Forced Sterilization Not the Miracle Remedy
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. 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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.US Supreme Court Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1927
Depiction Human Conception
Forced Sterilization in the US
Between the 1890s and 1910s was a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States of America. The main objectives of the activists and reformists were to address problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and political corruption.
Activists and reformists joined efforts to reform local government, public education, finance, industry, churches, and many other areas. Progressives transformed, professionalized, and made the social sciences, history, economics, and political science more “scientific”. Therefore it was not surprising that many Americans wanted to improve the future generations of the US with the help of genetics.
In the early twentieth more than thirty US states supported the idea that if people with genetic disorders were to be force sterilized systematically, genetic disorders would parish in future generations. Would that really work?
Depiction of Gene Mutation
Forced Sterilization Not the Solution
Supporters of forced sterilization of people with genetical deases consider sterilization as weeding out bad genes from human gene pull, and an attempt to harness the power of reproduction to produce people with traits that enable them to thrive.
It is true that science increased the number of individuals who are fit to survive, but that we let people with genetic disorders have children is not the main cause that keeps those “imperfect” genes in the human gene pool.
Many of us mutated genes that come from either one of our parents. However, when a gene coming from one parent is mutated our body subsidizes the “broken” gene with the matching healthy gene coming from the other parent.
A genetic disease manifests itself when certain genes coming from both parents are damaged, or mutated. Since we have so many genes, it is not very likely that both the mother and the father had the same imperfect gene, hence by far most of us do not have genetic diseases.
However, when the mother and the father are close relatives, the possibility that the same genes from both sides are mutated. Hence, we discourage people from marrying their cousins.
Preventing people with genetic diseases, who make up a negligible size of a group in the entire population, from having children helps little to “cleanse” the gene pool because almost all children with the genetic disease are from healthy parents that carry mutated genes.