The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 20: Castrate Them

The Nazi Lies Podcast

Mike Isaacson: Reproductive rights are inmates’ rights apparently.

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Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. I’m joined today by Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Michigan State University, Mark Largent, who is with us today to talk about his book Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. This slim volume tells the story of the historical enthusiasm for depriving certain classes of people the ability to reproduce and the efforts towards making that a reality. Really happy to get to read this book a second time for this podcast. Welcome to the show Dr. Largent.

Mark Largent: Thank you for the invitation and for your kind words.

Mike: So I want to start today by talking about what you start the book talking about, which is a discussion of your historical method of storytelling, your historiography. So you make a very deliberate choice of vocabulary that really does have a powerful effect in exposing, kind of, the grittiness of the whole issue. Can you talk about that and what effect you intended to have?

Mark: So I was trying very hard to work in an anti-presentist mode. Presentist mode is most commonly what's used in exploring issues like eugenics, things that have become recognized as problematic for a variety of reasons. What often happens when you take a presentistic view like that is you fail to understand how something that seems so obviously problematic to you could have been acceptable to large numbers of people in the past.

The danger, of course, is that you fall into the trap of becoming an apologist. So it's a fine line to walk between being a presentist and being an apologist when you're dealing with issues like this. You don't want to explain away past people's beliefs and assumptions and actions as merely products of their time because that doesn't treat them fairly; it doesn't treat them as equals; it sort of lets them off merely because they lived before you.

On the other hand, you need to understand the world as it was understood by them. So I think in graduate school is where I first heard the term “doing violence to the historical subject”. That is if you view them through your own eyes, you are doing violence to them. If you view them in such a way as to not hold them to any real standards simply because they came before you and therefore operated in a space of naivete relative to what you think you know, you're doing violence to them. You're treating them as somehow less than you and your present day colleagues.

So to walk that line really requires that you use their language and you try to understand and discuss the world the way that they may have understood and discussed it. Now, the problem, of course, when you're dealing with something like this is that many of the things that they held true, many of the assumptions on which their work is based, are deeply problematic to us today, or we at least on the surface claim that they're deeply problematic.

Because one of the real dangers of presentism is that it allows you to imagine that you're somehow better than the historical subjects were, that you're above whatever it was that they were dealing with, when in fact, you may simply rationalize some of the very same problematic assumptions that they held differently, holding them in a different way. So as a historian, I feel like it's my responsibility to treat the historical subjects fairly, and that means holding them to the same standards that I hold present-day people to, but also respecting the fact that their contexts were different in some ways.

Mike: Right. So one of the interesting things that you do is you also use the terminology that they were using at the time, and I think it gives a really good sense, not only of, I guess, how distasteful it is today, but also it gives a good sense of the logic that they're working with.

Mark: Yeah, their language matters. I mean, I really do think words matter, and unpacking words so that you understand what is within them is critically important. And one of the big ones, I address it right from the very start, is the concept of eugenics itself. Eugenics to us is by and large a slur, that if you call a person a eugenicist, you are by and large disparaging them in some way.

And that was not held to be true by the subjects that I look at, which the story runs from about 1850 to about 1950, with the most intense period being in the first 25 years of the 20th century or about 1900 to about 1925. And the idea here is that they didn't have a slur in mind when they said eugenics. In fact, eugenics as a slur didn't really even emerge until about the 1960s, I tried to show in the book.

Mike: Okay. So let's get a little into the terminology and the procedures involved. What kind of sterilizing interventions were physicians making, and what were they called at the time?

Mark: So at the beginning of the story, so from about 1850 to about the 1880s, they were what they would've called “desexing.” They were performing castrations or orchidectomies [Mike’s note: they’re actually called orchiectomies] as they came to be called. For men, a complete removal of the scrotum and testicles. So, neutering would be the closest concept that we have.

These were not widespread, it wasn't common. It was sufficiently brutal that it was considered problematic. But by the time you get into the 1880s and 1890s, a progressive new surgery, the vasectomy, had emerged. Vasectomization had first developed as a rejuvenating activity, a notion that you could rejuvenate a person by eliminating the pathways for sperm to leave the body, so by tying off or cutting the vas deferens.

But it was seen from its original holders, and these were by and large the heads of psychiatric hospitals, as a way of managing a couple of complex problems. One of them was what they called chronic masturbation. They thought that the vasectomy would somehow reduce the urge of the men in their charge to masturbate. There was also the notion that it would somehow calm them and be a management tactic.

But there'd been a broader effort both before the vasectomy and after it to cut off the inherited characteristics from one generation to another so as not to pass along what were largely seen as problematic traits that followed family lines. So all the way back to the 1850s, you have physicians, the first one that I can identify is in the 1850s Gideon Lincecum in Texas, who brings out in public conversation something that he said physicians widely discussed. And that was that there were families that were just no good, and that they produced children who themselves were no good who would grow up and have children who were no good.

And so this notion of good breeding was well aligned with notions of artificial selection and plant and animal breeding. So this is pre-Darwin or pre-Darwin's Origin of the Species, which is published in 1859–this notion that you could artificially select for different traits in plants and animals being applied to the reproduction of human beings.

And so what Gideon Lincecum, and other physicians like him, began talking openly about first castration and then by the end of the century vasectomies was intended to sort of stop these problematic lines of parenthood and then eliminate the problematic social behaviors and poverty that they believed were somehow rooted in the very biology of who procreates.

At near about the same time near the end of the 19th century in the 1880s, the operation of hysterectomy came into being and then vogue. The idea is that you could, by removing a woman's ovaries or fallopian tube or uterus or all of it, control reproduction with potentially a positive therapeutic effect to women themselves by removing these usually described as diseased organs, the women themselves would be healthier, happier for it.

But more importantly or at least equally importantly, you could prevent the passage of these deleterious social traits from parent to child, they believed, by preventing the parent from having children. So you're sort of removing from a community whatever deleterious social traits they believed were associated with the very biology of the parents who would otherwise have children.

Mike: Okay. So I tried to get Daniel Kevles to talk about this a bit when we had him on, but he didn't seem familiar too much with the pre-eugenic history. So your story of coerced sterilization doesn't start with the eugenics movement, and you briefly mentioned that. So talk a bit about the origins of the movement for sterilization in the United States.

Mark: Well, it really was focused on this analogy to plant and animal breeding which really did preceed both Darwin in 1859 and the emergence of the eugenics movement, which is a progressive era movement shortly after the turn of the 20th century. People generally associate coerced sterilization with the eugenics movement, and they certainly were closely aligned.

The eugenics movement began in the very late 19th or early 20th century depending upon which historians you're looking at. But the movement for coerced sterilization had begun much earlier. And in fact, there were even common calls to it being pressed all the way back to Aristotle and his discussion about how certain traits seem to follow in family lines.

And so by the mid-19th century when there was widespread interest in artificial plant and animal breeding, the application of it to human traits became an interesting element. And there were advocates for sterilization to prevent the passage of these deleterious traits that even preceded the invention of the word eugenics by Francis Galton in the 1860s.

But this pressure had really been focused around thinking about therapy for deleterious traits, that you could avoid them if you could somehow prevent the people who would possess them from coming into existence or from them being passed from a parent to a child. There also was no really hard line to biology proper.

And in fact, there was a lot of discussion all the way through the end of the 19th and 20th century about not just eugenics, but also a thing called euthenics, which was the study of the effect of the environment on the development of certain kinds of traits. And so in the same way that you could have a biological transfer of traits, you could have a social transfer of traits. And the thing is you can't separate. We talk about nature and nurture, you can't separate. You can't have nature without nurture and nurture without nature. The widespread analogy that was given was that seeds grow in the soil, and you can have a plant only if you have both seeds and soil. You can't have a seed that grows without soil, and you can't have a plant that grows without a seed.

So these two, nature and nurture or eugenics and euthenics, were entwined in most of the conversation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We tend to really focus on the latter, the eugenic issues, but euthenics was an important part of it. And that's the same way, if you prevent a parent from having a child who they might pass along either biologically or socially some deleterious trait. You prevent them from becoming a parent, you prevent the passage of that trait. It's really only the eugenics movement and a real narrow focus on the biological transfer of these traits that you lose that nature-nurture symbiosis. But in the 19th century, they were talked about both really hand in hand, there wasn't this sort of hard line of nature over nurture.

The place that it started to fall apart was when they began discovering genetic diseases. So Huntington's was the first genetic disease to be identified, and it was Charles Davenport himself who did some of the work to help identify that. And then you realize that that's a purely genetic trait that a parent passes along to a child, and if you prevent a parent from having a child, then you prevent the passage of that trait. So you could actually get rid of diseases if you prevented everyone who's a carrier for that disease from passing along from parent to child.

And so there was a kind of either curative or preventative medicine notion in play in this early part. But the idea of genetic disease really helped create some distance in between the people who were thinking about eugenics and euthenics as hand in hand and those who began to think primarily about just eugenics.

Mike: I do want to deviate here. So one of the things that you mentioned in the book was that even at the time they recognized that there was a flaw in the eugenic program insofar as, because they didn't have access to genetic testing, when you try to eliminate bad traits, you don't eliminate all the carriers, you only eliminate those that have dominant expressions. So they said it would take about a hundred generations to actually eliminate any of these traits, right?

Mark: Yeah, and of course mathematical geneticists came to help us understand why it was that as traits became less and less frequent it became harder and harder to reduce their frequency because they showed up so infrequently.

So I think from being fair to the historical subject's point of view, I think there's sort of two responses to it. One is, “Well, if we can substantially reduce the amount of disease by reducing the number of carriers that we know of who carry genetic disease, that's progress. So if you go from some number to a smaller number from one generation to the next of people who are likely or probable to have a genetic disease, that's progress. So you can't say, ‘Because we can't do everything, we shouldn't do anything,’ that's a foolish position to take.” So that's one aspect of it.

The other aspect of it is that, “While you're correct that lacking genetic testing we can't see the genome in an individual, we can infer a great deal about a person's genome if we have elaborate family histories.” So that's why the real burst of activity in and around eugenics is with Davenport's and Laughlin's Eugenic Record Office and the establishment of this elaborate effort to build very sophisticated family trees, because that was the way that you could infer a genome with some accuracy.

Mike: Okay. So one thing that you point out about the early physicians that were sterilizing people was that their reasons for sterilization were not necessarily eugenic, and early on they often weren't. So what were the other motivations of these physicians in sterilizing their patients?

Mark: Yeah, they run a gamut, and I'll start with the darkest motives: clearly punitive. There's a significant punitive aspect to it, especially when you're doing something as brutal as castration or as invasive as a hysterectomy. I mean, you have to keep in mind the relatively crude state of surgery in the late 19th and early 20th century. So these are pretty significant things.

There was one person in the state of Washington who had argued that a vasectomy was really not much worse than having a tooth pulled. And to imagine that without anything like sophisticated anesthetics makes you realize that having a tooth pulled is probably a pretty miserable experience in the early 20th century. So you're not comparing it to something that's not that big of a deal, but you were probably comparing it to something that was relatively common in an era before fluoride and dental health. So they were trying to sort of normalize it as something that could happen.

The use of castration continued well into the 20th century for decades after the vasectomy was invented. So when I looked really closely at the state of Oregon, for example, they were using both castrations and vasectomies. And when we looked at why they were using one rather than the other, what we found was that when people were convicted of offenses that were associated with what we would today consider homosexuality, they were more likely to be castrated. But for men who were in prison for crimes of rape against women, those men would be more likely to receive vasectomy. And so you see this interesting difference in the application of which surgery is used, and it clearly has a punitive aspect of it in the use of castration.

When you get later into the 20th century, you'll see this applied increasingly to women. And there's some very ugly stuff that happens in the 1960s and 1970s around women in poverty in which they are coerced to either have their tubes tied or to receive hysterectomies. There's a great book Fit to Be Tied by Rebecca Kluchin that is really the complement to my book. She takes it to the next set of decades, to the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, and looks really closely at the ways in which there's punitive aspects of it all the way through the 20th century.

But it's not just punitive, there were also therapeutic measures that were in place. There were clearly people involved who sought access to control of their own reproduction because they didn't want to pass something along or because they didn't want to have children.

So keep in mind, especially with the more recent decisions around abortion and privacy rights that we're dealing with right now, until you get to the late 1960s, the guaranteed access to birth control is not a fundamental right in the United States. And so how do you control your own fertility without access to reliable birth control?

There are cases, and Christine Manganaro has written about one such case with a physician in Washington State who was using eugenic arguments to justify and get through the bureaucracy necessary to sterilize women, and the women themselves wanted that sterilization and were collaborating with him to do the things necessary to get access to be sterilized. And so in control of your own fertility, there was some of that that you can find examples of.

You also find examples of where it has therapeutic uses for people who are suffering from mental or emotional trauma. And again, Christine Manganaro does a nice job in this with looking at women who suffered severe postpartum depression. If you suffer from postpartum depression, what is the only real way in a relatively crude medical environment, what's the only really effective way to avoid postpartum depression? Well, avoid postpartum. Don't get pregnant and have a child. And so that same physician was using sterilization as a way of preventing the postpartum depression that would then follow birth being given by women who had suffered from this previously.

Now, I will tell you those cases are relatively rare. By and large, the history of coerced sterilization in the United States is one of either eugenic justification or punitive measures or it's in order to allow for easier control over people, that there's a manipulative aspect of it. So it might be if you sterilize them you can release them because you believe that they will no longer commit the crimes or no longer perpetuate whatever genetic shortcomings those people are believed to have, or a notion that if you sterilize them you can release them because they have paid for their crime, that it's cheaper to sterilize them and release them than it is to keep them incarcerated.

But what I think is important to understand here is that it's not a single simple answer to this. It's a pretty complex set of things that are all based on a pretty simplistic notion, and that is that somehow located in the testicles and ovaries of these citizens is a problem that you could surgically remove, that it could be excised from society by taking it out of these people's bodies. And lots of different people were using that to promote lots of different notions.

Mike: Right. To me, it was interesting that it wasn't just about like doing things to prevent them from reproducing, but it was also sometimes used as a behavioral control method, they thought sterilizing people would actually change their behavior.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, Harry Sharp, the guy who invented the vasectomy, firmly believed that he would reduce the problems of the young men in his mental hospital and their masturbation, what you call chronic masturbation problems.

Mike: Right, okay. So now obviously a major factor of the movement for sterilization of the so-called unfit was the eugenics movement. So, like I said, we had Kevles on, so my listeners are familiar with the general history of the eugenics movement as far as its kind of intellectual development. So talk about some of the ways that the eugenicists were instrumental in turning sterilization practice into sterilization policy.

Mark: Well, the biggest was what now is pretty normal in American politics, and that is what the founders referred to as states as the laboratories for democracy. The idea that the founders had all the way back to the Federalists was a notion that you had a federal government, but then you also had originally 13 grown to 50 states, each of which was a kind of individual laboratory for democracy. So an individual state could come up with new legislation and enact it, and the other states could see how it went. They could see what value there might be in that legislation. And then you'd have all of these different little experiments going on, and the good ones would spread to other states.

And the early proponents of eugenics in the United States seized on this structure of governance that we have to individually, state by state, go to the legislatures with model legislation. And that model legislation came out of the Eugenic Records Office, and this is really Harry Laughlin's push to get states to adopt very similar eugenic laws. And you could state by state use these sort of models for it, so that legislators wouldn't even have to do the work of writing these things. Rather, the bills could be handed to them as a model bill that could be debated and put into place.

And the promise on all of them is that if you adopted this legislation, you would have a healthier body of citizens. You would have a safer community of people who live there, that the state would save money because it wouldn't have to put so many people in prison or mental health facilities, and that by and large the public good would be advanced. And it was all leveraged on a set of prejudices against people who were not seen as sufficiently fit, that they didn't meet whatever kinds of standards that there were for human goodness.

Mike: Okay. So on the subject of model legislation, so you talked about that and you also talked a bit about how court arguments were replicated across state lines as well. So how early was the eugenics movement to this game of pre-fabricated policy?

Mark: Well, I can't find anybody who is earlier. I mean, this really seems like one of the real novel contributions of the proponents of this. And it's because it leverages certain characteristics of the way in which federalism works in the United States with the very nature of eugenics itself which is operating at this intersection of human biology and education and public health and medicine and the punitive aspects of mental health facilities or of prisons, and all of these things are under control of the state, individual states. They are powers that either explicitly or implied in the US Constitution are of state import.

And it really only is until you get Buck v. Bell in the mid-twenties that you have any kind of federal sanctification of this. But prior to that, it had been going on at lower and lower courts, the big advance being made in the Michigan case two years before Buck v. Bell. And that Michigan case, everything that ultimately would be tested in the Buck v. Bell case was all sort of laid out and sorted in a much more complex case. But Buck v. Bell was the Supreme Court's sanctification of it.

Mike: Okay. So one of the things I liked about your book was that it's rich with data, but it's not bogged down with it. So what are some of the key statistics about sterilization in the US that people should know?

Mark: Well, I think one of the biggest is that it peaks in the 1930s and begins to fade prior to World War II. Another one is who is it that's advancing it at any given time? So what you see are really interesting lineage of professions who are advancing first sterilization and then eugenic sterilization in the 20th century. And one of the things that I find most fascinating is one of the last groups to get on board and one of the last groups to get off of this train are American biologists, and that American biologists really used this as a way to help professionalize them in the early 20th century because it allowed them to demonstrate the public value of basic scientific research.

And then really are among the last ones off. You don't see biologists turn against eugenics until the late sixties and early seventies, which is really late relative to other professional groups. I mean, the psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, many of the other social scientists, they are beginning to turn against it in the thirties. But American biologists sort of continue replicating a set of base assumptions that were first made in biology textbooks in the teens and twenties. They continue restating those assumptions all the way through the sixties.

Mike: So for a while, the eugenics movement was largely unopposed in it's crusade to sterilize the so-called unfit. I mean, there were parts of the Catholic Church that were opposed and individuals here there, but there wasn't any sort of organized resistance. Now you claim that all changed with Buck v. Bell, so talk about that ruling and the reactions to it.

Mark: Yeah. And again, it's funny to talk about this, funny in a like slow down and look at the car accident funny, funny weird and a little scary funny, it's funny to look at this right now in the context of, again, recent Supreme Court decisions about abortion because I do say in the book and I have said elsewhere that there really is no pro-life movement in the United States until Roe v. Wade. And in that same way, there really was no organized opposition to eugenics in United States until Buck v. Bell, that these court cases represent pivotal moments in the emergence of opposition because they crystallized something that until then really didn't have full state sanctification.

And so in both the case of eugenics in Buck v. Bell in the twenties and Roe in the seventies, you have the crystallization of something to push against. And Buck creates for an increasingly large number of professionals and social commentators something very specific against which they can push and they can begin leveraging their sets of arguments.

What I always find interesting is that the original arguments against eugenics in the 20s are very different than what are made later. That is, they often are rife with many of the same prejudiced assumptions that proponents of eugenics had. The issue for many though becomes the notion of whether or not the state has the power to do it and has the authority or is smart enough to know how to do it well.n ot really addressing the underlying civil liberties issues, which I think by the late 20th century are much more prominent in our minds.

Mike: Okay. So eugenics began to decline starting in the 30s, as you said. The Pope came out against it, there was organized resistance to it, and advances in biology were beginning to unwind some of its core claims. But according to your book, eugenics took quite a while to finally lose public respect. So talk a bit about the decline of eugenics and what sort of documentation you used in the book to gauge support for the theory.

Mark: Yeah, so that's actually my favorite part of the book, was the part that I found most interesting. For years, I had collected biology textbooks, hunting bookstores for them and libraries. And in every time I would find one, I would record if it talked about eugenics and how it talked about eugenics.

And the thing that we see very clearly is that there's no systematic turn against eugenics in biology textbooks until you get into the 1970s, and then you start seeing this sort of shift in the discussion of it. First you see a decline in any discussion, you start seeing in the fifties eugenics falls out of the textbooks. And then as you get into the sixties, seventies, and really into the eighties, you start seeing some criticism of it emerge.

But up until the 1960s, there's almost no textbook published that doesn't include eugenics, and there's almost none of the ones that do talk about it are critical. You don't see the real explosion of criticism until you get into the early and mid-sixties, and then by the time you get between the mid-seventies and 1980, it's overwhelmingly critical and overwhelmingly common to talk in negative ways about eugenics.

So I used the textbooks as a marker for the state-of-the-art sort of received wisdom. And until the sixties, the received wisdom that every college kid is taught is that eugenics is good and possible, and biology can tell us how to do it right and well.

Mike: Okay. So sterilization laws did start to also be repealed or overturned at the state level in the latter half of the 20th century with the decline of eugenics. Can you talk a bit about the decline of sterilization policy?

Mark: Yeah. So a couple of things happened, and again, I point you to Rebecca Kluchin's work which I think is very good in this regard. So my story is mostly a story about white people and disproportionately a story about men. And so from the late 19th century through the first third of the 20th century, the majority of people who were targeted for sterilization were white men.

And my argument was that this was a very racist activity because these men were being sterilized because they did not meet the ideals of white masculinity. That is, they were involved in activities that we associate with homosexuality; they were developmentally delayed; they stole or were violent. These are all unacceptable expressions or unacceptable activities of white masculinity. Violence or thievery or lower intelligence are acceptable for other races, but they're not acceptable for the white race.

And so these people had to be cleaned up, they had to clean up the white race. And I talk explicitly about how racist it was and how it focused almost entirely on white men. That began to shift first with an increasing emphasis on women, and then by the mid-20th century, an increasing emphasis on people of color. And that shift happens at the same time that eugenics itself becomes increasingly problematic. And again, Kluchin does a much better and more thorough job of looking at that latter period.

But my earlier work or my work in the earlier period makes clear that it's no less racist, that is, that targeting white men because they weren't upholding the expectations of white masculinity is a racist activity. And the latter work looks at what happens to minoritized communities and women, especially minority women, which by the time you get to 1970s, the vast majority of people who were being targeted for compulsory sterilization or coerced sterilization are minoritized women.

Mike: Okay. Now despite the general revulsion of the public to eugenics programs, the ghosts of the movement for sterilization still linger in many ways reflecting the origins of the movement. In particular, you point to legislation that was passed in four states authorizing the sterilization of certain classes of criminals in exchange for more lenient sentences as well as sort of vigilante judges who attempted to implement these sort of schemes in their own rulings. So where is sterilization still policy?

Mark: You see interesting popping up in interesting and problematic ways in certain either court cases or legislation that seems to get at the same underlying assumptions. And I guess if you were to ask simply, “What do you see as an overall historiographic trend to which you want to contribute?” One of the things that I want to argue, because I try to work very hard to not be either an apologist or a presentist, is that many of the same assumptions that led to things that we would consider deeply problematic are still present in our public discourse or our underlying assumptions today.

And so making the people in the past make more sense to us isn't an effort to apologize for them. It's an effort rather to show that today we still have some deeply problematic underlying assumptions in how we look at people and we think about issues like equity or equality that future historians will look back on and perhaps point out our own shortcomings.

So ways in which you may look at how it is that, for example, we would be much more inclined to be motivated to invest in sex ed or in birth control opportunities for people of poorer means, making investments in communities where we would allow for greater access because of a recognition that poor people should be encouraged to use birth control in ways that wealthier people don't need to be encouraged to use birth control. And I think as you're challenging some of those assumptions, you start confronting awkward concerns about what we think is happening in poorer communities, why they have larger numbers of children, and why that might be bad or problematic for us.

You certainly see it now in an increasing set of conversations about pedophilia and about how you might need to have some biological intervention in men especially who are convicted of pedophilia, and that's in some strange segment of our popular discourse right now out there.

But I think the biggest place for it is in the way in which we can very easily dismiss people in the past as merely eugenicists and oversimplify their views. Well, we would say when we are challenged for our own views that, "Oh, well, it's complicated actually," and you try to unpack it in more ways.

Mike: Right, okay. So one interesting thing you pointed to was the involvement of these private sector non-profit activist organizations in kind of a new movement for sterilization. In particular, you point to this organization called CRACK, so tell us what CRACK was doing.

Mark: Well, CRACK, and there's been others that have emerged like them that are philanthropic organizations or privately funded organizations that seek to provide access to sterilization in poor communities. Now, on the surface, there is undoubtedly both inequity in access to medical care between wealthier and poorer communities and a greater capacity for a person to have control over their own fertility if they have greater access to medical care. So you really can't deny the benefits of it.

CRACK is interesting because not only are they providing access to medical care, but they're providing stipends to people. They were offering economic payments to people in order to be sterilized in addition to the sterilization procedure. And an economic incentive like a hundred dollars means something radically different to a poor person than it does to a wealthy person. So it would've a disproportionate impact on swaying a person's decision to be vasectomized or to receive a tubal ligation if the hundred bucks mattered to them in ways that it didn't matter to a wealthier person.

But this is part of a larger movement away from state-sponsoredred eugenics to what Diane Paul talks about as a neoliberal approach to thinking about human reproduction. And this moves away from state coercion to social coercion or away from state coercion to economic coercion. The issue here is if you sort of turn this over to the marketplace and you're allowing for social coercion or economic coercion to take the place of government coercion, are you any less coercive?

That's why when I use the language in the book, I talk about coerced sterilization, not just compulsory sterilization or eugenic sterilization, but coerced sterilization, the idea that a person could be offered a shorter prison sentence or offered money or offered access to something if they were willing to be sterilized. And that coercion, whether it's in the hands of the state or in the hands of a philanthropic organization, is equally coercive and is equally problematic and is based on some of the very same underlying assumptions that there are good people who have good genes and there are bad people who have bad genes and we can figure out which are which and that we are somehow morally empowered to encourage the good people to have more children and discourage the bad people from having children. And so that commonality, whether you're on the philanthropic side of this coercion or the legal side of this coercion, shares too many similarities for me to be comfortable.

Mike: Okay. So somewhere in the book you state that while it hasn't been directly overturned, Buck versus Bell was essentially overruled by other rulings such as Griswold versus Connecticut and Roe v. Wade. So now your book was published in 2008, since then a lot of has happened in the courts. So how do things look now that we have rulings like Dobbs versus Jackson's Women's Health Organization on the books?

Mark: Well, I tell you, I'm extraordinarily happy that people understand that the recent abortion decision undermines the foundation for things like Griswold and all the way up through gay marriage. And recognizing that the legal foundations on which Roe was decided while weak–undoubtedly weak, I think any careful scholar on this is going to tell you that simply a privacy argument for Roe was liable for being overturned–but not only does the overturning of Roe on the basis of privacy threaten Roe, but it threatens all of these other things that we take absolutely for granted right now like access to birth control, like interracial marriage, like gay marriage. This is deeply problematic.

But it also tells us that we were relying on something that was not sufficient and perhaps not trustworthy. That is, there was work to be done to more carefully explicate why it is that in progressive modern society access to birth control, access to the legal recognition to marry the person you love regardless of their sex, gender, race, or ethnicity, and access to control of your own reproduction, those are all critical to a modern progressive society. And we had founded it on too tenuous a basis with Roe, and so we have good work to do, critical and important work to do to really further solidify these rights. I think the fact that these appear so important to the election of 2022 and to the election of legislators suggests that we're no longer willing to rely on just the court to preserve and protect these rights, but that we want a deeper and more binding commitment of legislation.

Mike: All right. So finally, one thing that you say in the book which I liked is that history exists to teach us about ourselves. So what can we learn about ourselves through reading this book?

Mark: So I'm a rather pessimistic historian. I like a quote attributed to Mark Twain, almost every witty thing is attributed to Mark Twain. There’s a quote from Mark Twain that says, "History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme." And I've always really liked that because I think people who study history know that to a certain degree we are doomed to repeat the past, that there's a certain similarity with things that seem to happen over and over and over again.

But like that movie Groundhog Day, the act of learning over and over and over again does change you. And we know that reading history and reading fiction generates in a person a sense of both empathy and a broader sense of why and how people do things. And so I think these kinds of histories are critical for us to look back at the ugliest, most challenging aspects of our own society's histories so that we can do a little bit better as we confront the same sorts of things generation after generation after generation.

Mike: All right. Well, Dr. Largent, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about coerced sterilization in the United States. The book again is Breeding Contempt, out from Rutgers University Press. Thanks again.

Mark: Thank you, Mike, I appreciate the opportunity.

Mike: You missed Breeding Contempt with us in The Nazi Lies Book Club. Join us weekly on Discord as we discuss the books of upcoming guests of the show. Sign up on Patreon or shoot us a DM. Thanks for listening.

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