MacNeill, Norman M.

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The Linacre QuarterlyVolume 4 | Number 2 Article 2March 1936Eugenic Sterilization vs. Feeble-MindednessNorman M. MacNeillFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnqRecommended CitationMacNeill, Norman M. (1936) "Eugenic Sterilization vs. Feeble-Mindedness," The Linacre Quarterly: Vol. 4: No. 2, Article 2.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnq/vol4/iss2/2THE LINACRE QUARTERLY is in favor of euthanasia, it is quite within the realm of possibility that that doctor's medical career will be at an end. The preservation of one's life is the strongest tendency present in the life of each individual and patients will become very suspicious of medicines prescribed by a doctor in favor of euthanasia, especially if they be rich and have rela-tives who are devoutly waiting for their passage from this valley of tears. BI RTH CONTROL AND EUTHANASIA The National Moderator of the Catholic Physicians' Guild, the Reverend Ignatius W. Cox, S.3., Professor of Ethics at Fordham Uni-versity, is the author of two recent pamphlets, one on euthanasia called "Mercy Killing Is Murder!" which contains a feature article written by him for the New York World-Telegram, and a radio talk on euthanasia. The other pamphlet is entitled "Birth Control, Birth Controllers and Perversion of Logic," and contains three radio addr'esses on birth control occasioned by the controversy on that sub-ject last fall in New York City. Both of these pamphlets may be obtained from the Paulist Press, 415 'West 59th Street, New York City. EUGENIC STERILIZATION vs. FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS By NORMAN M. MAcNEILL, M.D. Philadelphia EUGENIC sterilization, provided it were ethical, which it is not, as a human betterment program would not be futile, perhaps; if Mendelian principles were strictly predictable in their application to human genetic laws. At present they are not. For a period following the rediscovery of Mendel's work, it became fashionable to assume that the transmission of certain somatic defects and particularly mental defects, was the product of a single recessive Mendelian factor or gene; a view which is now held untenable in the light of much research and experimentation in heredity carried on during recent years . To quote Herd: "vVhen two pure bred individuals showing con-trasts in respect of one particular character are mated, the first generation usually shows one of the characters only, this character being called the dominant, the other the recessive. In some cases there is an apparent blend of the characters, but that it is not a real blend is shown when the individuals of the first generation are mated together; for the second generation then shows the two original characters agam [ 26] (I ( ( ( I f \ \ ( ) I TH E LI NAC R E QUA RTERL Y in the proportion of three domin ants to one r ecessive. The receSSIves if ma t ed together go on producing r ecessive charact ers p erpetually ; so also docs one of the three domin ants, but the two other dominants a re like those of the first generat ion .... Mendel knew this, but the explana tion in t erms of chromosomes and genes is more r ecent. Chromo-somes a re conceived as made up of genes , and these genes a re r esp on-sibl e for the presence of certa in cha racteristics present in the individ-uals. In a child's cells, one of any one p air of chrom osomes is from the fa ther , one from the mother ; so also with genes. If t he two genes of any one p a ir are both alike the individual will be p m e bred, so fa r as the particula r cha r act eristic determined by th at gene is concerned. If they a r e differ ent, then th e domin ant will express itself in that indi-vidual but opposite genes may be handed on in inheritance. If, for example (I emphasize the 'if') we can imagine tha t feeble-mindedness was det ermin ed by one gene and that a recess ive gene (tha t assertion has been seriously made) t hen if a pure normal married a defective the offspring would all be normal but they would ca rry in their germ cells a p a ir of genes , one for normality and one for feeble-mindedness , i. e. they would be 'carrier s' and in the next gener ation defectives would aga in appear , whether they ma rried other simila r or p ure normals or defectives ." A complicating factor in the a ttempt to det ermine th e relationship to or influence of heredity in mental defect is the lack of unanimity of opinion, even among p sychi atrist s, as to just wha t extent and in what t yp es it is genotypically conditioned. Add to thi s the as yet imper-fectly under stood factor of mutations, with the imposs ibility of ruling out t he so-called blas t ophthoric agencies, and the subj ect becomes exceedingly complicat ed and equally untenable as a th eo ry upon which to justify the some 16,000 st erilizations which were p erformed in the U nited Stat es during th e p as t few years upon men a nd women who wer e for differ ent and often inadequ at e reasons " considered" unfit to procreat e. It is safe to say that the great maj ority of the cases of feeble-mindedness, and this p a rti cula rly in the more marked defect s, ar e dUE to some disease or injury to the developing bra in and that a much smaller g roup ar e genot ypic or due to a defective r ecessive gene ; but the latter, to quote Mohr, "have no visible effect what ever in heter o-zygous conditions, i.e. when present in single dose only," so that in order t o transmit the defect it becomes necessar y for two r ecessive genes to occur in the same p a ir. 'Vhile this eventu ality is possible, it is admittedly r ar e, or, to quot e J ennings : "If the prop ortion of feeble-minded in the popul ation is one per thousand, t o decrease that proportion to one per t en thousand will r equire about sixt y-eight gen-[ 27] THE E I NAGRE QUARTERLY erations or two to three thousand year s if it is done merely by stopping the propagation of all feeble-minded individuals." Charles McNeil, Professor of Child Life and H ealth, Univer sity of Edinburgh, in reviewing a series of some 1,400 cases of feeble-minded-ness whi ch were studied over a p eriod of twenty-eight years, found that about three-fourths of his cases were non-her editary, a find ing which is in agreement with the class ical study by the late ,;V alter E. Fernald, of W averly, Mass ., in which more th an half were found to be non-her editary. Abraham Myerson, in referring to a study made for the Common-wealth of Massachusetts and published in 1930, says that: "Included in the survey were ma ny families in which feeble-mindedness had occurred for two generations and more, but even among these 'wo rst' families there were norm al branches p roducing worthwhile persons. And for anyone of these families therc wcre a dozen in which th e feeble-minded member was a solitary defective occurring in an otherwise normal familial group not in any way to be distinguished from th e rest of the population. Any p sychi a tri st practicing in a community who sees the run of p eople as they a re, knows that successful, ordinary, and defective parents p rodu ce feeble-minded offspring." It would t hus seem that the gene for feeble-mindedness is recessive, in which case all het erozygous carrier s may be normal in so far as obvious feeble-mindedness is concern ed, though they are "carriers" of the defective gene. There is no known method by which these carrier s can be identified; so that the st erilization program as applied to the feeble-minded resolves itself into the anomalous plan of sterilizing indi-viduals who may be circumstantially incapable of transmitting th e r ecessive gene which causes feeble-mindedness , while leaving un st erilized a vast army of carriers potentially capable of transmitting the damag-ing her edit ary factor, but incapable of det ection by any means known to genetics in its present stat e of development; and yet some of our states, as well as Nazi Germany, have adopted and enacted compulsory sterilization laws. The obvious corollary is that no measure, short of wholesale com-munal st erilization, would guarantee the non-transmission of defective genes; but even that extreme and ludicrous measure would not be a guarantee that mutations, which a re at present imperfectly under-stood, might not occur, as they probably do occur, to initiate defective changes in existing normal genes, or, as Alexander Fraser so excel-lently st ates it : "Even if we could by means of some happy discover y detect all the hidden defective genes in the race, and by some other happy method get rid of them, we have abundant evidence that they ar e being manufactured in normal individuals perhaps as fast as we could poss ibly get rid of them." [ 28] ( ( ( ( THE LIN AG RE QUARTERLY The methods of eugenic sterilization are vasectomy in the male and salpingectomy in the female. These procedures are not the physio-logical equivalent of castration or oophorectomy. They do not decrease sexual libido while they do p ermit of unlimited sexual promiscuity with its attendant increase in the incidence of venereal disease. The st eri-lized high-grade moron r epresents excellent material for the white-slave trade, both as to availa bility for the t r ader and assurance of continued finan cial r eturn, because of the ease with which these unfortuna tes can be dominated by panderer s. The diffusion into any community of groups of sterilized feeble-minded youths, whose eroticism is proverbial, would of necessity create a social problem of hideous possibilities. Much has been said and written about the benefits to the community and the race which would follow the st erilization of that moiety of our population which is incapable of demonstr ating, through intelligence tests, its right to r eproduce the numerica lly incalculable group of indi-viduals who perform fa ithfully and efficiently the thousand and one menial and laborious tasks which are so vitally essential in the conduc-tion of our socio-economic civilization, the lower-bracket laborers who clean our street s, who contribute to the (scientific) disposal of our garbage and in other countless ways make their simple but essential contribution to our modern specialized commun al exist ence. Their contribution to our mechanistic age is very vital and would not, yes, probably could not, be supplied by college graduates. Certa in American cities have recently witnessed the strange spec-tacle of the member s of one of the leaJ'l1ed professions summoning to the ba r of their own profession, certain of its outstanding members who had allegedly prostituted the professiona l ethics and ideals which they were pledged to uphold, through aiding and abetting the anti-social machina tions of our criminal underworld. If eugenic sterilization .aims at r acial and communal betterment, why advocate the st erilization of mental defectives with their relatively low potential for communal harm, as compared with tha t portion of the intelligentsia which contributes its highly tra ined normal intelligence quotient to anti-social and crimi-nal ends? A saner plan would seem to counsel the st eriliza tion of dicta tors and other venal intellectuals with their high potential for the genetic transmission of communal ha rm. It is noteworthy and indica tive of a changing attitude towards the eugenic sterilization propaganda that the British Departmental Com-mittee on Sterilization (Brock Committee) advised against compulsory sterilization and that the Journal of the A?nel'ican M edical Association has r ecently taken a stand against it. vVe live in troublous times and eugenic sterilization would seem to be an appanage of the chaotic and false philosophies through which It distract ed world seeks to stabilize itself, whether it be through birth [ 29) THE LI NACRE QUARTERLY control, in the face of an alarming decrease in the birth r a t e, or prohi-bition enforced on an unwilling citizenry, which ultimately unshackled itself through its rights of franchise, or human sterilization which, to a t least a numerically respectable minority of the population, r epre-sent s itself as a program based on a t heory scientifically unproven and eugenically unsound. REFERENCES H en ry H erd: Lancet, Sept. 30- 33, p. 783. Otto Mohr: H er edity and Disease, p . 63. H . S. J ennings: The Biolog ica l Basis of Human Nature, p. 242. Cha rles McNeil: Edin. ]fed. J our. , Oct., 1931. A lexander Fraser: L INACRE QUAUTEIU.y, D ec., 1933. A braham Myerson: A,·ch. New'. <S' Psych., March, 1935. SOME TOPICS FOR GUILD DISCUSSIONS By DR. .JOSEPH A. DILLON President, Federation of Cutholic Physicians' Guilds MOST worthy and inspiring is the work being done by the Catholic Physicians' Guilds throughout the country. Notable speakers address our assemblies. The Catholic point of view is elucidated and the spirit of true Christianity pervades. The discussions at the meet -ings bring all doubts into the open. Each member speaks his mind and all ethi cal questions are clearly defined. It is unfortunat e that it is not now feasible to put into print the many paper s r ead at our gatherings. Suggestions from Guild members should be sent to the officers of the Federation, thus helping to attain our desideratum of united action . As an aid in opening up field s of thought, the following a r e offered for consideration: Medicine and the Catholic Church. The Doctor and the Sacr aments-our duty in the sickroom. Physician Saints and Holy Men. Catholic L eaders in Medicine and R elated Sciences . H ygiene and Disease in the Bible. Ancient and Modern Medical Miracles. Manifestations by Holy P er sons. Catholic Ethics and Catholic Hospitals. Medical Missionaries and Nursing Order s. Catholic Medical Colleges. The Catholic M edical Student. The Catholic Interne in Non-Catholic Hospitals. The Catholic Student in the Univer sity--Newman Clubs. Psychoanalysis- P sychotherapy-H ypnotism- :Mesmerism. [ 30 1 

Eugenic Sterilization vs. Feeble-Mindedness

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Eugenic Sterilization vs. Feeble-Mindedness

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