Degenerate and dangerous, faux science is always a thing with fascism.

‘Sterilization–A Fascist Weapon’ from Health and Hygiene. Vol. 1 No. 2. May, 1935.

More than 12,000 have been sterilized as criminals in the United States since 1907, although there is no scientific basis for the practice. Nor is there scientific proof that any one race is superior to another.

STERILIZATION is an operation for the prevention of pregnancy. In the male this is a relatively simple procedure which consists in cutting the duct leading from the testicle on each side and so preventing the passage of sperm. In the female, sterilization is a more complicated procedure. It involves opening the abdomen and therefore carries a slight risk, like any major operation. The Fallopian tubes, which carry the ovum from the ovaries to the womb, are either removed or blocked in a way to prevent passage of the ovum. In most cases, the operation of sterilization probably has no harmful physical or psychological effects. Sexual function is not disturbed. While there are justifiable medical reasons for sterilization, we are not concerned with these here but will limit our discussion to so-called eugenic sterilization.

Eugenics and Genetics

Eugenics is a term introduced by Francis Galton in 1883 to denote the study of the possibility of improving the physical and mental qualities of future generations. Positive eugenics aims to increase good heredity by the encouragement of worthy parenthood while negative eugenics aims at the elimination of bad heredity. The propagandists for eugenic reform advocate the elimination of the so-called unfit as a social “cure-all.”

One must distinguish between genetics and eugenics. Genetics is a science based upon a comparatively new body of knowledge and is a study of how the genes, which are the bearers of hereditary material in the reproductive cells, interact. Eugenic propaganda is based for the most part on crude ideas of heredity current before our present knowledge of genetics.

Eugenicists Wrong

The eugenicist starting from the crude notions that like produces like entertain the fallacy that superior children must come from superior parents. They have the notion that if people with brains stopped breeding the next generation would all be morons. Actually the laws of genetics teach us that the chances are all against brilliant parents having equally brilliant children and that genius may result from a chance combination of genes from parents of average intelligence. The eugenicist, however, is convinced that the genius ought and therefore does come from parents of what they call the better class; that morons come from morons, that good people come from good people, that criminals come from criminals, etc. None of these things are so.

Ruling Class Propaganda

The eugenicists believe that heredity is all important and environment negligible. They hold to the idea that a hereditary characteristic is not alterable by the environment. Finally, they hold the idea that preventing the breeding of hereditary defectives will eliminate such defectives in future generations. We might dismiss such notions as those of ignorant idealists but it would be a mistake to do so, for the eugenicists are propagandists for the exploiting class. The people whom the eugenicists label unfit belong to a class, a race, a creed, a political group that the eugenicists and their backers hate and fear. Therefore you will find the eugenicists continually using such vague terms as degenerate, feeble-minded, criminal, insane and you will find them advocating sterilization of large groups of people classified under these crude headings.

The Nazi Laws

In Germany the law which went into effect January 1, 1934, would make unfruitful or sterilize through operation, the hereditary sick which certain types of insanity, epilepsy, chorea, blindness–includes people with inborn feeble-mindedness, severe physical deformity and those who suffer from severe alcoholism. The program in Germany calls for the sterilization of some four hundred thousand persons. The larger portion of these are supposedly feeble-minded. The terrible significance of this attempt to protect Nazi purity can easily be realized when one considers who decides which people are to be sterilized. Here is a ready weapon for use against political opponents. The Nazis have not hesitated to use castration. Castration, of course, sterilizes because it involves removal of the sex gland. Those who propose castration for habitual sexual offenders are often motivated by hate. It is astonishing to note that twenty men have been castrated in Michigan since 1925.

No Superior Race

The apparent obsession of the Nazis about pure Aryan stock has no scientific basis whatsoever. There is no such thing as a pure or a superior race. We are all hybrids, or mixed breeds, and from a biological standpoint a mixture of races, such as we have here in America, has been advantageous.

Sterilization in the United States

In the United States, twenty states have laws for the sterilization of the so-called unfit dating as far back as 1907. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court in the Buck versus Bell decision upheld the legality of these laws. Justice O.W. Holmes made at that time the famous and fatuous utterance much quoted by eugenicists “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Up to 1932 some twelve thousand individuals have been sterilized. About six thousand operations have been performed on the insane, three thousand on alleged feeble-minded and sixteen on criminals. As might be expected the majority of these operations were done in California, the state of the Criminal Syndicalist laws.

Mr. Leon F. Whitney, Director of the American Eugenics Society, has written a book, “The Case for Sterilization.” He calls sterilization a burning issue and advocates its wide use to save society. How many would have to be sterilized? The lowest fourth of our population! We should hardly miss them, says Whitney. Who is included in our lowest fourth? When we read that the Negroes in New Haven furnish six times as many “subnormals” as the whites, that the foreign born furnish six times as many as the native; when we read about “criminals” “who do not come from the best homes”; when we read about the status of recent immigrants–do we need any further evidence of what Whitney’s kind consider the socially unfit who ought to be made unfruitful?

No Proof

The discredited army intelligence tests are used to determine who should be sterilized. Using these tests as a basis half our adult population is below the mental age of 13.2, the age of a normal boy of thirteen. We should not under- estimate the intelligence of a thirteen-year-old boy and we should not set our expected standard of intelligence too high. Otherwise we find ourselves in the absurd position of saying that the average person is below average which is the same thing as saying the average quart is a pint and a half. Intelligence tests do not measure intelligence. Because of lack of space we must state somewhat dogmatically that there is no proof that children of different social classes differ widely in intelligence. There is no good proof that races differ widely in intelligence. There is no good proof that the so-called criminal population is lower in intelligence than the average.

Shuffled Chromosomes

Every cell in the human body contains forty-eight rod-like structures called chromosomes which are the bearers of thousands of minute particles called genes. The genes are the determiners of heredity. Both human egg and sperm undergo a reduction of chromosomes to twenty-four so that at fertilization the new individual receives half chromosomes from the maternal side and half from the paternal, obtaining in all the original forty-eight. In the reduction who are much more dangerous. of the chromosomes there is a random shuffling like the shuffling of cards; heredity is thus subject to the laws of chance. No two individuals ever get the same set of chromosomes except in the case of identical twins and therefore no two individuals are ever alike mentally or physically. Few of us draw a royal flush in the shuffling of the cards of heredity. Extremely tall and extremely short individuals are rare. The two extremes of mental defect and genius are rare. Most of us tend toward an average and this will ever be so. If the average is to be raised the environment in which the genes manifest themselves must be improved. Sterilize any number of people you wish and if the environment is the same, half of us will fall below and half above a given average regardless of class, color or creed. The only way to prevent feeble-mindedness by sterilization would be to sterilize everybody and call it quits.

Border Line Cases

The eugenicists advocate widespread sterilization for mental deficiency. While heredity undoubtedly plays an important part in the production of feeble-mindedness it does not work in the simple way described by the eugenicists. Non-hereditary factors, such as birth injuries, inflammation, gland disorders and malnutrition, often cause mental deficiency. Ninety-five per cent of mental defectives come from normal parents. Only five per cent have one or the other parent defective. When the defect is slight experts cannot agree as to whether an individual near the border line of average intelligence is mentally defective or not. Yet it is these border line cases that the eugenicists would largely sterilize. It is here that they are forging a weapon for use against anyone who raises a voice against economic exploitation. Sterilization is absolutely useless for the prevention of feeble mindedness because it will not prevent the ninety-five per cent defectives from normal parents from appearing in the next generation. The whole question of feeble-mindedness is of very moderate dimensions as Penrose has pointed out and he has shown that a large proportion of these unfortunates could be made socially useful assets. A small part of the money spent for armament would do this. The truth is, of course, that the people who rave about sterilizing the feeble-minded avoid mention of social parasites who are much more dangerous.

Crime Not Hereditary

A tendency to crime is not inherited, is not transmitted from parent to child. Crime is a social product and the greater the number of laws the greater the number of crimes. There are social crimes which spring from motives not lower but higher than those ruling the society in which they arise. As economic crisis deepens “crimes” increase. Laws are passed against those who strike making them therefore criminals and subject to sterilization. Tom Mooney is considered a criminal. So is Ernst Thaelmann in Germany.

Fake Science

One has only to ask who decides to sterilize who? Then one will realize that sterilization ranks with imprisonment and deportation as a fascist attack on workers. Eugenicists are attempting to maintain the domination of a decaying class. The pseudo-scientific propaganda of charlatans like Paul Popenoe, Madison Grant, A.E. Wiggan, Lathrop Stoddard and their kind should be recognized as demagogy. Only the unenlightened will be fooled by such terms as race purity, degeneracy, insanity, feeble-mindedness, criminality, etc. These are not scientific or medical terms but merely legal. Behind the hypocritical moral tone and all the mystical hokum about class and race superiority is a typical fascist attempt to obscure, disrupt and divide.

Conditions and Genes

Careful students of heredity have pointed out time and time again that eugenics cannot be taken seriously. Bad living conditions produce the same effect as bad genes. Environment and heredity interact. Eugenicists ignore the environment, they ignore the evils of capitalist exploitation. Mental deficiency, insanity, crime cannot be considered separate from the social and economic pattern in which they appear.

No real attempt to solve the problem will be made by those who advocate sterilization. A solution would threaten their very existence. Nor will the voice of reason, the protests of eminent geneticists stay their hands. They are irrational, they talk nonsense but it is nonsense with a purpose. We must fight the attempt of the eugenicists to divide us on the basis of color, class, or race.

Health was the precursor to Health and Hygiene and the creation of Dr. Paul Luttinger. Only three issues were published before Health and Hygiene was published monthly under the direction of the Communist Party USA’s ‘Daily Worker Medical Advisory Board Panel’ in New York City between 1934 and 1939. An invaluable resource for those interested in the history history of medicine, occupational health and safety, advertising, socialized health, etc.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/health/v1n2-may-1935-health-hygiene.pdf