The eugenics movement provided the motive for dozens of laws that remained in force for more than a century in the United States, a significant number of which specifically targeted people with disabilities for legally sanctioned discrimination. Similar laws were adopted around the world, perhaps most notably as part of Hitler’s prelude to the Holocaust. Consequently, we tend to associate the word “eugenics” with all things evil. Yet the underlying message of eugenicists was popular for so long not solely because it denoted coercive legislation but more often because it signaled a hopeful future devoid of social problems. This paper describes how the word “eugenics” is now coming back into common use, and how it has been revived in the service of political objectives, divorced from the period in which it developed and the meaning it had within its earlier historical context. The resulting distortions - directly traceable to the ongoing “culture war” over reproductive rights - sugges...

This paper examines the arguments held by the proponents of "liberal eugenics." Specific emphasis is placed upon current discussions of disability within these arguments. First, the basis of the proponents of liberal eugenics is examined. The arguments held by the proponents are based on separating existing people with disability and the object of intervention or selection (fetus or embryo). The separation is summarized in the thesis that "devalues disabilities, not people with disabilities." We show that this thesis is not consistent. Secondly, this paper examines the meanings of "inclusion." Proponents of liberal eugenics claim that genetic intervention is not an exclusive way for people with disabilities. However, we show that the basis of the proponents of preventing the birth of people with disabilities is the ongoing social system with its interests; the ongoing social system is itself exclusive of people with disabilities. In conclusion, we insis...

At the turn of the twentieth century, social attitudes toward disability turned sharply negative. An international eugenics movement brought about restrictive immigration laws in the United States and other immigrant nations. One cause was the changing understanding of time, both historical and quotidian, that accompanied the advent of evolutionary theory and a competitive industrial economy. As analogies of competition became culturally ubiquitous, new words to talk about disability such as 'handicapped', 'retarded', 'abnormal', 'degenerate', and 'defective', came into everyday use, all of them explicitly or implicitly rooted in new ways of thinking about time. The intense fear of disability that characterised the eugenics movement grew, in good part, from this new and unsettling vision of time.

A crucial challenge for critical disability studies is developing an argument for why disabled people should inhabit our democratic, shared public sphere. The ideological and material separation of citizens into worthy and unworthy based on physiological variations imagined as immutable differences is what I call eugenic world building. It is justified by the idea that social improvement and freedom of choice require eliminating devalued human traits in the interest of reducing human suffering, increasing life quality, and building a more desirable citizenry. In this essay, I outline the logic of inclusive and eugenic world building, define and explain the role of the "normate" in eugenic logic, and provide a critical disability studies reading of the 2005 novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and its 2010 film adaptation. I argue that the ways of being in the world we think of as disabilities must be understood as the natural variations, abilities, and limitations inherent in human embodiment. When this happens, disability will be understood not as a problem to be eliminated but, rather, as a valid way of being in the world that must be accommodated through a sustaining and sustainable environment designed to afford access for a wide range of human variations.