Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe by Dagmar Herzog (review)
- Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe by Dagmar Herzog
The very premise of "unlearning" eugenics is a compelling one. As Daniel Kevles noted several years ago, we need to exercise constant vigilance as to the legacy of eugenics or, in his words, the operations of eugenics as a specter that haunts the current social and biological imaginary.1 In this volume, Herzog traces and maps out the effects of eugenic knowledge in the past and the present with a view to disinterring its influence and resonance for current historians and ethicists and with a specific focus on the questions of reproduction and disability.
Written in a highly accessible style, the book is divided into an introduction and three chapters with extensive notes, which make up nearly half the book. The attractiveness of a volume whose main text comprises less than one hundred pages is evident for those who are looking for a concise but detailed argument about the echoes of eugenic science in today's politics of reproduction and disability. The book has a clear focus on the postwar period with an emphasis on Germany, but Herzog actively ranges across other European countries.
The introduction, perhaps with conscious echoes of Judith Butler's work on "precarious life," centers on the "precarious citizenship" (3) thrown up by the biologized world in which we increasingly live and posits one central thesis: that debates about the curtailment or advancement of abortion rights are related to the rise of disability rights and their increased recognition in European law and society.2 Herzog argues that the historical entanglements of these two questions arose from the eugenic past, especially in Nazi Germany, and displays how two ostensibly progressive goals have been effectively turned against one another in their transit through political and religious terrains. Herzog illustrates how for many Protestants and Catholics who were offering themselves as guides for the moral development of postwar [End Page 454] German society, historic opposition to the so-called euthanasia murders of the 1930s and 1940s "was generally combined with the message that sexual conservatism needed to be restored and that above all abortion … must be criminalized" (4).
Such ideas were tempered by what the author highlights as a "remarkable find" (8): in the 1960s, many religious figures in the West argued that abortion under some circumstances was legitimate. Herzog notes that this argument was "saturated" (9) by references to disability and arguments about the need to reduce human suffering or prevent disabled individuals from being born. From the 2000s on, this position was in turn countered by disabled rights groups, which called for the protection of the disabled and pointed to the Nazi past to oppose abortion on grounds of disability, and by staunch conservative and religious groups that were opposed to abortion on almost any grounds. Herzog explores this "contrapuntal relationship" (10) across time and place throughout the rest of the book in order to detect its reverberations and consequences for today's discussions of disabled rights, "consumer eugenics," and individualization in the neoliberal age.
Chapter 1 traces how a preponderance of discourse on abortion rights developed in western Europe precisely as a mechanism to avoid the birth of disabled children in societies that generally viewed disability with contempt. Herzog brings examples from numerous countries to bear, including the UK and France, and while the saturation of eugenic rationales is clear, the treatment of some countries' debates (for example, Spain in the 1930s) is rather telescopic (31). She mentions that the Spanish sex reformer Hildegart Rodríguez advocated for legislation that would have allowed women to prevent the birth of children who were "retarded, epileptic, degenerate, [and] insane" (31) before the formal establishment of Nazi eugenics. Herzog describes such positions as part of a broader eugenic and sanitary approach whose discursive connections were somewhat distinct, despite their proximity and similar effects.
The other two chapters further explore the relationship between conservative sexual politics, abortion rights, and pressures for women's rights in the postwar...
