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eugenics
Uncomfortable lessons tweeted: “It’s one thing to deplore

eugenics on ideological, political, moral
from history and today grounds. It’s quite another to conclude
that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of
course, it would. It works for cows, horses,
pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t
it work for humans?”
We are horrified by Nazi atrocities but did the beliefs that led The fact that the breeding of physical
to them really disappear after the war and do they persist characteristics in animals and plants is
quite different from ensuring intellectual
today? How can we tackle them? asks Stephen Unwin capacity in human beings is one objection;
another is that eugenics has been tried
and made absolutely no difference.
ugenics was created in London and moved beyond the mentality that enabled It is astonishing that such eminent figures
enthusiastically nurtured in America the Nazi Aktion T4, the systematic murder have spread such pernicious nonsense.
Eand Scandinavia, but it was in of people with disabilities. We also have to recognise just how
Nazi Germany that it found its most Furthermore, the appalling catalogue of deeply rooted the prejudice against
appalling realisation. bullying, violence and murder of learning- disabled people is, and not just among
The persecution, forced sterilisation and disabled people in Katherine Quarmby’s some look-at-me intellectuals. The fact
murder of as many as 275,000 “useless book Scapegoat suggests we live in a that some parents internalised the views
eaters” is one of the most overlooked society that all too readily devalues the of their child’s worthlessness during the
chapters in the whole ghastly history of disabled and regards them as fair game. eugenic period shows just how pervasive
the Third Reich. An example of support for this barbarism this can be.
We must be careful not to draw might be philosopher Peter Singer’s T4 enjoyed popular support and that
simplistic parallels between the grotesque statement in 1979 that “killing a disabled should give us pause. Germany had an
cruelties of the Third Reich and the very infant is not morally equivalent to killing a advanced society with an enviable
real but much more nuanced injustices person. Very often it is not wrong at all.” reputation for medicine and social care
faced by disabled people today. However, yet its population had absorbed a culture
certain lessons can, I think, be drawn. of contempt to such an extent that it
allowed these things to happen.
Support by progressives
The first is the way this barbarism was Medical values
supported by lawyers, professors and The programme was carried out by
other respected professionals. medical professionals, from nurses and
We can easily dismiss eugenics as doctors right up to the most senior
pseudoscience but that was not how it academics and experienced physicians of
seemed at the time, with many people the time, and in hospitals and other clinical
– including a large number of progressives settings, which offers us the second lesson.
– wanting to improve the health, We rightly praise the NHS and entrust
happiness and prosperity of “the race”. our bodies to the expert care of its staff,
In other words, the motivation behind but medical professionals are no more
this campaign was not confined to Nazi immune to prejudice, often unconscious,
Germany but was evident in advanced than the rest of us.
societies around the world. The fact that learning disabled people
It is an uncomfortable truth that suffered disproportionately in the
eugenics was not discredited in 1945, and pandemic for reasons unconnected to
many of its core beliefs endured. William their condition should make us question
Beveridge, the founder of the welfare medicine’s hierarchy of values.
state, was a committed eugenicist. Especially worrying was the National
The long-stay hospitals that were the Nazi eugenics poster from the 1930s declaring: Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s
destiny of so many learning-disabled “Healthy parents, healthy children!” early triage advice which identified
people in postwar Britain and America learning disability as an underlying health
treated learning disability as a medical This was based on his views on the condition. This was quickly changed when
issue and were often appallingly relative capacities of animals: “If we it was pointed out that a learning disability
managed, resulting in dehumanising, compare a severely defective human was not an illness, but it is troubling that it
regimented and squalid living conditions. infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or was issued in the first place.
While the worst of these were a pig, for example, we will often find the In thinking about T4, we need to explore
eventually closed down in the 1970s and nonhuman to have superior capacities, the extent to which our own society regards
1980s, hardly a week goes by without new both actual and potential, for rationality, the disabled as in some sense dispensable.
accounts of neglect, abuse and cruelty, self-consciousness, communication and
and the dreadful roll call of places such as everything else that can plausibly be A price on everything
Winterbourne View, Muckamore Abbey, considered morally significant.” Third, we should examine how a cost- Wellcome Collection
Whorlton Hall and so many others should Another example is evolutionary benefit analysis was used to vindicate the
make us consider whether we have biologist Richard Dawkins who, in 2020, murders. For, although irrational hatred

16 Vol 35 No 3 | Spring 2022 Community Living www.cl-initiatives.co.uk