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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Disability Law
The New Eugenics, Samuel R. Bagenstos
The New Eugenics, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Articles
During the first third of the Twentieth Century, the eugenics movement played a powerful role in the politics, law, and culture of the United States. The fear of “the menace of the feebleminded,” the notion that those with supposedly poor genes “sap the strength of the State,” and other similar ideas drove the enthusiastic implementation of the practices of excluding disabled individuals from the country, incarcerating them in ostensibly beneficent institutions, and sterilizing them. By the 1930s, with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, eugenic ideas had begun to be discredited in American public discourse. And after the Holocaust, …
Disability And Reproductive Justice, Samuel Bagenstos
Disability And Reproductive Justice, Samuel Bagenstos
Articles
In the spring of 2019, disability and abortion rights collided at the Supreme Court in a case involving an Indiana ban on “disability-selective abortions.” In a lengthy concurrence in the denial of certiorari, Justice Thomas argued that the ban was constitutional because it “promote[s] a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.” Just a few months earlier, disability and reproductive rights issues had intersected in a very different way in the debate over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Disability rights advocates drew attention to an opinion then-Judge Kavanaugh had written …
Reproducing Dignity: Race, Disability, And Reproductive Controls, Mary Crossley
Reproducing Dignity: Race, Disability, And Reproductive Controls, Mary Crossley
Articles
Human rights treaties and American constitutional law recognize decisions about reproduction as central to human dignity. Historically and today, Black women and women with disabilities have endured numerous impairments of their freedom to form and maintain families. Other scholars have examined these barriers to motherhood. Unexplored, however, are parallels among the experiences of women in these two groups or the women for whom Blackness and disability are overlapping identities. This Article fills that void. The disturbing legacy of the Eugenics movement is manifest in many settings. Black and disabled women undergo sterilizations at disproportionately high rates. Public benefit programs discourage …
Politically Correct Eugenics, Seema Mohapatra
Politically Correct Eugenics, Seema Mohapatra
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Wicked Witch Is Almost Dead: Buck V. Bell And The Sterilization Of Handicapped Persons, Robert L. Burgdorf, Mary Pearce Burgdorf
The Wicked Witch Is Almost Dead: Buck V. Bell And The Sterilization Of Handicapped Persons, Robert L. Burgdorf, Mary Pearce Burgdorf
Journal Articles
Judgment at Nuremberg 1 concerned the criminal trial of a former German judge who, under Hitler's Third Reich, had ordered involuntary sexual sterilization operations to be performed upon Jewish men and women. In a famous scene from that screenplay and movie, the defense counsel, Rolfe, cross-examines a German law professor, Dr. Wieck, in regard to the legality of such practices: Rolfe (continuing) Dr. Wieck, you referred to "novel National Socialist measures introduced, among them sexual sterilization." Dr. Wieck, are you aware that this was not invented by National Socialism, but had been advanced for years before as a weapon in …