Re-dressing eugenics

Like other matters of life and death, the selective elimination of the most weak and vulnerable among us has gone through semantic engineering to make it more palatable to the public. Like abortion, euthanasia, cloning, etc…eugenics has been dressed in different clothing, and is hanging around in new disguise.

In its preamble, the recently unveiled U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities recognizes”the inherent dignity and worth and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

We wonder what Oliver Wendell Holmes would have said about that.

This month marked the 80th anniversary of the disgraceful Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, which upheld Virginia’s involuntary sterilization laws. In his majority opinion, Holmes declared: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

Although eugenics was eventually dismissed as “junk science,” it didn’t happen before states authorized more than 60,000 forcible sterilizations and segregated, institutionalized, and denied marriage and parental rights to those deemed “genetically unfit.”

Though society may be inclined to regard Holmes’s detestable opinion in Buck v. Bell as a relic of a time past, eerie similarities exist in contemporary remarks of the well-respected.

Shocking stuff, isn’t it? This WaPo piece goes on to list some of those remarks, and all lined up, they frame a stark picture. It lays bare the lies, and re-claims the language.

In stark contrast to words such as “defective,” “burdensome” and “futile” are the words of civil rights laws that liberate and defend.

The Americans With Disabilities Act recognizes disability as a natural part of the human experience that in no way should limit an individual’s ability to participate fully in all aspects of society. The U.N. convention reaffirms that people with disabilities have both a right to life and a right to the effective enjoyment of that life on an equal basis with others.

On this 80th anniversary of Buck, let’s not foolishly believe that victims of eugenics are an artifact of history. So long as we speak in terms of good genes and bad genes, recognize a life with a disability as an injury, and allow health policies to value some lives over others, we continue to create human rights violations every day.