Two weeks ago, Americans were briefly alerted to a history of state-coerced sterilization in modern Sweden. A series of articles in Dagens Nyheter, the leading Stockholm daily, had recently detailed the program under which nearly 60,000 “socially inferior” and “subnormal” Swedish women were targeted for hysterectomies, from 1934 to 1975. This was an irresistible scandal for American newspapers, which reported Sweden’s embarrassment with more than a hint of satisfaction, the kind you get when you catch the preacher with a call girl. Note the subtext: Even the Scandinavians, who have been preening about their superior humanism for decades, sometimes behave very, very badly.
Now, we hold no brief for Sweden. And it is really no accident that it was a succession of “enlightened” Social Democratic governments in Stockholm that worked most vigorously to purify the Nordic bloodline. Quite the contrary. It is an established fact that for half a century — until the example of Nazi Germany prompted a quickie divorce — socialism and eugenics were married to each other in the “advanced” Western mind. These were manly men, Europe’s early lefties. They did not shrink from the notion that eliminating social misery might also involve eliminating procreation by the miserable.
But truth be told, Americans cannot now scold the Swedes without hypocrisy. While we may always have resisted socialism here in the States, we are nevertheless marked among free peoples by a eugenic past that’s second to none. And there is more; something even worse. American culture currently embraces an icy scientism about “lives not worth living” — an attitude so thoroughgoing as virtually to escape notice.
The world’s first eugenic sterilization — a prophylactic vasectomy for ” genetic inferiority” — was performed in 1899 on a state prison inmate in Indiana, which eight years later enacted the world’s first compulsory sterilization law. Thirty other states, in an attempt to arrest the generational transmission of criminal or “feeble minded” tendencies, followed suit over the next few decades. Between 1907 and 1960, according to the best available research, at least 60,000 Americans were sterilized under such statutes. If you count unwitting victims and undocumented or inaccurately recorded surgeries, the number might be as high as 100,000. In Sweden, most sterilizations were at least putatively consensual. In the United States, the vast majority were entirely involuntary.
And they were fully enforced by the high priests of progressive jurisprudence. Carrie Buck of Charlottesville, Virginia, was allegedly retarded. In 1924, under a law governing “mental defectives” passed earlier that year, she was scheduled for a court-ordered “salpingectomy,” or tubal ligation. Buck fought her sterilization sentence for three years, all the way to the Supreme Court. Where she was dismissed, out of hand, by no less than Oliver Wendell Holmes. As the likely future parent of “socially inadequate offspring,” Holmes wrote for an 8-1 majority, Carrie Buck had a positive duty to submit to the knife — lest the nation be “swamped with incompetence.” The United States, Holmes concluded, in what must be the most hideous high-court pronouncement in our history, can “prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
That was 70 years ago. The relevant laws are long gone. But the spirit of those laws — the unreflective conviction that there are spheres of human existence, actual and potential, that are worse than useless — is everywhere still with us.
When last we met Jack Kevorkian, the Supreme Court was deciding that it wasn’t quite ready to identify a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. That morning, June 26, Kevorkian saw to it that Janis Murphy of Nevada died in a motel room near Detroit. She’d been suffering from “chronic fatigue syndrome.” Kevorkian has been on a tear ever since, though after what his lawyer says are “nearly 100” such treatments, the national press has largely lost interest and stopped reporting them.
On July 2, Kevorkian supervised two more Detroit-area motel deaths. Dorinda Scheipsmeier of Oceanside, California, and Lynne Lennox of Lakewood, New Jersey, each had multiple sclerosis, which is not a fatal illness — though it is quite often associated with clinical depression. On August 13, Kevorkian dispatched another MS patient, Karen Shoffstall of Long Beach, New York, in a Holiday Inn. On August 26, he took care of Janet Good, his longtime technical assistant and propagandist. Good had earlier been operated on for pancreatic cancer. But at the time of her death, an autopsy indicated, she was cancer-free. On August 29, Kevorkian helped MS patient Thomas Summerlee of Colorado Springs to a lethal injection.
Just last week, on September 3, Kevorkian set up his suicide machine in a Bloomfield Township Quality Inn. Carol Fox had flown in from Pennsylvania with a so-far-unconfirmed case of ovarian cancer. Now she, too, is dead. Michigan police no longer even bother to arrest the good “doctor.” They have tried repeatedly to prosecute him over the years. No jury is willing to convict.
Amazingly enough, there are American juries, more than a few, now willing to assign damages against certain doctors who fail to kill their patients. The American cultural bias against irregular life has become so deep-rooted that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists officially recommends pre-natal Down-syndrome screening for all pregnant women, though that screening’s only practical purpose is to trigger a choice for abortion. Private health insurance and Medicaid and state-based health programs now typically pay for amniocentesis — and for a raft of comparable tests for other incurable fetal anomalies. Disabled newborns are becoming a relative rarity in the United States, because American OB/GYNs routinely and automatically recommend these tests to their patients, many or most of whom routinely and automatically elect to end their pregnancies at the merest hint of “risk.”
This is not simply an argument about abortion. What’s more broadly startling about current obstetrical practice is what happens in those circumstances when risk becomes reality. Doctors who deliver disabled infants get sued. All the time. Parents make a tort claim for something called ” wrongful birth,” arguing that they would have aborted the child had they been properly advised during gestation — in essence, that their parenthood represents a net injury that warrants compensation. Dozens of times, in at least 16 states in recent years, juries have affirmed such complaints.
In at least four states, beginning with a 1982 California trial involving a child born deaf, juries have gone so far as to accept a claim for something called “wrongful life.” Here, the disabled child himself sues, through his parents. The alleged tort, in such a case, is life per se. The plaintiff newborn argues, essentially, that he has been denied a right to be aborted — that his undesired life is less valuable to him than nonexistence would be. And the jury, speaking for state and society, agrees that this is a reasonable conclusion.
What is all this if it is not eugenics? In the industrialized word, where intolerance of biological imperfection is concerned, the United States may yet be Number One — recent disclosures from Sweden notwithstanding.
David Tell, for the Editors
