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Full-Text Articles in 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 …
Human Identity: The Question Presented By Human-Animal Hybridization, Jospeh Vining
Human Identity: The Question Presented By Human-Animal Hybridization, Jospeh Vining
Other Publications
What makes each of us, as individuals, human to one another, or, more generally, what makes an individual creature human? We have not often had to ask the question because of the species line based on reproductive capacity and incapacity, although "degrees of humanness" were explored in the various eugenic programs of the last century. Now the biotechnological possibility of fusing human and other forms of life is presenting the question in a new and serious way. If the traditional biological means of defining species are no longer reliable, what other criteria might determine what is "human" and what is …