SAME HERESY, NEW VICTIMS:

Remember Then, Now: What the eugenics movement can teach us about today’s stem-cell debates. (Christine Rosen, 3/03/05, National Review)

Praise for the forward march of science; progressive and liberal leaders championing new scientific techniques that promise to cure disease, eradicate illness and suffering, and advance the progress of the human race; elite institutions of higher education embarking on their own initiatives, training students, and supporting researchers in the new science; California’s self-described progressive citizenry passing a law granting state funding and support to the cause, with other states preparing to follow suit; the intellectual elite of the country decrying the obstructionist, anti-modern views of the people who oppose or publicly challenge the underlying ethical rationale of the new science.

This might sound like our contemporary debate over embryonic stem cells, but it’s actually an apt description of the eugenics movement in the United States in the early 20th century. Eugenics, a term coined by British scientist Francis Galton in 1883, was the movement to “improve the human race through better breeding,” and in the first few decades of the early 20th century in the United States it found a ready and eager audience. California and many other states passed compulsory eugenic sterilization laws that led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of Americans. Congress passed an Immigration Restriction Act in 1924 based on the testimony of eugenicists and fears about the fitness of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. And the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1927, upheld the sterilization of a supposedly “feebleminded” woman as constitutional, with progressive Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declaring, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Underwritten by the wealth of some of the country’s most prestigious families, such as the Carnegies and the Harrimans, eugenics was something every enlightened American believed in, since the movement promised to end needless suffering, increase economic prospects by alleviating the burden placed on the state by the feebleminded and their many illnesses, and generally improve health and well-being for all citizens. Eugenics was the future.

Although there are vast differences between the eugenics movement of the past and the stem-cell research of the present, there is an eerie similarity to their rhetoric and tactics. Like eugenics, promoters of embryonic-stem-cell research talk of its endless promise, declaring it the scientific “path to the future,” as two state senators from Massachusetts wrote in a recent opinion piece. Embryonic-stem-cell promoters claim that their science will lead to cures for a range of diseases and the alleviation of much human suffering. And they denounce those who question the ethics of their pursuit as backward or blindly religious. But as we continue to debate the ethics of embryonic-stem-cell research, it is worth recalling that movements waged in the name of scientific progress often leave a troubled legacy. [...]

So forgotten is our history of eugenics that in a January opinion piece in the New York Times, Susan Jacoby argued that contemporary debates between religion and science could easily be harmonized if we only followed the examples of liberal Christians in the past, enthusiastically citing the zoologist Maynard Metcalf as her example. It is true that Metcalf reconciled his liberal Christianity with evolution, but Jacoby failed to disclose that his faith was also broad enough to encourage an avid embrace of eugenics. In an article titled “Evolution and Man,” in the August 1916 issue of the Journal of Heredity, Metcalf argued that the success of eugenics depended upon the success of Christian civilization, because only Christian societies could properly foster eugenic ideals.

What more appealing heresy is there than that we are ourselves gods and men clay in our hands?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2005 5:30 AM