Such language! Okay, here’s one that will likely offend the millennials for dated verbiage in reprint. George Carlin famously derided the use of today’s soft language. The subjective term being “learning disabled” as one of several replacements for retarded or imbecile, which have become highly-offensive slurs. Yet, the softening of a severe mental condition is nothing new. The eugenics newspaper clip is from the late 1920s.
Published in the Gainesville Times, September 20, 1988, Prof. Alex Taylor enters the unceasing debate over some tough cases that plague society, and the logical fallacies that surround them.
A full transcript and additional commentary follow the column.
TRANSCRIPT
Prune or ruin the human race with sterilization
A few days ago, the Associated Press ran a story about Indianapolis resident Melody Baldwin, a young woman awaiting trial for the murder of her 4-year-old son, Joshua. Most newspapers either buried the story or never ran it at all.
They should have.
In legal circles, no debate over crime and punishment is more heated than whether or not our courts are protecting society . . . or playing God.
Standing before Judge Roy Jones, charged with feeding Joshua fatal doses of psychiatric drugs, Mrs. Baldwin, expecting her second child this month, agreed to voluntary sterilization and adoption of her unborn child.
The decision brought an immediate outcry from the Indiana Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women. Richard Waples, legal director for the Indiana CLU, informed Judge Jones, “You’re authorizing a decision on reproductive capabilities that is dangerously close to eugenics,” (a form of selective breeding)
.Legal and ethical questions raised in this case have surfaced all over the world during the past few years, touching on the most intimate aspects of human interaction. Sterilization, chemical castration and therapeutic tubal ligations are terms bantered around courts as if people were lab samples in an anatomy class. Yet, the question is certainly not new, nor unknown to legal and medical scholars all over the world.
The fear of sterilization and eugenics seems to be a residue from the early years of this century. Between 1911 and 1930, 33 states passed laws requiring sterilization for a variety of behavioral traits deemed to be genetically determined. These included such characteristics as alcoholism, criminality, bestiality and feeble-mindedness. Probably the greatest impact of the eugenics movement was internal pressure in Germany during the 1920s for “racial hygiene.” You know the rest of that story.
Yet there is another dimension to this legal test . . . whether sterilization is a form of controlling the population, or improving the quality of life for all humanity.
The question has already been answered in the celebrated case of Buck vs. Bell, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1927. Carrie Buck was an 18-year-old white woman from Amherst County, Va., who was committed to the state institution for the retarded or “feeble-minded.” Carrie, the mother of a severely retarded child, and her own retarded mother, were all in the same institution. The lower court wanted Carrie sterilized to prevent further generations of retarded children.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in delivering the court’s opinion, contributed some very interesting and thoughtful comments on this soul-wrenching debate. “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. (war). It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices . . . The principle that sustains compulsory vaccinations is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
And so they are. Still . . .
-Alex Taylor’s column on history and criminology appears in The Times on Tuesdays.
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“Weed Out Mentally Deficient”. Referencing that newspaper clip, it’s another fine example of broad-brushed soft language. I can’t help but hear Gene Wilder’s conclusive summation from the movie Blazing Saddles. “You know — morons.”
