Eugen Sandow’s visit to South Africa in 1904 was a triumph of colonial display and racism. Despite its prejudices it influenced the development of bodybuilding in South Africa.
Immigrant children at Ellis Island in New York, 1908.
National Archives/Wikimedia Commons
Politics and the lack of compensation are among the factors that can undermine the peer review process, which is important to the quality of knowledge in academic journals.
Anti-trans legislation adjudicates the bodily autonomy of those who do not conform to gender norms.
Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Though progressive politics at the turn of the 20th century called for the protection of America’s national parks, it did so for the enjoyment of white people.
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, after participating in an abortion rights sit-in on July 19, 2022, in Washington.
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In the US, white men have long had the power to make decisions about women’s reproductive health care. Those decisions have often been especially harmful to Black women.
Conversations between patients and their doctors about permanent birth control procedures can at times be fraught and influenced by long-standing stigmas.
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The term voluntary sterilization, referring to the choice to receive permanent birth control, arose as a contrast to the involuntary, or forced, sterilization that stems from the eugenics movement.
Diane Rodríguez and her husband, Zack Elias, are a trans couple in Ecuador.
Chichicko/Wikimedia Commons
Testosterone therapy is often essential for the health and well-being of transmasculine people. The choice to stop it to pursue pregnancy can be a difficult one.
Britney Spears was forced to continue wearing an IUD under her conservatorship.
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The legacy of eugenics is still active in the U.S. Paternalistic attitudes and policies on the reproductive agency of disabled people is one way it manifests.
Originally, medical assistance in dying was intended for people who were terminally ill and whose death was foreseeable.
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Research suggests that expanded access to MAiD tends to benefit people with wealth and privilege, offering them choices and autonomy. At the same time, it puts marginalized people at risk.
Smart people can have really bad ideas – like selectively breeding human beings to improve the species. Put into practice, Galton’s concept proved discriminatory, damaging, even deadly.
Is it really necessary to identify gifted children?
W.E.B. Du Bois in his office at The Crisis in New York City, 1925.
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
As editor of the magazine for 24 years, Du Bois featured articles about biology, evolution, archaeology in Africa and more to refute the rampant scientific racism of the early 20th century.
At the turn of the 20th century, marriage was assumed to be an exercise in mutual misery.
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Concerned about the state of marriage – and thus the ability of whites to procreate – eugenicists were behind some of the earliest modern marriage manuals.
An operation taking place in 1941 on South Side of Chicago.
Library of Congress
The archives of academic institutions can tell previously untold stories of eugenics. Universities can begin to undo oppressive legacies by opening them to artists and communities.
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Visiting Professor in Biomedical Ethics, Murdoch Children's Research Institute; Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law, University of Melbourne; Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford