The sterilisation-seekers

In the story of eugenics, disabled people are often depicted as passive victims. But for some it seemed an opportunity

by Coreen McGuire & Alex Aylward  BIO

Detail from a poster created by the British Eugenics Society, c1930s. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection

is assistant professor in the Department of History at Durham University, UK. She is the author of Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period (2020).

is a departmental lecturer in the history of science at the University of Oxford, UK. He is working on his first monograph, titled ‘Selective Reading: Evolution, Eugenics, and the Contested Legacies of R A Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection’.

Edited byNigel Warburton

A working man, father of six, sits at the table in his small bungalow on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent in the Midlands of England. He – let’s call him Mr H – takes a pencil and paper and traces the outline of each of his hands. He then folds the paper and places it, along with a descriptive note, in an envelope addressed to the Eugenics Society, 20 Grosvenor Gardens, London, and ‘anxiously await[s] reply’.

It is December 1930, and a campaign to legalise the surgical sterilisation of the ‘mentally deficient’ is in full swing. Over the previous decade, thousands of people have already been sterilised across various US states, under laws penned and promoted by eugenics campaigners. Inspired, Britain’s Eugenics Society – whose 700-strong membership included medical doctors, clergymen and leading scientists, such as the statistician R A Fisher and the biologist Julian Huxley – is on the march, pumping out propaganda pamphlets and filling correspondence sections of UK newspapers, magazines and medical journals. Eugenic sterilisation, they argue, is safe, humane, and urgently necessary. Only decisive action can curtail the supposed overzealous breeding of so-called ‘defectives’ and arrest the racial deterioration of the British people. Moreover, and crucially amid the economic wreckage of the Great Depression, a sterilisation programme promises to curb the spiralling costs of caring for those deemed ‘feebleminded’ in overburdened state institutions.

Historians know what happens next, or rather, what doesn’t. Unlike their counterparts in the United States, Canada or, notoriously, Germany, British politicians proved unwilling to ratify such extreme and targeted interventions into the lives and bodies of individual citizens. When introduced into Parliament in the summer of 1931, the Eugenics Society-backed Sterilisation Bill was defeated – 89 ‘ayes’ versus 167 ‘noes’ (130 of which came from Labour MPs who opposed the Bill as anti-working class). The matter was never again put to the vote in Westminster.

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A near miss. Fast-forward a decade and a half and, amid the fallout from the Second World War and revelations of Nazi genocide, ‘eugenics’ would acquire toxic political baggage. The Eugenics Society limped on through the postwar period but, as the credibility of the wider movement crumbled, its mission necessarily evolved. With successive rebrands – most recently in 2021 when it became the Adelphi Genetics Forum – the organisation steadily shed its divisive policy ambitions, reinventing itself as a learned society with the sole aim of supporting basic scientific research in human genetics.

Here lies an apparent irony in the history of modern eugenics. The very word ‘eugenics’, meaning attempts to shape human evolution through controlling who does and does not reproduce, is a British invention, coined in 1883 by Charles Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton. The idea took off in Edwardian England, made concrete through the establishment, in 1907, of what was initially called the Eugenics Education Society, and of the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College London. An idea, a movement, a would-be ‘science’ born in Britain. And yet, practical application of eugenic principles was only ever realised elsewhere. Sterilisation of those considered imperfect – that most archetypal eugenic intervention – bypassed Britain entirely.

Amid the Eugenics Society’s propaganda storm, one piece – an article in The Daily Mail by Julian Huxley entitled ‘One In 100 A Burden To The Rest’ (1930) – caught Mr H’s eye. The article discussed ‘new methods of dealing with the immense and growing army of mental defectives’ and advocated for a combination of sterilisation and institutionalisation to reduce their numbers. Mr H took up the author’s invitation to write to the Eugenics Society for further printed material on sterilisation. In his letter, he expressed his desire to be sterilised, and pleaded for assistance. Doctors had assured him that the congenital deformity of his hands and feet would not be passed on to any children. So it proved for the first five girls, who were ‘perfectly formed’. The sixth baby girl, though, then 12 weeks old, he described as ‘deformed in almost the same manner as myself’. Mr H was willing to undergo ‘any operation in order........

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