Monthly Archives: April 2021

In January 1936, San Francisco heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt shocked the nation when she claimed that, in order to deprive her of her inheritance, her mother, Maryon, had her declared "feebleminded" and then sterilized without her knowledge. Ann explained that her father, legendary inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt, had bequeathed two-thirds of his $4 million dollar estate to her and one-third to her mother, but his will provided that her share went to Maryon if she died childless. Knowing this, and presuming she would outlive her daughter, who had bronchial trouble, Maryon had taken steps to see that Ann never became a mother. A mere months before Ann's 21stbirthday, she conspired with two doctors to have Ann's fallopian tubes removed during a scheduled appendectomy.

In addition to suing her mother for half a million dollars, Ann demanded a full accounting of her mother's spending. She claimed Maryon had squandered much of her trust fund at gambling resorts across the world.

It wasn't long before San Francisco prosecutors learned of the case, filing criminal mayhem charges against Maryon and the physicians. But before authorities could get to Maryon's penthouse, she'd fled for the East Coast. She left behind an affidavit explaining herself: She was merely protecting society from the effects of Ann becoming pregnant. Ann had been deemed a "moron." (Indeed, prior to surgery, a psychologist had peppered the heiress with civics questions that she refused to answer.) Ann also had "erotic tendencies." She had been addicted to masturbation as a child, the affidavit claimed, and was now attracted to "men in uniform," including "Negroes." She'd once tried to elope with the chauffeur, to whom she'd written long letters containing her pubic hairs.

For the next six months, the two women riveted the public with their claims against each other. It wasn't merely the salacious nature of the feud that raised eyebrows, but also the unusualness of Ann's case. The heiress hardly resembled the typical victim of eugenics; she was educated, wealthyand white. This raised the question: Could any woman deemed"sexually deviant" be plucked off the street and operated upon?

She could, for the simple reason that she threatened to amalgamate the races. As Ann's mother and the doctors' attorneys managed to persuade the public, "adrift" women constituted a grave danger to white society, which only surgery could ameliorate.

Long after Ann's death and the eventual repeal of sterilization laws, the heiress's story and that of eugenics, more broadly, remain instructive. Together, they reveal how narrowly whiteness is conceived and how readily the very institution that confers a person's privilege can become her undoing. They reveal a truth that scholars and activists are only now beginning to make mainstream: White peoplecan be collateral victims of white supremacy.

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Eugenics was a movement to protect the purity of the white race. It took hold in America precisely at a moment when the nation's racial makeup was transforming. In the early 20th century, Eastern Europeans were emigrating in record numbers, andAfrican Americans were migrating from the rural South to the industrial North. In order to protect the white race from "undesirables," eugenicists weredetermined, among other measures, to eliminate the "waste humanity" from their own ranks. Conflating mental, moraland physical defects, they targeted poor, disabled, substance-dependentand sexually transgressive white peopleperceived to threaten the vitality of the gene pool, either by virtue of their heritable traits or their seeming likelihood to cross the color line.

Ann's mother exploited these realities, making much of Ann's flirting with an African American train porter. In telling of Ann's preference for "the help," she also stoked fears of low-class men bringing out women's baser instincts. According to psychologists at the time, it was household workers who tended to introduce perversion into respectable homes, corrupting wellborn individuals like Ann.

Intuiting the racial dynamics at play, Ann re-asserted her whiteness and cast her mother as the real threat. She had experts attest to her fluency in French and Italian, as well as her high-brow literary tastes. One physician noted that she read books on Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Marie Antoinette, in addition to Charles Dickens' works. If Ann had any defects, her defense claimed, they were due to her having been neglected by a mother who led a riotous life; it was Maryon who drank herself stupid and threw herself at workingmen.

Ann's advocates never questioned the ethics of sterilization, either in the civil case or the criminal one, in which the two doctors stood trial in August, while Maryon remained on the East Coast convalescing from a suicide attempt. Focused on establishing the unlawfulness of Ann's surgery, these witnesses simply tried to prove her undeserving of sterilization.

It was no use. The judge dismissed the case against the doctors, finding that they and Ann's mother had acted lawfully. The public seemed to accept this outcome. There were no protests or riots; and for the rest of her life, the heiress was lambasted by the press.

The case faded into obscurity, but not before helping eugenicists to rebrand their movement in ways that would enable involuntary sterilization practices to endure well into the 20th century. As Wendy Kline first recounted in her book, "Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom," the case abetted eugenicists to shift focus from heredity to environment exactly at a moment when scientists were exposing the flaws of eugenicists' claims about inheritance. It also authorized the use of sterilization in private practice. These changes paved the way for thousands of individuals the majorityof color to be operated upon without consent. In California, the heiress' tragedy would reverberate in the many instances of Mexican Americans sterilized on the grounds that they were "hyper-breeders" whose children would inevitably drain public resources.

Yet, for all its impact on people of color, the case also reminds us of the great tragedies endured by white peoplethought to imperil the racial hierarchy. Still today, poor, disabled, transgenderand norm-breaking whites face an increasedrisk of state violence, including police brutality and forced sterilization. Many in white evangelical circles report trauma from the rituals of "purity culture," whose racial animus is documented in a slew of recent books.

Scholar-activists like Jonathan M. Metzl and Heather McGhee have also called attention to the harms whites experience as a result of the dismantling of public programs, brought on by a "politics of racial resentment." Their respective bestsellers, "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland" and "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together," contend that whitesgreatly suffer from a culture that casts government dependents as menaces to society. As in the early 20th century, when eugenics first flourished, the pervasive contempt for such dependents cannot be disentangled from fears of non-whites gaining dominance. Yet, far from rooting out racism, many marginalized whites fall for the myth that dark-skinned people are to blame for their woes, supporting the very austerity measures responsible for growing poverty.

Before her death from cancer at 41, Ann fell into similar patterns of thinking. She often appealed to her wealth and lineage to disparage other women, including one whose husband she stole. She never seemed to realize how such classism had contributed to her tragedy.

But she did show great compassion to at least one outcast woman: her mother. When Maryon died in 1939, never having fully recovered from suicide attempt, Ann travelled east to mourn her. Perhaps, having been excoriated for her the same crime (maternal unfitness), she recognized her parent for the hurting woman she'd become. At Maryon's graveside, she may have fleetingly realized what Metzl, McGhee, and others have: Our well-being is intimately bound up with others' and no one will be truly free until all are.

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Eugenics, racism and the forced sterilization of heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt - Salon

Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson called out the organization's founder in a New York Times op-ed, saying she had ties to "white supremacist groups and eugenics."

Margaret Sanger, founder of the reproductive healthcare nonprofit organization, is known for having devoted her entire life to expanding access to birth control. Since her death, some historians and biographers have been characterizing her as a proponent of the eugenics movement, meant to control populations for "desirable" characteristics while weeding out so-called undesirable ones.

"Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder's actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate 'product of her time,'" Johnson wrote in the op-ed.

"Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated," she continued.

Sanger once spoke to the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey to hype up birth control , noted Johnson while pointing out examples of her shamed history. She also "endorsed" a Supreme Court decision that led to state-controlled sterilization attempts, Johnson said. This decision allowed the government to sterilize people it deemed "unfit" to have kids, usually without their consent or knowledge.

Germany also established a forced sterilization program in the 1930s, which Sanger supported.

"I admire the courage of a government that takes a stand on sterilization of the unfit and second, my admiration is subject to the interpretation of the word 'unfit,'" Sanger said in praise of the program. "If by 'unfit' is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an admirable gesture, but if 'unfit' refers to races or religions, then that is another matter, which I frankly deplore."

Johnson's comments mark the latest in a broad push to distance Planned Parenthood from Sanger's legacy.

Last year, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, located in Manhattan, announced it would drop Sanger's name from its building "as a public commitment to reckon with its founder's harmful connections to the eugenics movement."

Have a news tip? Reach this reporter at ydzhanova@insider.com

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Planned Parenthood CEO calls out founder for her 'association with white supremacist groups and eugenics' - Business Insider

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of AmericaBy Daniel Okrent | Scribner528 pages $30Langans Book Mark: 4/4 stars

Until recently, the US has had a Republican administration anxious to keep certain peoples that it deems undesirable from immigrating into the country. If you thought this was a new impulse, Dan Okrents The Guarded Gate shows that it is a repulsive American policy with a recurring history.

Okrent is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and first public editor of The New York Times, former editor at Large at Time, and managing editor of Life Magazine.

Part of the story of The Guarded Gate is one of scientists, who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing an intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers many of them progressives who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenics arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.

Readers may find it hard to believe, but this policy is, relatively speaking, very old. Okrent, who took five years to write this important book documents the history of this plan that began in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. (Slightly earlier, 1891, Lodge wrote a piece for the North American entitled The Restriction of Immigration.) By 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that biological laws had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans and the restrictive law was enacted three years later.

This proof is something that fair-minded people find repugnant: a combination of the rise of eugenics, Nazism, and a repeat of Know Nothing political party beliefs that began in the 1850s, that were xenophobic and hostile to immigration.

Beliefs werent very different in the United Kingdom, where it was thought that the falling birthrate would soon lead to a national deterioration while the country fell to the Irish and the Jews and this was after Parliaments adoption of the Aliens Act of 1905, which had already cut the numbers of Jewish immigration into the UK by two thirds. About this alleged deterioration The Times of London asked in 1912: whether any of us are really wise enough to know how a human society ought to be constituted.

Okrent begins the story with Ellis Island, 1925. There youll remember, on the base of the nearby Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazaruss famous poem invited the world to Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The author tells us that at that time, many Americans still found a certain nobility, a confirmation of the nations promise, in Lazaruss word and image they evoked.

However, even then he warns, It was likely that even more citizens perceived evidence of menace, and threat, and an inevitable national decline.

Why so, we ask?

Henry Curran, commissioner of immigration for the Port of New York at the time, signaled the change. He was a former republican who lost a run for New York mayor in 1921. Curran told his visitors to Ellis Island in 1925, The immigrants of today are of a better kind than those of two decades earlier. They are better by reason of our new immigration law; the cause and effect are direct.

Currans reasoning was specious but widely held. Some examples of it: a major national figure had written four years earlier Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The editors of the nations most popular magazine had said continued immigration from southern and Eastern Europe would compel America to join the lowly ranks of mongrel races.

This was an idea, Okrent says, that had been gaining traction for years. Some of the nations leading scientific institutions, amplified by political activists, political exigencies and long-standing hatreds, had assured that a version of the Immigration Act of 1924 would pass. Sound familiar?

Who started this resurgence?

Credit Charles Benedict Davenport, a scientist beset with a nervous temperament, as our author describes it. Margaret Sanger recalled Davenport expostulating, And with his hands upraised as thought in supplication, quivered emotionally as he breathed, Protoplasm. We want more protoplasm.

In reality Davenport was a slim, van dyke bearded biologist at Harvard in the 1890s. He was a pure geneticist who published 439 scientific papers, sat on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals and maintained memberships in sixty-four scientific and social organizations. His work eventually changed the face of the nation to its detriment. Eventually, Okrent notes, Davenports ambitions distorted his work, leading him dangerously past the edge of reason. Perhaps over the edge at the time, he expostulated, I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.

Couple the efforts of Davenport with Sir Francis Galtons (1862 1911), an English Victorian statistician and eugenicist known for stressing psychological differences between people, the inheritability of talent, rather than their common traits, and you get an influential set of scientists who favored retrogressive social policies that eliminated Italians (gross little aliens and Eastern European Jews furtive, reeking, snarling Yacoob(s).

Other major figures in Americana pitched in to make the case for exclusion. They included Henry Cabot Lodges friend, Theodore Roosevelt, Darwins relative Francis Galton, Madison Grant, who founded the Bronx Zoo, and his pal, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, as well as Max Perkins, the editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Perhaps a disappointment, but not a surprise, that all came to the same regrettable conclusion of exclusion being protective of a country built upon open access.

On an April Sunday in the spring of 1924 the New York Times announced the profound change in an eight column headline. It read, atop an article that stretched across a full page: AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO AN END.

All a great shame, documented fairly and carefully by scholar-writer Okrent.

(An important aside: discredit both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, DC for not finding an equitable immigration policy for the past twenty years.)

President Biden offers more than nominal hope for a change to a better immigration program.

Michael D. Langan is the NBC-2.com Culture Critic. Dr. Langan has written for the BBC, The Dublin Review of Books, Boston Globe, Buffalo News and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, among other publications. This is a slightly revised review of a book that should be required reading in an America that continues to exclude so many from its shores.

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Review: The Guarded Gate - NBC2 News

The House took up a bill Thursday that would ban disability abortions in Florida, readying the measure for debate and a floor vote.

Sponsored by Republican Rep. Erin Grall, the bill (HB 1221)would prohibit a physician from performing an abortion if they know or should know that a womans decision to abort is based on a test result that suggests a disability.

The bill makes exceptions for abortions deemed necessary to save a womans life. It also extends immunity to a woman if they violate or conspire to violate the provision.

I believe that the state does have a compelling interest in making sure that abortions are not used as a form of modern-day eugenics, Grall told lawmakers on the House floor.

Throughout the committee process, Democratic lawmakers have expressed staunch opposition to the measure.

On Thursday, they questioned the bills intricacies including privacy concerns and possible impacts on minority and low-income women.

They also questioned how the bill would be exercised if signed into law.

In previous committees, Grall explained that a family member or medical worker could report an instance in which they believe an abortion violates the proposal.

A complaint would be filed with law enforcement and law enforcement would be able to undergo an investigation and obtain evidence in the way that they would normally, Grall added Thursday.

Democrats filed four amendments including one to make an exception for pregnancies related to rape and human trafficking.

Republicans rejected all amendments.

If passed, Florida would become the 10th state to ban disability abortions.

Notably, legal challenges are ongoing in seven of the nine states with similar laws in place.

According to a staff analysis, data on disability abortions is limited and not tracked by most states.

However, retrospective analysis of abortions from 1995-2011 estimated that 67%-85% of women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome in the United States elect to abort the fetus, the staff analysis adds.

If passed and signed into law, the bill would take effect on July 1.

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Disability abortion bill teed up in House Rep. Erin Grall. - Florida Politics

The UK government is coming under increasing pressure to call a public inquiry into its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst the country is amongst the world leaders in rolling out vaccinations, it also has the fourth-highest rate of deaths per capita in the world. According to the government, 126,000 people in the UK have died of Covid-19 since the pandemic began. But why did so many people die? And were any of these deaths preventable? Georgette Mulheir, a global expert on the impact of institutional care on health and life chances, asserts that any public inquiry must ask serious questions about Britains system of care for older people and adults with disabilities. At least 20% of those who died were living in care homes, whilst care home residents make up only 0.6% of the population. Although older people are at a higher risk of dying from Covid, the deaths in care homes are still wildly disproportionate. The UK is not alone. Almost half of Swedens Covid deaths were in care homes. In New York State, the figure is 30%.

According to Mulheir, this phenomenon may relate to deep-seated discriminatory attitudes. One of the most disturbing aspects of the way Covid deaths are reported in the UK, she says, is that the deceased are routinely referred to as older people or as people with a disability or underlying health problem. The unspoken implication seems to be that these people are expected to die in any case. Equally concerning, she continues is the sense that these lives are of less value than young, healthy people.

Most of the care home deaths are of older people, but disturbing news is emerging of disproportionate Covid deaths among adults with learning disabilities those aged 18 to 34 with are 30 times more likely to die of Covid than their peers of the same age. One doctor observed that the biggest factor associated with the increased rate of death was living in care homes or residential settings.

Georgette Mulheir believes that any inquiry must take account of the history of discrimination against people with disabilities. If we do not understand the past, she says, we miss the clear reasons behind what appear to be inexplicable errors of policy and practice.

Why would young people with learning disabilities be more likely to die of Covid-19? One reason that seems obvious is rarely mentioned in reporting. Large groups of people are not meant to live together in one building. Lack of resources and limited staff time make it impossible to provide individualised care for each resident. So much activity is done communally that, if one person gets sick in an institution, the disease spreads like wildfire.

According to Georgette Mulheir, across the world, institutional settings have long been associated with higher mortality rates. But there is a tendency to imagine the deaths are due to the illness, disability or frailty of the residents, rather than the institutional system itself. This is rarely the case, says Mulheir, who has led programmes to reduce mortality rates in institutions in many countries in a baby institution in Sudan, where the rate was over 80%, in Romania, where some institutions had mortality rates of 30% to 40%. In nearly all cases, deaths were due to neglect or abuse. Changing the approach to care reduced mortality dramatically.

In one institution for children with disabilities in Bulgaria, Mulheir says, we asked the director why the mortality rate was so high and she replied, You must understand, these children are sent here to die. The average life expectancy of one of these children is 11 years. If a child lives longer, we feel we have done an exceptionally good job. However, when Georgette Mulheir investigated, she found that most of the deaths had no direct relation to disability. Instead, the children were dying from malnutrition. Observing mealtimes showed that, on average, each child was given 1 minute 20 seconds to eat their meal. Mulheirs team worked to change the way personnel fed children, reducing the mortality rate almost to zero.

According to Georgette Mulheir, such pseudo-scientific explanations for high death rates in institutions are not new. A belief that people with disabilities intrinsically have a shorter life expectancy than their peers, coupled with a discriminatory judgment that their lives are of less value has, in many countries, led to warehousing people with disabilities in institutions and waiting for them to die. Once removed from their families and hidden away from society, in some circumstances, this led to a suggestion that curtailment of life might be expedient, even merciful.

Georgette Mulheir Reveals Legacy of the Eugenics Movement in Social Care Today

The Eugenics movement was born nearly 150 years ago but reached the height of its influence between the two world wars. One stated aim was to improve the health of the nation by breeding out defects, isolating people with disabilities and ensuring they could not procreate. UK scholars and politicians played a leading global role, with London hosting the first International Eugenics Conference in 1912. The audience, including Winston Churchill and Lord Balfour, was addressed by Charles Darwins son, who went on to lobby the government to arrest people deemed as unfit,' then segregate them in colonies or sterilise them.

Those early Eugenics-inspired practices still prevail in care systems today. In her 30-year campaign to end institutionalisation, Mulheir has encountered many women with disabilities who were sterilised against their will while they were children living in institutions. The simplest way to control people with disabilities was through institutionalisation, Mulheir asserts. Across Europe and in the United States, at various points in the 20th Century, enforced sterilisation of children and adults with disabilities in institutions was commonplace.

At the same time as the UK Eugenics movement grew in strength, Germany was already going one step further, with medics and lawyers joining forces to argue for the extermination of people with disabilities. The 1920 essay, Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life is seen by many as a blueprint for the Nazis future crimes against humanity. Dr Ewald Melzer, who directed an institution for children and adults with disabilities, reacted against the claims that disabled lives were unworthy. He believed it was societys Christian duty to care for people with disabilities, but he also saw institutionalising them as ideal for carrying out experiments.

In his survey of the attitudes of parents of disabled children, many apparently said that though they loved their children, they would be willing to have the children killed, so long as they were not aware it had happened. These results were cited by the Nazi regime as a basis for Aktion T4. Through this programme, institutions for children and adults with disabilities were transformed into killing centres, starting with newborn babies. The government compelled midwives to report all babies born with disabilities, then coerced parents to place their children in institutions. Visits were discouraged or forbidden. Quickly, medical personnel transformed a programme of institutionalisation into extermination.

Children with disabilities were the earliest victims of Hitlers programme of mass murder, disguised as mercy killing. Mulheir says, institutions, allegedly set up to provide expert care, killed children first by deliberate starvation, then by lethal injection, with nurses trained to preserve life lovingly cradling babies in their arms as the poison was administered. Later, gas chambers were developed to improve efficiency. More than 5,000 children were killed in the network of institutions for children with disabilities, followed by more than 200,000 disabled adults. And the medical and administrative teams who developed the first mass extermination programme were transferred together with their killing technology to set up and manage the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor.

The Monetary Value of a Life and the Crisis in Social Care

In Nazi Germany, the killing of children with disabilities was also justified economically. A propaganda campaign demonstrated to the general public the huge expense of keeping disabled children in institutions suggesting that money could and should instead be spent on healthy children. This, despite the fact that most of the children were institutionalised compulsorily and the expenditure, was therefore unnecessary.

Whilst the Eugenics movement in the UK did not result in extermination camps, its impact still resonates today. In February 2021, University College London (UCL) issued an apology for its role in promoting the pseudo-science of Eugenics. As the first University in the world to set up a Eugenics Department, it provided academic cover, legitimising theories of race and disability that directly affected policy and practice globally.

As a result of the horrors of the holocaust, the popularity of Eugenics began to wane in the 1940s, but John Maynard Keynes still claimed that Eugenic theories were fundamental to planning the economics of the Welfare State. According to Georgette Mulheir, this partly explains why our social services still, stubbornly, focus on the failed policy of excluding and institutionalising older people and those with disabilities, rather than including them in our homes, families and communities.

Today in the UK, debates around the crisis in social care focus on the high cost of looking after older people and disabled people. And those costs predominantly relate to institutionalisation. Georgette Mulheir has carried out extensive research on the costs of various kinds of care across the world. She said, across low, medium and high-income countries, it is always more expensive to care for a child with disabilities in a poor-quality institution that harms their health and development than to support them to live in family care, where their health outcomes, happiness and life chances are greatly improved.

Right now, bodies representing UK care homes are asking the government for more financial assistance. Due to the pandemic, they are only running at 70% occupancy and because they receive their funding per resident, their income is down considerably, whilst costs have increased. Mulheir suggests that before the government automatically uses tax-payers' money to bail out a profit-making care system, some fundamental questions should be answered. Firstly, why are they running at low capacity? It is partially because so many people have died. But also, precisely because of the high rates of preventable deaths, many families are now reluctant to place their relatives in care homes. If the industry has failed so spectacularly, why should we bail it out?

The problem, though, according to Georgette Mulheir, is that we have no alternative. As a country, we have underfunded home-based care and support systems for families and communities. We have allowed a harmful institutionalised system to flourish and grow, without questioning whether it is fit for purpose. The government, local authorities and families simply have nowhere else to turn for help for people with increasing support needs.

There is no denying that institutionalising people is big business, with the UK spending more than 20 billion annually. We imagine our modern social work systems have nothing in common with the eugenicists vision from more than a century ago, but, in the context of a society where lives are valued according to economic output, many older and disabled people are still segregated, excluded and warehoused in institutions. And what happens when resources, already stretched thin, reach breaking point? According to Mulheir, the economic imperative takes over and the rights, needs and wishes of individuals become secondary, with terrifying results.

Blanket DNARs The Logical Next Step

Throughout the pandemic, disturbing reports appeared in the UK press that led to an official investigation into blanket Do Not Attempt Resuscitation orders (DNARs) in care homes for older people.

Within weeks of UCLs public apology for its role in promoting Eugenic theories, the Care Quality Commission issued its damning report. It was indeed the case that, in some care homes, DNARs were entered into the notes of all residents, without consulting the person or their family.

According to the report, in at least one case, a family doctor sent letters to families, stating, Dear [care home resident relative] adding that after looking at medical notes and using a computer algorithm, I realise there is less than one percent chance of resuscitation being successful. For this reason, I have signed a do not resuscitate order in their nursing notes.

It appears a similar approach has been taken to people with learning disabilities. According to Mencap, Throughout the pandemic, many people with a learning disability have faced shocking discrimination and obstacles to accessing healthcare, with inappropriate Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR) notices put on their files and cuts made to their social care support.

As yet, there is no clear analysis of Covid deaths in care homes. But some over-stretched medics and civil servants appear to be using economic arguments and pseudo-science this time in the shape of a computer algorithm to decide who lives and who dies. How far these approaches have resulted in preventable deaths is, as yet, unknown. But it is certainly the case, says Mulheir, that if we expect older and disabled people in institutions to die, we rarely ask questions when it occurs. In this context, a public inquiry into Covid deaths must open the doors of residential institutions and find out what really happens inside.

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Georgette Mulheir Explains the Scandal of DNRs, Covid-19, and a Broken Care System - HealthTechZone

The Morton Cranial Collection, assembled by the 19th-century physician and anatomist Samuel George Morton, is one of the more complicated holdings of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Consisting of some 1,300 skulls gathered around the world, it provided the foundation for Mortons influential racist theories of differences in intelligence among races, which helped establish the now-discredited race science that contributed to 20th century eugenics. In recent years, part of the collection was prominently displayed in a museum classroom, a ghoulish object lesson in an infamous chapter of scientific history.

Last summer, after student activists highlighted the fact that some 50 skulls had come from enslaved Africans in Cuba, the museum moved the displayed skulls into storage with the rest of the collection. And last week, shortly after the release of outside research indicating roughly 14 other skulls had come from Black Philadelphians taken from paupers graves, the museum announced that the entire collection would be opened up for potential repatriation or reburial of ancestors, as a step toward atonement and repair for past racist and colonialist practices.

The announcement was the latest development in a highly charged conversation about African-American remains in museum collections, especially those of the enslaved. In January, the president of Harvard University issued a letter to alumni and affiliates acknowledging that the 22,000 human remains in its collections included 15 from people of African descent who may have been enslaved in the United States, and pledging to review its policies of ethical stewardship.

And now, that conversation may be set to explode. In recent weeks, the Smithsonian Institution, whose National Museum of Natural History houses the nations largest collection of human remains, has been debating a proposed statement on its own African-American remains.

Those discussions, according to portions of an internal summary obtained by The New York Times, have involved people who have long prioritized repatriation efforts as well as those who take a more traditional view of the museums mission to collect, preserve and study artifacts, and who view repatriations as potential losses to science.

In an interview last week, Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian, declined to characterize the deliberations but confirmed the museum was developing new guidance, which he said would be undergirded by a clear imperative: to honor and remember.

Slavery is in many ways the last great unmentionable in American discourse, he said. Anything we can do to both help the public understand the impact of slavery, and find ways to honor the enslaved, is at the top of my list.

Any new policy, Dr. Bunch said, would build on existing programs for Native American remains. It could involve not just the return of remains to direct descendants, but possibly to communities, or even reburial in a national African-American burial ground. And the museum, he said, would also strive to tell fuller stories of individuals whose remains stay in the collection.

It used to be that scholarship trumped community, he said. Now, its about finding the right tension between community and scholarship.

The quantity of enslaved and other African-American remains in museums may be modest compared with the estimated 500,000 Native American remains in U.S. collections, which were scooped up from burial grounds and 19th-century battlefields on what Samuel J. Redman, an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, termed an industrial scale.

But Dr. Redman, the author of Bone Rooms, a history of remains collecting by museums, said the moves by Harvard, Penn and especially the Smithsonian could represent a historical tipping point.

It puts into shocking relief our need to address the problem of the historical exploitation of people of color in the collecting of their objects, their stories and their bodies, he said.

The complexities around African-American remains who might claim them? how do you determine enslaved status? are enormous. Even just counting them is a challenge. According to an internal Smithsonian survey that has not previously been made public, the 33,000 remains in its storerooms include those from roughly 1,700 African-Americans, including an estimated several hundred who were born before 1865, and so may have been enslaved.

Some remains come from archaeological excavations. But the majority are from individuals who died in state-funded institutions for the poor, whose unclaimed bodies ended up in anatomical collections that were later acquired by the Smithsonian.

In addition to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires museums to return remains to tribes or lineal descendants that request them, the Smithsonian allows remains from named individuals of any race to be claimed by descendants. While many African-American individuals in the anatomical collections are named, none have ever been reclaimed, according to the natural history museum.

Kirk Johnson, the museums director, said that the anatomical collections, while disproportionately gathered from the poor and marginalized, included a cross-section of society in terms of age, sex, race, ethnicity and cause of death, which had made them extremely useful for forensic anthropologists and other researchers.

But when it comes to African-American remains, a broader approach to repatriation including a more expansive notion of ancestor and descendant may be justified.

Weve all had a season of becoming more enlightened about structural racism and anti-Black racism, he said. At the end of the day, he added, its a matter of respect.

Dr. Bunch, the Smithsonians first Black secretary, said he hoped its actions would provide a model for institutions across the country. Some who have studied the history of the trade in Black bodies say such guidance is sorely needed.

It would be wonderful to have an African-American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, said Daina Ramey Berry, a professor of history at the University of Texas and author of The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, a study of the commodification of enslaved bodies from birth to death.

Were finding evidence of enslaved bodies used at medical schools throughout the nation, she said. Some are still on display at universities. They need to be returned.

Penns Morton collection vividly embodies both the sordid side of the enterprise, and the way the meanings of collections change.

Morton, a successful doctor who was an active member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, has sometimes been called the founder of American physical anthropology. He was a proponent of the theory of polygenesis, which held that some races were separate species, with separate origins. In books like the lavishly illustrated Crania Americana, from 1839, he drew on skull measurements to outline a proposed hierarchy of human intelligence, with Europeans on top and Africans in the United States at the bottom.

Mortons skull collection was said to be the first scholarly anatomical collection in the United States and, at the time, the largest. But after his death in 1851, it fell into obscurity, even as his racist ideas about differences in intelligence remained influential.

In 1966, the collection was relocated to the Penn Museum, from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. And it quickly became a useful tool for all sorts of scientific research including studies aimed at debunking the racist ideas it had helped create.

In a famous 1978 paper (later adapted for his book The Mismeasure of Man), the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that Mortons racist assumptions had led him to make incorrect measurements thus turning Morton into a symbol not just of racist ideas, but of how bias can affect the seemingly objective procedures of science.

Goulds analysis of Mortons measurements has itself been hotly disputed. But in recent years, the appropriateness of possessing the skulls at all has been sharply questioned by campus and local activists, particularly after student researchers connected with the Penn & Slavery Project drew attention to the remains of the enslaved Cubans.

Christopher Woods, who became the museums director earlier this month, said the new repatriation policy (which was recommended by a committee) would not change the collections status as an active research source.

Although there has been no access to the actual skulls since last summer, legitimate researchers can examine 3-D scans of the entire collection, including those of 126 Native Americans that have already been repatriated.

The collection was put together for nefarious purpose in the 19th century, to reinforce white supremacist racial views, but theres still been good research done on that collection, Dr. Woods said.

When it comes to repatriation, he said, the moral imperative is clear, even if the specific course of action may not be. For the skulls of Black Philadelphians taken from paupers graves (a major source for cadavers of all races at the time), he said the hope is they can be reburied in a local African-American cemetery.

The enslaved remains from Cuba, however, would require future research and possibly testing, as well as a search for an appropriate repatriation site, possibly in Cuba or West Africa, where most of the individuals were likely born.

The Black remains may have become a particularly urgent issue, he said. But repatriation requests for any skulls would be considered.

This is an ethical question, he said. We need to consider the wishes of the communities from whence these people came.

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What Should Museums Do With the Bones of the Enslaved? - The New York Times