Project Goal
There are a few things I want to highlight and contextualize.
First and foremost, this is not a complete, polished work of scholarship. This is a miniscule fraction of all the work that could be done with this material. I had 6 weeks to refine my idea, design a plan, conduct research, and visualize and execute it effectively. This material could take a team of scholars months, if not years, to cover comprehensively. This is meant to be a jumping off point for future scholarship. This is centralized information pulled from various sources that points to an under-discussed part of scholarship.
Stance in Scholarship and Language
That leads me to the next point I want to bring up.
This conversation goes against other conversations about the relationship between eugenics and genetic counseling in one key way. It focuses on the longevity of eugenics rather than the modernization of ideas that moved genetic counseling away from pre-WWII eugenics. While there is value in pointing out the change that came to the profession and acknowledging those who pushed away from outdated, racist, classist views, there is also value to pointing out how long these ideas persisted and how widespread they were. Sheldon Reed, one of the fathers of genetic counseling and a key character in this project, professed eugenic ideologies and their connection to genetics well into the 1970s (Stern, Telling Genes 20).
These people can be commended for their change while also not being put on a pedestal. These men and women were not heroes. It is important to acknowledge the worst parts of our past as well as the changes that took place. It is not comfortable to admit that something like genetic counseling is related to something as horrific as eugenics, but it is the reality we are living in. So, put succinctly, the focus of this paper is on the connection between eugenics and genetic counseling rather than the changes that took place in the field.
On the note of being uncomfortable with the tone of previous scholarship, there is one key point I want to make regarding language. The term positive eugenics is used to describe the side of eugenics that encourages things, like encouraging certain families to have more children. While I understand that this is a clinical term (positive reinforcement, etc.), the purpose of this paper is to make it so that anyone can engage with this information, no matter how much background they have in scholarship. As such, it feels like an injustice to put the word positive in front of eugenics. There is nothing positive about the coercion that took place. In an effort to reform this, I am going to stick to using pronatalist eugenics to describe what others call positive eugenics.This project takes a strong stance against the historical ignorance surrounding American eugenics and refuses to stick to previous language that feels misleading.
Alexandra Minna Stern, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 20.
Further Reading
To read more about the project itself, take a look at the history of these eugenics ideas and their relationship to genetic counseling or look at the visualization and explanation of these relationships.