Compulsory sterilization

Noted in supreme court cases, Relf v. Weinberger and Buck v. Bell, re-examining compulsory sterilization is pivotal in dismantling discrimination against women. Particularly affecting women of color, the multi-form occurrence is slowly moving into public consciousness along with the effects of settler colonialism. Depopulating foreign land through strategic movements, settler colonialists have been and continue to be clever as far as their tactics to establish political systems. Purposed to disadvantage the colonized and to benefit the colonizers, these systems have been founded upon the misery of Aboriginal peoples. Correspondingly, colonialism intricacies combined with eugenic principles continue to be used to legitimize colonial say in Indigenous women’s sexual and reproductive matters,…

She was not married, but did have a child. Her mother Emma, had been enrolled into an Asylum, The Virginia Colony, for the epileptic and feebleminded. State laws of sterilization in virginia lasted between 1924 and 1979, and over 7000 people had been sterilized. Officials at the Virginia Colony said that Carrie inherited the same traits her mother had of feeblemindedness and promiscuity. To people who believed those traits were genetically transmitted, Carrie fit the law’s "probable potential…

The Eugenics movement was a program designed to encourage the procreation of a people of a superior stock. Certainly, blacks were never in the history of America considered superior and did not fit the criteria of positive eugenics. Blacks did however fit the criteria of negative eugenics which advocates reduced rates of sexual reproduction and sterilization. The IQ Test became the chief measurement psychologists used to deem blacks and other minority groups as less-desired and intellectually…

of abortion laws in the country where she lived, got a botched abortion. This subsequently led to her not being able to have any more children. If abortion was legal, dangerous and emotionally challenging occurrences such as this one would never happen. This story is also similar to those of women who received back alley abortions or even tried to abort fetuses themselves. Compulsive sterilization also falls into this category of abuse of personal space. In the book, Reproductive Politics,…

today’s world but was widely known during the 1800 to 1945 period (Wikler, 1999). However, in Europe the word eugenics started to associate with the idea of racial hygiene. This concept was most likely to be found in the Nordic states of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden that started instituting compulsory sterilization programme from 1926 (Barnett, 2004). Francis Dalton a cousin of Darwin invented the term eugenics and the theories of human improvement. He launched a movement to improve the…

“Crimes against humanity” In Abby Mann’s play, Judgment at Nuremberg readers ask themselves if Janning really should be charged with crimes against humanity. Was he in fact the most cruel and devastating murderer and torturer, this world has ever seen? Or was he just doing his job for the love of his country? Jannings may have done what he thought was for the love of his country, but he most certainly committed crimes against humanity. Tragedies like the one that happened in Germany has…

mankind by the sterilization of incompetent people with intentions to improve the value of our society. In the mid 1800’s Charles Darwin’s natural selection gave pathway to eugenics. More of the science behind eugenics began to develop in 1902 on the Cold Spring Harbor Campus by a professor know as Charles B. Davenport (Farber, 2008). Mr. Davenport began the study of biological study on evolution on animals which eventually evolved to the study of eugenics among people. As studies began to get…

Ethical treatment was a commodity of insight in the 1800’s. In the past, those who had mental conditions were naturally taken care of in harsh conducts. In the United States and Western Europe, doctors who treated the mentally insane began to promote better conduct for mental care. During the late nineteenth century, the confidence around moral conduct for mental health started to diminish. With the beginning of development in industry along with the rise of migration to the U.S., burdens were…

desirable traits were seen to be prominent in the superior classes thus, sterilizing women of inferior traits to prevent her from spoiling the chances of the master race. This master race consisted of those with high intelligence, fair skin tones, desirable physical characteristics, and not a descendent of a minority background. This form of segregation divided the whites, minorities, and people of low economic stability. Women of color, women with disabilities, and women from lower financial…

Herbert Spencer was thought to be the father of social Darwinism. He initially came up with the term survival of the fittest. Eugenics and social Darwinism were both similar since eugenics originated from social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century. "Eugenics" was thought of in 1883 by the English researcher Francis Galton, who was the cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton characterized the expression "eugenics” as the theory of hereditary improvement of the human race by selective breeding. The…