses' help to get us out of this trouble. It is really important that businesses become convinced that they can make money doing things to help the climate.

Reading your book, 'Countdown' feels like having a world tour. You surely travelled dozens of countries before writing that one. How long does it take for you to write a book?

Yes, I visited 21 countries. I started the research for 'Countdown' in 2009 and the book came out in 2013. I was so exhausted after that. This one was supposed to come out in 2022, but because of the pandemic it will come out in 2024. I am probably seeing nine countries and several places in the US for this book. I wish I could see the whole world.

I started working intensely on 'The World Without Us' at the end of 2004, and it came out in 2007. I brought into it some reporting I had done before. So, sometimes I think that the research for these books has taken all my career because everything that I have learned I bring into them.

What have you seen in Bangladesh apart from the Sundarbans?

I went to Kutubdia Island, which was damaged terribly during the 1991 cyclone. Then I went to a climate refugee camp on the mainland where thousands of people were taken. It is arguably the first climate refugee camp on earth and it is here in Bangladesh.

I went to one of the Rohingya refugee camps. There I spoke to a solar energy company, which is an interest of mine coupled with the coal fired power plants.

Bangladesh at one point was the fastest growing solar development in the world, but things have shifted. There are solar panels everywhere, you see them in Dhaka but they are not connected to the grid in most cases. They are there because there is some building code that requires solar panels (on the roof).

My country does really stupid things all the time so I am not singling Bangladesh out as being stupid.You have got the infrastructure in place; please connect up those panels to the grid right now. It will ease a lot of this load sharing, if not all of it, and the smell and noise from diesel will cease.

You surely have been reading Bangladeshi newspapers. As a journalist, do you have any observations on the country's media industry?

Yes, I have been reading the English language newspapers. I think you guys have been very careful to report well without *[upsetting] the government. Every country that self-sensors, for instance the Israelis, are famous for this: they find ways to insert the truth.

When you are reading, it has got double meaning: you know you are reading this but an astute reader will really know that oh, so this is what is going on.

I am sorry that you have to be careful with your government. But now that journalism is under stress, we need journalists more than ever.

So what is our 'last best hope for a future on earth'?

As I said, the future is uncertain. The climate- it is already warmer, there is already more carbon dioxide than there has been in the atmosphere since over three million years ago.

But there are great minds everywhere in the world. Use those minds and if we do our best and our smartest then maybe humanity can find a way to coexist with the warmer world that we are certain to have.

The most important thing we can do now is to stop accelerating that warming. Turn this around before this really gets out of control.

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Hope Dies Last: A tte--tte with Alan Weisman - The Business Standard

Democrats love to talk about abortion and systemic racism, just not in the same conversation.

The National Right to Life Center estimates that by the end of 2021, 63.5 million abortions had been performed in the United States since the Supreme Courts 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Nearly 40% of women who seek abortions are African American, which is astounding, considering this demographic made up just 13.6% of the population at the time of the 2020 census. This likely means that over 20 million black babies have been aborted during the past 50 years.

20 million equates to 6% of the total U.S. population. Its also approximately 45% of the current black American population of 45 million. And, had these children been born, blacks would represent about 20% of the total population. Clearly, abortion has had an enormous effect on blacks in America.

THE FIVE STATES THAT WILL HAVE ABORTION MEASURES ON THE BALLOT IN NOVEMBER

In August 2019, then-New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet assembled his troops to introduce the controversial 1619 Project, their deliberate attempt to "reframe Americas history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

The editors of the "paper of record" had decided that systemic racism should become the central issue in the upcoming presidential campaign. Baquet told his staff, "Race in the next year and I think, to be frank, what I hope you come away from this discussion with race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story."

Following George Floyds death in May 2020, systemic racism exploded into the national debate. Suddenly, every institution, the U.S. justice system, our history, our Founding Fathers, and of course, every Republican, was declared racist. Woke corporations forced employees to attend diversity training sessions to learn how to be "less white." And demands for equity became ubiquitous.

Planned Parenthood was also forced to recognize its own racist roots. The group admitted that Margaret Sanger, the organizations founder, was a racist with "harmful connections to the eugenics movement." Sanger established a predecessor organization, "The Negro Project," in 1939. In turn, Planned Parenthood removed Sangers name from its Manhattan health clinic and renamed nearby "Margaret Sanger Square." In a later, more formal declaration that it called "a reckoning," Planned Parenthood acknowledged that Sanger was a white supremacist. The group also confirmed that Sanger delivered a speech to "a womens auxiliary branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, in 1926."

The statement said Sanger "believed in eugenics an inherently racist and ableist ideology that labeled certain people unfit to have children." It added that Sangers actions had "undermined reproductive freedom and caused irreparable damage to the health and lives of generations of Black people, Latino people, Indigenous people, immigrants, people with disabilities, people with low incomes, and many others."

The racial disparities between abortion rates for black and white women in America cannot be denied. In his concurrence in the 2019 abortion case Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: "There are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area." Unfortunately, renaming a clinic in New York City and disavowing the organizations founder are woefully insufficient to compensate for the evils put in motion by this repellent woman and perpetuated by her successors.

So, yes, lets talk about abortion and systemic racism in the same conversation.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor tothe Washington Examiner andthe Western Journal.Her articles have appeared atMSN,RedState,Newsmax, theFederalist, andRealClearPolitics. Follow her onTwitterorLinkedIn.

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20 million black babies have been aborted since Roe v. Wade. Where is the equity in that? - Washington Examiner

The Vassal Lane Upper School, temporarily in East Cambridge, should have a new name by the time it reopens in West Cambridge. (Photo: Marc Levy)

A second Cambridge public school is on track for a name change to avoid honoring a racist.

The School Committee agreed unanimously Tuesday to find a new name for the Vassal Lane Upper School before the end of this academic year, asking the district to propose how by Dec. 31.

The citys four upper schools are all identified by the names of their street addresses, but that means the Vassal Lane Upper School by extension honors John Vassal, whose family enslaved hundreds in the Jamaican sugar industry. The family were Loyalists during the American Revolution who fled Cambridge for Boston in 1774, then moved to Canada.

Theres an early front-runner for replacing the name of John Vassal, and one in which some committee members found some satisfaction: Darby Vassal.

Darby Vassal was once enslaved by John Vassal but by the time of his death in 1782, had become an activist with religious, political and economic societies of the time, according to the History Cambridge organization. An art installation up through Nov. 6 at Christ Church, Cambridge, in Harvard Square, tells his story and reveals his tomb under the church, with the Vassal family.

We very easily could name the school tonight. We have lots of ideas of who we want to honor, said vice chair Rachel Weinstein, who wrote the motion for the renaming. But we want this to be an inclusive process.

Precedent from 2002

This will not be the first time a Cambridge school is renamed to avoid the stain of racism. The Maria L. Baldwin School was known as the Agassiz School from 1874 until 2002, but that name was associated with Louis Agassiz, a Harvard scholar who promoted eugenics. (The school is in the Baldwin neighborhood, which was renamed from the Agassiz neighborhood in August 2021.)

The call to change the name of the Vassal Lane Upper School came from students and it was students who led the work for the Baldwin name changes, noted Carolyn Turk, the districts deputy superintendent. In each process, there were students who did a tremendous amount of research, yet in each case they knew this was something the community needed to be a part of, Turk said.

Still, superintendent Victoria Greer said those who attend the school or did attend it which includes children of Weinstein and fellow committee member David Weinstein (no relation) should have a strong voice in deciding the change. Greer said her process would turn first to Vassall students, staff and faculty; principal Daniel Coplon-Newfield has begun work, she said.

Black, indigenous and other

Rachel Weinsteins motion asks that the name change honors a Black Cantabrigian or multiple local Black leaders who contributed to the advancement of equitable education, civil rights and the community, leading member JosLuis Rojas Villarreal to ask if the order couldnt be broadened to include consideration of indigenous peoples such as those of local interest highlighted by the work of History Cambridge.

There was resistance from Weinstein and others. For this particular school, it seems most appropriate to face the history of enslavement right here in Cambridge and speak to it and do some healing. It would feel like a slight not not to acknowledge the black history tied to the Vassal name, she said. You make a good point about in general about recognizing the diversity of our student population and ensuring that all students see themselves reflected we have three other upper schools that are also named after the streets theyre located on.

There should at least be a stated intent to consider indigenous peoples and other minorities in the renamings, Rojas said drawing a suggestion from Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui to submit a motion calling for that instead of amending the Tuesday order.

Siddiqui agreed it made sense to overwrite the Vassal Lane name with a name that honored black residents, and student committee member Adelina Escamilla-Salomon agreed there was extreme value in renaming the school to honor a black person where young people would be going and learning its history. I do see the value in what member Rojas was saying.

A change for the street named after John Vassal is likely to be proposed as well. A City Council policy order adopted in June 2019 called for review of monuments, memorials and markers throughout the city to see which honored people linked to the slave trade or engaged in other similarly shameful acts and due for a rethinking.

There are a lot of things that need be renamed, Siddiqui said, promising recommendations in the next one to three years.

Long overdue

The Vassal Lane Upper Schools in fact, all of the upper schools are long overdue for it. They were created as part of an Innovation Agenda approved by the committee in March 2011, and then-superintendent Jeff Young told city councillors at a June 2012 budget hearing that the renaming process for each would begin that fall, possibly through contests.

The street names were meant to be placeholders, Young said. We looked at it as the one element of the Innovation Agenda that would not be controversial.

Two of the four schools have even been through elaborate and expensive campus reconstructions without getting new names. Vassal Lanes campus in West Cambridge, shared with the Tobin Montessori School, is undergoing a $299 million renovation now, during which the upper school has relocated to 158 Spring St., East Cambridge. The schools expected reopening is in the fall of 2025.

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An overdue renaming of the Vassal Lane school wins approval, with process to end by summer - Cambridge Day