I think that it’s hard not to tether that conversation about poverty and just not having resources to the conversation that Justice Thomas wants to have about abortion. Again, I think there’s a throughline there because he’s holding out his concern as concern for poor black mothers who are being treated to a second round of eugenics. Again, I think the parallels, at least initially, are pretty striking. Right?
Right, and I think he’s very clever at using these things in just the way you are saying. But in fact, as we know, it’s always the poor folks who get disadvantaged by both things. In the eugenics era, it was absolutely poor women who were most likely to be sterilized. They used to call it a Mississippi appendectomy. We’re going to find a situation where wealthy women will by and large be able to have their abortion needs met, but it’s going to be the poor women who really get screwed over by the court if they continue down this path.
One other piece from your book that I think will help at least set the table for the conversation about what happened in Box v. Planned Parenthood is, how did we as a society come to realize we were wrong about eugenics? You mentioned the Holocaust, but it seems like there was a pretty quick pivot from saying, “Everybody should do this, and all the states should get on board” to “Oh, my God, that was embarrassing.” I wonder, I mean, there aren’t a ton of things about which we change our minds that quickly. Tell us how we came to realize the error of our ways in this country.
The big fervor behind it was really the 1910s and 1920s. Indiana starts us off with the first eugenics sterilization law in 1907, it really picks up steam in the ’20s, and slows down a little bit during the Great Depression just because the country was worrying about other things, but it is exactly as you say. One of the real villains of my book is a guy named Harry Laughlin who ran the Eugenics Record Office that I mentioned. He was very close to the Nazi scientists. He corresponded with them, he actually accepted an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1938—that was after they had purged all their Jewish faculty. He seemed like he was very sympathetic to the Nazis.
This was all moving along apace, but yeah, once we enter the war and we’re actually as a country committed to defeating Nazism, that’s the first step. Then, of course, when we learn about the atrocities of the Holocaust. In that era is when Laughlin loses his funding and the Eugenics Record Office has to close up shop. He sort of moves back to rural Missouri, where he came from, in disgrace, and that was because foundations were seeing what was going on in Germany, and they didn’t want to fund this anymore. Then, yes, after the war, it is very much discredited. Although it’s worth noting that it wasn’t entirely eliminated, and incredibly enough, the last eugenic sterilization under one of these state laws occurred in I think it was Oregon in 1982. It trails off, but into the ’70s they were still doing a number of eugenic sterilizations.