BLOOD
The history of the American birth control movement is the story of this dynamic: the anarchic energy of sex, or life itself, sometimes resisting and sometimes collaborating with and always entangled within the disciplines imposed by power.
The abdominal incision used in Salpingectomy and Oophorectomy
When Omer Kem was in his fifties, and for the remaining three decades of his life, he became nearly obsessed with the dangers of blood-mixing—the problem, and the promise, of genetics.
Over and over, in letters to family, friends, and newspapers, Omer promoted firm racial segregation and a eugenic program aimed at first defining, and then “weeding out” an ever-increasing list of subhuman types: the idiot, the imbecile, the feeble-minded, the moron, the criminal.
Eugenics—most simply the science of better breeding as applied to humans—was embraced by scientists, academics, physicians, criminologists, politicians, welfare professionals, and ordinary people all across the United States from around 1907, when the first eugenic sterilization law was passed in Indiana, to around the mid 1930s.
Believing that controlled breeding could promote healthier babies and fitter (smarter, more moral) genetic strains in the population, eugenicists advocated a range of practices and policies, from birth control to marriage laws, from the institutionalization of the physically and mentally disabled to severe immigration restriction.
As a prime aspect of biopower, eugenics sought to steady racial, class, and gendered hierarchies by at once controlling sexuality and pathologizing racial minorities and the poor. Eugenicists’ most vicious goal was to eliminate the reproduction of “undesirable” people through forced sterilization of those deemed dysgenic, which included the mentally and physically disabled, the sexually deviant (often homosexuals), the epileptic, the incarcerated, and sometimes simply the poor and uneducated.
