Law Commons^™

Eugenics Not Eradication: How People With Disabilities Have Lost The Right To Life, Ava Standish

Helm's School of Government Conference - American Revival: Citizenship & Virtue

Disability-selective abortion stems from a eugenical philosophy not a hope of eradication. Disabilities cannot be eradicated because they are not diseases. Eugenics seeks to purify society from those who are considered “inferior” and to encourage the rate of births considered “superior.” Eugenics continues today through selective abortion of children with disabilities. These children deserve the right to life guaranteed by natural rights, human rights, and the laws of the United States. Children with disabilities, particularly Down Syndrome, have lost this right to life in the United States and abroad. In the United States, 67% of children with Down Syndrome are …

Disabling Lawyering: Buck V. Bell And The Road To A More Inclusive Legal Practice, Jacob Izak Abudaram

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be and Ally. By Emily Ladau and Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell By Paul A. Lombardo.

Confronting Eugenics Means Finally Confronting Its Ableist Roots, Robyn M. Powell

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

In September 2020, a whistleblower complaint was filed alleging that hysterectomies are being performed on women at an immigration detention center in alarmingly high rates. Regrettably, forced sterilizations are part of the nation’s long-standing history of weaponizing reproduction to subjugate socially marginalized communities. While public outrage in response to the whistleblower complaint was swift and relentless, it largely failed to acknowledge how eugenic ideologies and practices, including compulsory sterilizations, are ongoing and deeply entrenched in ableism. Indeed, a conversation that recognizes the ways in which eugenics continues to target people with disabilities is long overdue.

This Article contextualizes how eugenics …

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

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

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

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reproductive Justice, Public Policy, And Abortion On The Basis Of Fetal Impairment: Lessons From International Human Rights Law And The Potential Impact Of The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities, Carole J. Petersen

Journal of Law and Health

This article argues that we should consider not only American constitutional law but also comparative law and emerging international human rights norms, in order to navigate the difficult issue of abortion on the basis of fetal impairment. The United States is a State Party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)13 and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). It is also a signatory (but not a full State Party) to several other relevant treaties, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the …

Beyond Abortion: Human Genetics And The New Eugenics, John R. Harding Jr.

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Preface, Paul A. Lombardo

Paul A. Lombardo

Introduction to a volume chronicling the 20th Century North Carolina eugenic sterilization program and the investigative journalism that prompted the state to apologize for it

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 …