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An Image of God

The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

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CHAPTER 1

For the Welfare of the Race: The Early Clash over Reproduction and Community

In March 1910, Father Stephen M. Donovan wanted to talk about vasectomies. Specifically, he was concerned about the increasing number of vasectomies ordered by an increasing number of states for institutionalized persons. Were these state-ordered deprivations of the ability to have children moral? Writing in the American Ecclesiastical Review (AER), he launched a discussion that would draw numerous contributions and opinions from Catholic moral theologians in the United States and Europe for the next two years. Rather than addressing lay people, the AER provided instruction for the clergy, often advising them on matters of doctrine and morality so that they could more appropriately deal with the challenges of their congregations. A professor at the Franciscan House of Studies affiliated with the Catholic University of America, Donovan initially questioned the morality of the sterilization operation as a practical matter, since a number of states had begun to authorize the practice in order to lessen criminal tendencies and to prevent what they deemed "hereditary degeneration." His inquiry marked the first mention of eugenic sterilization within the pages of an American Catholic publication. The ensuing discussion about the permissibility of the vasectomy operation would result in no definitive pronouncements, but it served as a forum to lay bare some of the conflicts and dilemmas that would recur again and again in the next two decades as US Catholics debated the many facets of sterilization and the larger questions of eugenic reform.

Donovan's interest in the issue coincided with the public recognition of Dr. Harry C. Sharp's use of vasectomy among institutionalized persons in Indiana. The surgeon for the Indiana Reformatory, Sharp had moved to the forefront of those advocating eugenic sterilization with a March 1902 article in which he argued that states should authorize their mental institutions to sterilize inmates. His rationale: the positive and calming effect that he observed from the forty-two inmates on whom he had performed the operation in the previous several years. In undertaking this remedy, Sharp had put into practice a procedure that had only appeared in the medical literature for the first time in 1897. But in the years immediately after publication of his article, others warmed to Sharp's perspective; in 1907 the Indiana legislature affirmed his position by passing the country's first sterilization statute. The law called for the prevention of "procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists," and clearly stated the importance of hereditary thinking to this legislative movement—and the budding American eugenics movement—by professing, "Heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy, and imbecility."

The clear association between heredity and crime can be tied to nineteenth-century criminal anthropology and a host of "family studies" that raised the question of criminal fecundity and the resultant drain on community resources. In 1909, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a speech, delivered at the association's annual convention, in which Sharp directly addressed the rapidly rising cost of institutionalization and proposed that the results of his successful sterilization of inmates—now nearly five hundred in all—offered a viable solution. Activist physicians in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, California, Maryland, Illinois, and Texas followed Sharp's lead and called for eugenic sterilization as a solution to the problem of state institutions overflowing with male inmates. By 1913, eleven other states—including Washington, California, Connecticut, Nevada, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Michigan, Kansas, and Wisconsin—had put eugenic sterilization measures into place. The legislatures of four other states—Pennsylvania, Oregon, Vermont, and Nebraska—passed similar laws, which were then vetoed by their governors.

It was in the context of this growing medical literature and bustling legislative activity that Donovan's piece prompted further inquiries. Physicians, lawyers, and clergy alike wondered about the "attitude which a Catholic is in conscience bound to take should the subject be brought before them in a practical way." In general, the theologians who responded fell into two categories. The first group maintained that vasectomy operations were immoral since the procedure constituted a grave mutilation of the human body and only grave mutilations that were necessary for the conservation of human life could be morally justified. The second group of theologians submitted that, since the patients in question were not only defectives but also criminals, the state had the right to perform the operation for the greater protection of society. Also, since the operation could be reversed upon rehabilitation, the mutilation would not necessarily be permanent. Though the authors each brought particular nuances and concerns to their writing, these two general positions laid out the key issue under consideration in the exchange: under what circumstances, if any, would the state have the right to physically interfere with an individual's capacity to have children.

In exhibiting these contrary positions, the writers in the AER began the first in what eventually would be a much larger Catholic exchange about the eugenics movement and the policy initiatives that the movement advocated. While the AER contributors limited their reflections to the narrow question of whether the state could justifiably sterilize a criminal inmate, other Catholic thinkers tied eugenics reform theories and goals to a host of other issues, including the appropriate role of science in social policy, the challenges of the birth control movement, and larger questions of economic justice. It is this broad gamut of Catholic thought that shapes the story presented here. For the emergence of the eugenics movement itself was matched, nearly as quickly, with a deep engagement by Catholics with the benefits and pitfalls of that movement. Here, I begin by exploring the variety of ways that Catholic thinkers agreed and disagreed with the claims of the eugenics movement and what these arguments reveal about the proper relationship between the state and the family and the obligations of a society to care for all of its members.

In 1910, however, no one could have anticipated the roiling debates of the next three and a half decades, nor the many corners of ordinary life that would be touched by eugenics. The different perspectives published in the AER in response to Donovan's initial query produced no consensus about the morality of state-sanctioned vasectomy for criminals, so in May 1911 the editors turned to P. A. Schmitt, a Jesuit from Louvain University in Innsbruck. Schmitt's response, translated and summarized for AER's American readers, suggested that the morality of vasectomy could only be judged with respect to the intentions of the individual performing the operation. He hoped that this emphasis on context would make the question regarding the double effect of the operation more clear. Schmitt then argued that the serious effect of the operation—withdrawing the powers of reproduction from the patient—yielded an intended good result: preventing hereditary disease, something that "all will agree ... is desirable in itself." There was a crucial caveat, however. Schmitt held that the good result was not the immediate effect of the operation, but only a by-product. In this sense, judging a vasectomy to be morally permissible would be equivalent to arguing that the ends justify the means. In summarizing Schmitt's opinion, the editors reminded their readers, "It is never lawful to do evil in order that good may result therefrom."

In addition to his perspective on ends and means, Schmitt recognized that if the legislation in question were to be logically applied, it would affect more than just mentally defective criminals. It would also apply to those who were "affected by tuberculosis, excessive alcoholism, the sexually morbid in certain stages of disease, and indeed to many other conditions of life in which heredity becomes the immediate source of mental or physical defects cumbersome or dangerous to the commonwealth." Based on this observation, Schmitt made a strong argument that the impulse to sterilize was propelled by a misguided notion that heredity was the primary cause of degeneracy. He strongly disagreed, submitting that "evil has many sources, such as a false method of education, mistaken or insufficient nutrition, especially the use of alcoholic stimulants, social and labor conditions which over tax the capacity of the individual, the strenuosity and nervous anxiety incident to the striving after material success, artificial living and the pursuit of enervating pleasures,—all of which contribute to the growth of insanity or mental and physical degeneracy." Thus, Schmitt surmised that by emphasizing the hereditary causes for degeneracy, reformers absolved themselves from advocating expensive and complex social and environmental reforms that would really help to end degeneracy.

In subsequent months, as letters poured in to the journal, opinions remained evenly split between those who felt that vasectomy was immoral under all circumstances (other than when necessary to preserve the life of the patient) and those who felt that vasectomy served a greater social good which justified the operation. Since the Vatican had offered no explicit teaching on the question, these authors were free to disagree on the morality of state-ordered vasectomies for criminals. No one, however, denied the fact that the legislation as written—giving institutional administrations complete authorization to choose whom to sterilize—would be ripe for abuse. In the end, Stephen Donovan explained:

While am I still thoroughly convinced of its correctness theoretically, I cannot fail to recognize the wide difference that exists between theory and practice; nor have I at any time during the controversy lost sight of the numerous and great abuses that would follow were the lawfulness of the sterilization of criminals be generally conceded. Practically, therefore, and, as a general rule, the affirmative opinion should not only not be urged in practice, but Catholic surgeons and lawyers as well as others who have an active part in the framing of the laws of our several States should take a firm stand against the legalizing of any surgical operation by which criminals are deprived of their procreative faculty.

At its heart, the discussion about whether or not the vasectomy operation violated the Catholic interpretation of moral law laid out three issues at the core of Catholic responses to negative eugenics policy initiatives during subsequent decades. First, all of the theologians addressed the importance of the generative faculty. They agreed that human beings possess a reproductive faculty endowed by the Creator and that individuals are obligated to control and exercise in light of reason. Second, the authors involved in this conversation agreed that the role of the state in controlling and regulating reproduction was a question that theologians and philosophers would have to address before they could come to any consensus on sterilization. The contributors to the AER were unable to agree on whether the interests of the community, embodied in the state, superseded the right of the individual to procreate. Finally, the authors suggested that the current sterilization legislation was quite ambiguous about who would be subject to the operation. Thus, there was a possibility for grave abuse and tremendous moral hazard.

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As we know, these questions—of reproductive rights, the power of the state, and the rights of the individual—were deeply embedded in the larger eugenics movement, of which the flurry of state sterilization statutes was only a part. Eugenics as a movement grew out of an impulse to discover predictable natural laws that could be applied to improve modern society. The British statistician and traveler Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) led the way, drawing on contemporary thinking about evolution and the urban-industrial climate to develop a theory about individual greatness and British society in the 1860s. A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton applied mathematical techniques to the characteristics he observed in the natural world, working with statistical notions of normal distribution illustrated by the bell curve. He began collecting human data and pondering questions of human heredity using mathematical expressions for the relationships between measured traits. Tracing the family history of prominent individuals—namely scions of the British upper class—in "Who's Who" guides such as the Dictionary of Men of the Time, Galton claimed to have proven a hereditary cause for "greatness" and success. Thus, he posited that the race could be improved with a program of eugenics, or "good breeding"—purposefully encouraging the "fit" to reproduce and discouraging the "unfit" from reproducing. Galton's eugenics rested on some dubious scientific conclusions, but it held powerful attraction for elites who wanted to believe that modern science could confirm and support their position of privilege and superiority. From the beginning, eugenics was not only a question of scientific hypothesis and evidence, but it also was bound up in a host of assumptions about social and economic status that supported a vision of achievable racial perfection.

Though Galton's statistical work was the basis for small, disconnected eugenics movements that sprouted in various spots around the globe, the movements did not draw significant support until the work of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) was rediscovered in 1900. Mendel's 1865 results about the hereditary assortment of dominant and recessive traits in peas stimulated a renewed confidence in the predictability of human heredity. Mendel's theories of inheritance were based on elements that were not directly observable, since a characteristic, such as hair color, that was visible to the human eye might be the genetic result of a combination of both a dominant and a recessive factor where the recessive trait was simply masked by the dominant one. So, while Mendel's work provided a method for predicting heredity, it necessarily included some speculation outside of controlled experimental conditions. More important, however, was the widespread and false assumption that complex human heredity would follow the same single-trait patterns that Mendel's simple pea plants exhibited. However, in the early twentieth century, Mendelian laws of inheritance and August Weissman's hypothesis—that "germ plasma" remained the same from one generation to the next, and thus traits would too—appeared to hold the key to understanding and manipulating the laws of human heredity. Energized by these developments, biologists in the United States went to work trying to distinguish dominant traits from recessive traits in human heredity so that we would all be able to understand—and predict—which traits each mother and father would pass down to their children. The result was an emerging discipline that, in 1905, William Bateson termed "genetics." Much of the work in this new field was done independently of the nascent eugenics movements, but the results would easily, and quickly, be appropriated.

Simultaneously, the period between the turn of the century and World War I was marked by the establishment of a number of institutions that helped to crystallize eugenics as a distinct movement within the United States. The Harvard biologist Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944) played a particularly significant role in these developments. By 1904, Davenport had successfully lobbied the Carnegie Institution of Washington to provide funding for the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. During his time as director of the research center, Davenport conducted breeding experiments with numerous animal species using Mendelian principles. Shortly after founding Cold Spring Harbor, Davenport began to focus his work on human genetics and launched plans to make the laboratory a center for propaganda about eugenics. In addition to becoming the secretary of the committee on eugenics at the American Breeders' Association, Davenport sought the financial support of philanthropist Mary Harriman, wife of E. H. Harriman, the railroad magnate. Harriman's financial assistance allowed Davenport to purchase a location for the Eugenics Records Office (ERO). Over the next three decades, it would become the preeminent facility in the United States for the promulgation and dissemination of eugenics findings.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from An Image of God by SHARON M. LEON. Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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