'Speaker says advances in genetics pose new human rights challenges'

Daniel Kevles, a professor at Yale University, warns that dramatic advances in genetic science have "revived some of the old issues" surrounding the eugenics movement that flourished in the United States and Europe during the early part of the 20th century.

 

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Kevles said many people are stunned to learn that "liberal, democratic Sweden" sterilized approximately 60,000 people between the 1930s and the 1970s.

Between the start of the 20th century and World War II, two dozen American states passed laws authorizing the forced sterilization of "the feeble minded" and others labeled as genetically flawed.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 8-1 to uphold Virginia's eugenics law, with the majority opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. And, according to Kevles, by 1930, California had sterilized some 6,000 people.

Kevles said the racial concerns of the American eugenics movement focused less on fears about blacks than on the waves of European immigration.

"Immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were not thought to be white," he said. He said many Anglo-Protestant Americans worried that they'd be outnumbered and overwhelmed by those they considered substandard humans.

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