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Author Archives: Spirit of our Time
“The Invisible Child” wins Alberta Literary Awards Prize
Leilani Muir (centre) with Sandra Anderson (to her right) and the cast of The Invisible Child.
At the Alberta Literary Awards last night, the play The Invisible Child received the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for outstanding play. The play was written by David Cheoros, Lou Morin, and Leilani Muir (O’Malley), and was performed at last year’s Edmonton International Fringe Festival. A special reading of the play was given at the Living Archives team meeting in October 2012, and footage of both performances features in the Alberta Eugenics Awareness Week highlights video, which will be released later this week. Congratulations to the team that wrote and performed Invisible Child on this well-deserved honour!
Rob Sparrow: talks on eugenics TODAY in Edmonton
Just a quick reminder:
Professor Rob Sparrow will be giving two talks in Edmonton at the University of Alberta on Monday April 8 and Tuesday April 9, 2013. Both talks are open to the public and free! Talks are being held on campus in ETLC (Engineering Teaching & Learning Complex) Continue reading
Forced Sterilization of Women and Girls with Disabilities in Australia: The WWDA submission
In November, I posted on the Australian Senate Inquiry into the forced sterilization of women and girls with disabilities. Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA) has just made its powerful, eye-opening submission to the Inquiry. And there’s something you can do, pronto, that may make a difference here: endorse or support the submission. Anyone who thinks that forced sterilization is a “thing of the past” shoudl read this submission. First, from the submission (p.20),
There is a historical precedent in several countries including for example the USA (until the 1950s), in Canada and Sweden (until the 1970s), and Japan (until 1996) indicating that torture of women and girls with disabilities by sterilisation occurred on a collective scale – that is, mass forced sterilisation. This policy was rationalised by a pseudo-scientific theory called eugenics – the aim being the eradication of a wide range of social problems by preventing those with ‘physical, mental or social problems’ from reproducing. Although eugenic policies have now been erased from legal statutes in most countries, vestiges still remain within some areas of the legal and medical establishments and within the attitudes of some sectors of the community:
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“Disabled people should not have babies.” Continue reading
Eugenics in Australia: Melbourne’s Hidden History
Students Fight to Include Difficult History in California Schools
from Facing History; you might also want to check out their publication for schools on eugenics here:
March 8, 2013
In San Francisco, a group of Facing History and Ourselves students is spearheading a movement that could change public high school history classes for generations of future California teens. Their goal: to include California’s history with eugenics and sterilization in the state’s public high school curricula. To read more, see the original post.
Pride Week Panel on Reproductive Autonomy: Control of Sexuality
Here’s the poster for the upcoming panel, Reproductive Autonomy: Control of Sexuality that we’re hosting this Wednesday as part of the U of Alberta’s Pride Week. The sesssion will feature Lise Gotell and Lane Mandlis as speakers, with Moyra Lang and Rob Wilson performing an interpretative dance (ok, perhaps not, … but we’ll do something useful … or at least will be there). Please print and post, or distribute electronically. Text only version included as well.
Decision to close Red Deer’s Michener Centre prompts mixed reactions
“Baby M”, End of Life Policy, and the Stollery Children’s Hospital
Some of you may be aware of the matter of “Baby M”, involving a 2-year-old child who was admitted to the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, on May 25, 2012. She required a ventilator for life support. Despite the parents’ opposition to the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, which incorporated their religious beliefs, the Court of Queen’s Bench found that it was in the child’s best interests to terminate life support and, on September 14, 2012, ordered the withdrawal of the ventilator. The Court held that there is a general notion in society that a life dependent upon machines and without awareness is not in the best interests of any patient. On September 19, 2012, a three member panel of the Court of Appeal held that there was no error in principle in the Queen’s Bench decision and the appeal was dismissed. On September 20, 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the parents’ application for a further stay. “Baby M’s” ventilator was removed, she suffocated, and died.
The parents are appealing to the Supreme Court of Canada to have Canada’s highest court decide important issues regarding termination of life-sustaining medical treatment. This decision of the lower courts and, if leave is granted, the ultimate decision of the Supreme Court of Canada will decide the process that will be used and who will make decisions to terminate life support.
These decisions of the Alberta Courts and how they will be followed in the future may ultimately affect individuals in your organization or your community. Should you believe that you, your organization, or community have a position on these life and death issues that should be heard and considered Continue reading
Contemporary practices of sterilization in Australia
As a follow up to the post in the first link below, here is a list of further related links on those wanting to know more. Thanks to a helpful anonymous reader of the What Sorts blog who provided most of the links below but who doesn’t wish to be identified. Folks in Oz: let us know if you have more information, are undertaking action, whatever.
- http://whatsortsofpeople.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/forced-sterilization-and-disability-in-australia/ Recent What sorts blog post on forced sterilization in Australia TODAY:
- 1997 & 2001: reports from the Human Rights Commission in Australia that discuss the practice.
- 1998– official document assessing situation, number of sterilizations per year, convenience of sterilizing disabled woman http://www.familycourt.gov.au/wps/wcm/resources/file/ebb8810487b4021/MURRAY.pdf
- 2001- Study and report from Women With Disabilities Australia. Thorough, including much relevant history, sterilization survivor testimony and narratives, as well as a talk given by Adrienne Asch, and references to the significance of the Canadian eugenic history here, and reports “The Sterilization of Leilani Muir” as one of two video source. http://www.ag.gov.au/Documents/HRPB%20-%20NHRAP%20-%20Baseline%20Study%20-%20Submission%20-%20Women%20with%20Disabilities%20Australia%20-%20Attachment%205.PDF
- Leilani Muir on The Current, with Anna Maria Tremonti Continue reading
Forced sterilization and disability in Australia
From a “better babies” competition, 1913
A Senate committee was recently established in Australia to review existing law and social policy concerning the sterilization of people with disabilities.
It seems that the inquiry is a response to public response (surprise? outrage?) to finding out that this practice continues in Australia under state and territorial legislation, and beyond it.
I suspect that the commission will find that Continue reading
Sterilized: Their Fight for Reproductive Rights
here’s a video posted by the justice for victims project, based in lynchburg, virginia, as part of a kick-starter pledge campaign.
Samantha Martin, 1993 – 2006
“A fundamentally eugenic rhetoric”
I have no desire to rekindle the flame of this man’s still unrepentant posture that ending Tracy’s life was a blameless act. My quarrel here is not with a Saskatchewan farmer, or an Ontario mother, or any other horribly misguided parent seeking to end the life of a disabled child. My quarrel is with the clichés and platitudes that both foster and condone a very particular homicidal impulse. It is a preposterous notion that Tracy’s life did not conform to the law of nature that Robert somehow epitomizes. The simplistic morality of pitting the “law of nature” against the “law of a nation” – the core assertion of Global’s Taking Mercy – must be exposed for what it is: a fundamentally eugenic rhetoric.
Check out Catherine Frazee on Global’s “Taking Mercy”, and on the Latimer case more generally, from whom this paragraph is taken.
Maine law changes disparaging language in state statutes, programs
from Bangor Daily News Maine, April 9th, 2012:
Christina Mailhot got teased a lot as a child.
Born with Down syndrome, words like “retard” were flung at her every day, meant to be insulting. So when Mailhot, now 33 and a member of the Augusta-based self-advocacy group Speaking Up For Us, heard state officials using “mentally retarded” in relation to people with disabilities, she cringed.
“It’s legal talk; they’re legal words saying we are stupid,” she said. “I’m not that stupid, you know.”
Soon, such words will be wiped from Maine law and removed from the names of some Department of Health and Human Services programs. They will be replaced with phrases like “intellectual disability” and “person with a disability.”
Read the whole article here
Offensive words and phrases and their recommended replacements:
- Afflicted (eliminate or use “affected”)
- Crippled children (children with disabilities)
- Deranged (persons who have mental health diagnoses)
- Drunkard (person with alcoholism)
- Handicapped (eliminate as a noun, as in “the handicapped.” Replace with “disabilities” when paired with a person, as in “child with disabilities”)
- Lunatic (person declared legally incompetent)
- Mental deficiency (cognitive disability)
- Mental retardation (developmental disability)
- Mentally defective (has a cognitive disability)
- Senile (eliminate or use “people with dementia” or “people who have dementia”)
Genetic counseling for the politically committed
h/t Anne Pasek
What sorts of academics should there be?
from Carl Elliott, “How to be an academic failure: an introduction for beginners”, The Ruminator Review, but also: whitecoatblackhat.com/academicfailure/
Carl visited us up in Edmonton a few years ago, courtesy in part due to the work he was doing at the time on big pharma and also as a member of the What Sorts Network. In addition to enjoying and learning much from his public lecture, we also had a great informal, roundtable session with about a dozen people that was focused on his then-developing work on a particular case in psychopathology that involved a senior professor who had murdered his spouse.
I also had a fun dinner with Carl in which he confessed his slight ill-ease with me. This was caused by the fact that every time I started speaking, I managed to disappoint his expectation that I would sound just like The Dude. “Damn it, how can that be?” he wondered aloud, almost with sufficient pathos for me to consider peppering our conversation with some of the many lines I know from heart from The Big Lebowski. But despite the short-term fun this would have involved, I thought that this might actually exacerbate the problem in the long run, so I resisted the temptation. “But that’s just like, your opinion, man.” I still hear a small voice inside my head say.
Here’s how his recent article, with all its sage advice on academic failure, begins:
How to be an academic failure? Let me count the ways. You can become a disgruntled graduate student. You can become a burned-out administrator, perhaps an associate dean. You can become an aging, solitary hermit, isolated in your own department, or you can become a media pundit, sought out by reporters but laughed at by your peers. You can exploit your graduate students and make them hate you; you can alienate your colleagues and have them whisper about you behind your back; you can pick fights with university officials and blow your chances at promotion. You can become an idealistic failure at age 25, a cynical failure at 45, or an eccentric failure at 65. If failure is what you’re looking for, then you can hardly do better than the academic life. The opportunities are practically limitless.
Call me arrogant, but I like to think I have a knack for failure. Having started and abandoned one abortive career, participated in the dissolution of a major bioethics center, published dozens of articles nobody has read and given public lectures so dull that audience members were actually snoring, I think I have earned my stripes. It is true that I am not an alcoholic yet. I do not have a substance abuse problem, and no university disciplinary proceedings have been brought against me so far. I am still a novice at failure. Many other people in my own field have succeeded at failing in a far more spectacular fashion than I have, some of whom are rumored to be living in South America. But I am learning. And I think I have something to contribute. Read more
Tommy Douglas, young eugenicist
from The National Post, by Michael Shevell
This NP article is itself taken from a longer article in the January 2012 issue of the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences.
Though bespectacled and slight of build, Tommy Douglas is a giant of 20th Century Canadian history. His iconic, indeed mythic, status within the Canadian historical landscape is exemplified by his selection, in 2004, as “The Greatest Canadian” in a CBC-mandated competition above such luminaries as former Prime Ministers Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Lester Bowles Pearson, scientist Frederick Banting, and hockey great Wayne Gretzky. This honour reflects Douglas’ role as the “father” of Canadian Medicare, which has emerged, for better or worse, as a defining feature of a Canadian national identity.
Medicare has in effect emerged as a statement of national values. Values that include compassion, fairness, tolerance and equality; values that are not selectively applied, but are extended to embrace even the most vulnerable of Canadians.
Eugenics, by contrast, concerns itself at its most fundamental level with the selective breeding of humanity to improve the human species. At a practical level, eugenics in the 20th century involved the removal from the gene pool by various means those classes of individuals considered “inferior stock,” whose deficits had an inherited basis that was immutable for future generations. These classes included those suffering from mental illness, intellectual disability or what was characterized as social diseases (e.g, alcoholism, delinquency).
The broad principles of universal-access medicare contradict those that can be utilized to justify the practice of eugenics. It would be paradoxical for an individual to support both. Yet Tommy Douglas did so with moral persuasion. Careful analysis of this contradiction reveals with hindsight further paradoxes that merit consideration. … read more
Limelight Film Festival: Edmonton
The Limelight Film Showcase, Day 2, is TOMORROW, i.e., Tuesday 18th October, 2011, at the University of Alberta campus in Edmonton. All events are in Myer Horowitz Theatre in the SUB Building, and the festival runs from noon until around 10pm and includes not only short and feature films, but also live dance and movement performances. Check out the schedule via the festival page here. All events are free and open to the public.
Eugenics and contemporary disability studies
from Natalie Ball, working with Gregor Wolbring at the University of Calgary on the Living Archives on Eugenics project:
People with disabilities often were targeted by the state for eugenic intervention. Such policies and practices continue to impact the lives of people with disabilities. The word ‘eugenics’ often invokes thoughts of forced sexual sterilization mandated by a governing body. It recalls to mind 19th and 20th century ideas about a ‘master’ race, the Holocaust and ‘forgotten crimes’. Yet, eugenics often is seen as a dark era of the past, a regrettable fragment of history, beliefs, ideas and practices from which modern society progressively has distanced itself. But is eugenics truly limited to the past?
Eugenics is not just an historical experience. It is, arguably, a contemporary and future topic of concern for people with disabilities and for disability study scholars. To understand why we need only look at how the concept and practice were understood by Sir Francis Galton, the person who coined the term, and the way in which eugenics practices have changed over time. In his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, Galton introduced the term as follows: “the investigation of human eugenics – that is, of the conditions under which men of a high type are produced.”
You can read the full article at the FEDCAN blog here
or
http://blog.fedcan.ca/2011/07/14/eugenics-and-contemporary-disability-studies/
