America's Long, Shameful History of Sterilizing Prisoners
By Zoë Beery,
The Outline
| 07. 25. 2017
Coerced sterilizations are a shade away from eugenics.
Last Thursday, Tennessee judge Sam Benningfield was suddenly inundated with accusations of being a eugenicist. Since May, he’s been offering misdemeanor defendants — most of whom, in opioid-plagued White County, are drug users — a 30-day sentence reduction if they get a vasectomy or birth control implant. No one said much about his offer until he told a local news reporter last week that he’d come up with the idea after seeing recovering addicts struggle to rebuild their lives. “I hope to encourage them to take personal responsibility and give them a chance, when they do get out, to not to be burdened with children,” he said.
National news outlets, though, saw it differently: Here was a man with power telling people who had none that they were unfit to reproduce. Pressured into releasing a statement the following day, Benningfield, who declined multiple requests from The Outline for comment, addressed his critics, saying that his idea was “in no way a eugenic program. Sterilization is never involved, as all procedures offered are...
Related Articles
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos...