To browse Academia. Unpublished draft of an episodic look at the ingredients that constructed the eugenics movement in the last quarter of the 19th and first half of the 20th century. The last third of the book looks at the extension of eugenics though not by that name into public policy in the second half of the twentieth century and the attempts to curtail it. Rivista dell' e del ", Introduction to "Present-days eugenics", monographic issue of "Contemporanea.
Rivista dell' e del ". This essay will focus on the history of eugenics, particularly as that idea was employed in the United States as a justification for laws adopted in the 19th and 20th Century. I will then explore why—apart from the horrific practices it eventually led to, ranging from coercive sterilization to genocide-the underlying hopeful message of eugenicists was popular for so long.
In one case it has been revived in the service of political and rhetorical goals, and the meaning it had within its earlier historical context has been distorted. The Editors One of the most hotly debated concepts in contemporary bioethics, eugenics is often reduced to an evil of Nazism that should have been discarded long ago. In this video dialogue, two leading scholars of eugenics— Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson—contextualize and complicate the current discussion of eugenic practices.
Beginning with a discussion of the definition of eugenics, the dialogue then examines how the history of eugenics can help us understand contemporary reproductive practice practices that are often labeled as " eugenist, " including prenatal screening and the selective abortion of fetuses with disabilities. It then examines the relationship between disability discrimination and reproductive freedom, and concludes by addressing the extent to which the association between eugenics and Nazism is useful to understanding contemporary medical practices.
After decades of efforts to build a more inclusive and democratic world, it appears that the "old ideas" of eugenics have not gone away. Some of these ideas may have been hiding in the archives, but others were not.
