The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America

"If you only have one piece of it, then you really aren’t understanding what an incredibly broad and protean movement Eugenics is. What is so interesting to me about eugenics is that it can be so different, that there are so many different interpretations in different countries. Also, because it is so broad, you get this interesting mix of people who are involved in it. On the one hand, you’ve got left-wingers and feminists like George Bernard Shaw , or Marie Stope and Margaret Sanger, the birth control people. Lots of socialist supporters in the inter-war period. But you also get the Nazis introducing sterilisation and other eugenics practices in the 1930s when Hitler takes power. “It is really quite unusual to have something that has this broad an appeal” You’ve got doctors who are much more interested in maternal and infant mortality on the one hand, then Hitler and his followers saying we need to make sure that people who we think are racially impure don’t get to breed. That’s an incredible difference. I think it is important to ask: how could it appeal across those political boundaries in this incredible way? How does that happen? It is really quite unusual to have something that has this broad an appeal. Stepan’s book was the first book that said, look, there’s this other way too: this other mode of eugenics which is about improving the outcome of births and doing that through, for instance, better housing, better medical care, better antenatal care—what Americans call prenatal care—and so forth. That’s a very different kind of eugenics. Just to complicate things even further—and none of the books that I’ve given you really deal with this—the other interesting example is what’s happening in Scandinavia. We think of the Scandinavian countries in the 20th century as being really progressive places, the beginning of the welfare state and the rest of it. Well, part of the way that welfare develops in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, all across Scandinavia, includes compulsory sterilisation. Yes, and what’s interesting is they are passing these sterilisation laws right at the time that Hitler and the Nazis are passing legislation that is much broader in some ways, but at exactly the same time. 1934 saw the first of the Scandinavian laws. The Scandinavians were saying, ‘No, no, no, we’re nothing like the Nazis. We’re doing this for different reasons. We’re not doing it because you’re Jewish, or black. It is not that. It’s about mental incapacities, or sometimes physical incapacities.’ And they say they are voluntary, although they are only slightly voluntary, because the law says that if you’re not mentally capable of giving consent, someone else—a doctor—can give consent for you. “This is something that doesn’t go away. It’s like opening Pandora’s Box” And these laws in Scandinavia, like the laws in the United States and elsewhere, don’t disappear. They don’t disappear in 1945 or even after the Nuremberg trials in 1946–47. They’re still in place in the 1970s. This is something that doesn’t go away. It is like opening Pandora’s Box. Once you’ve got those capabilities, once you’ve started down that path, it’s very interesting to think about where you then go. It depends on how you want to define it. One of the modern versions might be what has happened in India in the post-war period, starting in the Indira Gandhi era, with mass sterilisations. Now technically they were not coercive sterilisations, but we know that certain kinds of incentives given to people—you got your transistor radio, can of cooking ghee or whatever it was that you got in exchange for being sterilised—but also that people like civil servants, local officials were told that if they didn’t meet quotas of people to be sterilised, they would lose payments, or be demoted or fired. So they were rounding up local people who didn’t understand that they had a choice. I would call that coercive. It may not be coercion that is formalised, but it is certainly a form of coercion. “A quarter of million women were sterilised in Peru in the late 1980s and early 1990s” We know that this has been happening in India as recently as 2011; the BBC had a very interesting report on the situation in Rajasthan. People were being given cars in return for agreeing to be sterilised. If you are a poor person and you don’t have transport, that’s awfully tempting. So it is not coercion in the sense of what the Nazis were doing, or the Americans in the 1920s, but in the end how different is it? And India, by the way, is not the only place where this is going on. We know that this was happening in Peru under Fujimori as well, and it was peasant women from the highlands of Peru who were being sterilised in very large numbers, in fact a quarter of million women were sterilised under Fujimori in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My argument, in the book that’s coming out, is that we have moved from a formalised, government-driven eugenics to what I would call consumer eugenics. People with enough money can say: ‘I’ll have the blue-eyed, blonde-haired baby.’ Yes, and no. You can’t actually do the blue-eyed, blonde-haired thing yet, but it is coming. You can already do quite a lot. For example, in some Asian countries where baby boys are prized over baby girls, the number of baby girls being born has dropped. The wealthy are getting [the unborn child’s gender] tested, and then dealing with the fetus depending on what it is, because people don’t want baby girls. It’s too expensive, you’ve got to pay a dowry. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We know this is happening because we also know what the demographics look like: there’s been a drop in the number of girls born. We don’t know why, but natural populations always have slightly more girls born than boys. In India it is illegal to terminate a fetus because it is a girl, it doesn’t mean it is not happening. “In Asian countries where baby boys are prized over baby girls, the number of baby girls being born has dropped” It is also interesting to look at the way sperm banks advertise their products: you pay more for donors who are athletic, or highly intelligent, or highly musical, even though there’s no scientific evidence that you’re going to get that baby that you want. So for the sperm from a guy who’s 6’4 and plays basketball and is a really hotshot athlete, you will pay more than you would for the sperm of some ordinary brute down the street. And that’s legal. It is perfectly legal to charge more for those different kinds of sperm. No, not just in the States! The US is only one of the two biggest sperm bank countries in the world. The other one is Denmark. I believe the biggest sperm bank in the world currently is based in Denmark. So it isn’t just the Americans. That’s my point about consumer eugenics. In a sense, that calculation is made on both sides: the people who want the baby are making that calculation, and so too, I think, are those who might need the money from selling their eggs, or their sperm, or whatever it might be: is it worth my time?"