Continuity and Change in the History of Eugenics

January 21, 2025

Patrick J. Ryan’s article “Eugenic Continuities: Youth, Sex, Disability, and the Rise of Liberal Eugenics in the Late Twentieth Century” was published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth in January 2024. The fascinating piece repositions the 1986 decision E. (Mrs.) v. Eve by the Supreme Court of Canada within the history of eugenics. By explicating the judicial decision and tracing different legal traditions in the U.S., UK, and Australia, Ryan argues for a “series of unresolved eugenic continuities in the politics of youth, sex, and disability” in the form of “liberal eugenics.” Since this goes against traditional framings of eugenics in the late twentieth century, we were able to interview him about it.

Your article centers the Canadian court case E. (Mrs.) v. Eve (1986), whose significance, you argue, has been largely forgotten. Can you give us an introduction into what makes this case so remarkable?

In Canada, contraception (inclusive of sterilisation) was decriminalized in 1969. This happened in many countries at about the same time. There was a strong immediate consumer demand for contraceptive medications and devices, along with tubal ligation and vasectomy. Indeed, hundreds of Canadian parents sterilised their intellectually disabled children annually in the 1970s. When this aspect of reproductive freedom reared its head, it caused a public outcry and mobilised advocacy groups such as the Canadian Association for the Mentally Retarded (CAMR – as Inclusion Canada was then named). A disabled young woman named Eve became part of the controversy in late 1970s, when a judge in Prince Edward Island denied her mother (Mrs. E.) a court order for sterilisation under its parens patriae jurisdiction. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

My study exposed an important divergence in the application of parens patriae among common law countries. Australian courts have assumed the broadest social (most interventionist) interpretation of the doctrine and its test (‘the best interests of the child’); after Eve, Canadian law became the narrowest and most individualistic. In Canada, the parens patriae jurisdiction can only be used for the direct benefit of the dependent individual. It cannot be used to benefit caregivers or to advance social practices or relationships upon which the child or vulnerable adult may depend. I explore these issues in greater detail in the first three chapters of my book Childhood and the Law in Canada – the family/state relationship recently released by LexisNexis.

Canadian legal scholars know E. v. Eve, but you are correct to say that historians have ignored it. Maybe this happened because Eve’s case troubles how we think about reproductive rights and does not fit the dominate historical narratives on eugenics. Be that as it may, the victory of reproductive rights produced the facts and law of the dispute; the case was won by the parties and intervenors (Eve’s advocates) who placed eugenics at its center. There is no debating that greater access to reproductive technologies since the 1970s has vastly expanded the proportion of persons with disabilities sterilised. Even in Canada, where policy and law after Eve restricted the mass sterilisation of the disabled, persons with intellectual disabilities are approximately 9 times more likely to be sterilised today than they were during the so-called “eugenic era.”

You use the term “liberal eugenics” to refer to the continuities of eugenic practices beyond what historians have deemed its gradual end in the 1960s and 70s. Why do you think we – historians and social scientists alike – no longer use the term “eugenics” even though many legal and social barriers to reproductive choices continue to exist?

This question raises the issue of how historians should define eugenics and allows me to offer some clarifications.

First, I did not coin the term ‘liberal eugenics’ (or ‘the new eugenics’). Those terms are at least three decades old. I’m not sure who used them first, but they come from a diverse group of philosophers, ethicists, and social commentators trying to understand the implications of several trends (a) advancements in genetic screening; (b) new genetic technologies; (c) the L20C politics surrounding the reproductive choices of poor women; and (d) the L20C surge in the sterilisation of the disabled.

Second, your question implies a conventional understanding of eugenics that I do not accept. Eugenics does not depend upon the existence of “legal and social barriers to reproductive choice.” In my view, eugenics happens whenever a patterned of reproductive intervention at the level of the individual creates a population effect purported to be salubrious. Eugenics can be implemented by administrative mandate, by market pressure, or other structural forces. In any form it only exists as a set of practices. This is an alternative to examining it as an ideology (the concealment of truth) produced by a movement, or as a policy of state coercion (the prohibition of individual freedom). I did not invent this approach toward power and knowledge; it is derivative of Michel Foucault’s lectures on governmentality and biopolitics in the mid-1970s.

Consider my Foucauldian redefinition of eugenics by thinking about the $5 Billion USD global market in sperm. One bank specialises in trading the seed of Nobel laureates. More commonly companies provide catalogues of their donors’ race, eye-colour, height, education, family history, and other characteristics. Customers say they choose profiles that match their own characteristics and the ones they value. I have found anecdotal evidence that tall, white men with higher education who suffer from no known disabilities or diseases are favoured. I have not been able to determine the strength of this market pattern, but it is obvious that a sperm market can produce population effects thought to be eugenic just as well as any government bureau could. Dressing up the market in the terms of informed consent or consumer choice does not free it from the problems of power in eugenics or any other realm. The sperm market is a visceral example, but it has not been as important as the selective screening and sterilisation of the disabled in the last half-century. And neither of these seem as potentially significant as the nascent therapies that promise population-wide genetic transformations.

But let’s return to the case at hand. The dispute over Eve was not eugenic because there was a legal imposition upon her mother’s decision-making on Eve’s behalf. It was eugenic because it was part of a large-scale pattern of family sterilisation of the disabled. None of the parents had to speak of a master race or a construct a grand vision of human perfection for the population effect to be secured. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, people know what they are doing, and they can sometimes explain why they are doing it, but they cannot tell you what they are doing does. In my opinion, historians should be more concerned with consequences than intentions.

I was captivated by your argument that, “by its own logic, eugenics is only inseparable from the politics of youth, generational relations, gender, sex, and disability.” How does a lens of age, childhood, and youth studies help us reconceptualize the continuities of eugenics?

In the process of this research, I encountered historians who did not understand the connection between eugenics and power relations between the generations. It encouraged me to make the connection more assertively. Several L19C-E20C examples will never leave me. Consider the fate of 600 boys sentenced to the Indian juvenile reformatory who were experimented upon by Harry Sharpe as he perfected the vasectomy in the 1890s. A few years later, Henry H. Goddard built his career around measuring children’s intelligence in what he endeavoured to make a standard step in the administration of eugenic policies. Goddard never reached his goals, but he provided us with the most important eugenic family study (The Kallikak Family) and the enduring figure of Deborah (the ‘moron’) – a sexualised bad seed passing as normal. Goddard’s eugenic gaze was not confined to a book. It was inscribed on the bodies of countless girls and young women. Carrie Buck was one. She was sent to the Virginia colony because she became pregnant by the son of her foster mother. Her sterilisation was inseparable from the marginalisation of poor youths and was ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the infamous 1927 case Buck v. Bell.

Many other historical examples could be brought forward but try this thought experiment. Q: Could we do eugenics on a planet without racial discourses or ethnic nationalism or a strong state? A: Yes, because we might produce techniques designed to improve the population by breeding or making better individuals and bring them to bear in multiple ways. Eugenics could not be done, however, without interventions into sexual and generational relationships, nor could it free itself from the idea of ‘better’ people – and thus the discursive practices of (dis)ability.

Eve, the youthful, disabled claimant of E. (Mrs.) v. Eve was not present at the trial about her own reproductive future. I assume there are no extant sources by Eve. How do you approach recovering the history and voices of people who were granted so little representation in their own lives?

Unfortunately, Eve is among the most important figures in my larger project about whom I know the least. According to her diagnosis and the testimony of those who knew her for many years, Eve was unable to hold conversations about her actions or experiences. She left no written records, but she was capable of symbolic interactions that placed her in relationship with others. Eve chose to hold the hand of a boy at the training Centre. Staff observed frequent displays of affection between them. At trial, several witnesses testified that she expressed physical attraction to men. Purportedly, these very human expressions prompted her mother to seek a court order for sterilisation.

These observations and opinions about Eve do not come from her, but they are pregnant with interpretive possibility. They were offered to the court because they positioned her as a person in need of protection by making her a potential sexual victim and a future source of sexual vice. Indeed, the court responded by giving her the pseudonym “Eve.” This placed her within eugenic discourse alongside Deborah Kallikak, Carrie Buck, Lelani Muir, and thousands of others. One could dismiss it all as ideology and wonder after the real Eve. I understand the feeling, but our knowledge is limited by the malformed traces of eugenic discourse preserved in the record. And I suspect Eve would have encountered these ideas at some level, as many other women have.

You explicate skillfully that Canadian law did not trade “the vehicle of police power for the vehicle of wardship power” as U.S., UK, and Australian lawmakers did in the late twentieth century. Why did you choose these three countries of comparison? Would you argue that Canadian law has a singular, distinct legal understanding of disabled youth?

 Carl Ubbelohde introduced me to working comparatively in legal and policy history when I was his graduate student at Case Western Reserve University in the early 1990s. Because these are common law countries, they share legal histories and have developed similar public policy debates. Their courts owe no deference to each other (no formal stare decisis), but they often cite each other to form and explain their reasoning. The disrespectful tone descending from the Law Lords (U.K.) in review of Canada’s decision in Eve was extremely unusual. But it was consistent with my own questions about the Eve court’s rejection of a tightly argued 1981 New Jersey decision (In re Grady) as put forward by Mrs. E.

If I had not worked comparatively, my understanding of the decision would have been impoverished. This work has not led me to conclude that Canadian law or policy has a distinct view of disabled youth. It raised questions about “the best interests of the child.” Is it a proper legal test? I explore that difficult issue further and through other cases in Childhood and the Law in Canada.

A key theme of your article is the continuous “strong current of eugenic governmentality.” You deliberately do not use the past tense to talk about eugenics. Could you share some examples where you observe continuities of eugenic governmentality, especially at the intersection with youth, in our current moment?

If I were to examine the current moment further, I would start by reviewing the right of informed consent for persons with intellectual disabilities in the last three decades. What’s the formal law and policy, and how has it been implemented? The answers may help us better understand what I document, but do not explain, in the book: the high incidence of sterilisation of the disabled in post-Eve Canada. An exploration of the screening of foetuses and more sophisticated genetic interventions is called for too. All these have the potential to be large scale reproductive interventions that have population effects designed to improve people and make their lives better, but they are not (to my knowledge) proceeding through administrative directive in common law countries. They are choices that parents make in the context of family planning and the assessment of their health needs. This is the way governmental power works – it operates through the calculation and reasoning by nominally free subjects who choose in the context of social, economic and political constraints.

I would like to avoid a misunderstanding. I never draw an ethical equivalency between current forms of eugenic governmentality and the prohibitive administrative structures of the state (the older eugenics), any more than I would equate the scientific validity of CRISPR with the doctored photos of early eugenic studies. All should be able to recognize the daily suffering of ordinary Americans who have lost their reproductive rights. We are witnessing a betrayal of the state’s duty to advance public welfare. That said, governmentality (or neoliberalism) does not emancipate us from eugenic reasoning, techniques, or dilemmas. It alters, relocates, and intensifies them. My work questions liberalism’s narrative of itself without inviting the return of a coercive sovereign.

As a scholar of childhood and youth studies, what first got you interested in the history of eugenics?

Before graduate school I lived at a group home on weekends for two years caring for teenage boys and young men with developmental disabilities and mental illnesses. These experiences encouraged me to conduct my master’s thesis on the history intellectual disabilities through one of the world’s first state bureaus dedicated to research on children: Ohio’s Bureau of Juvenile Research. This agency was founded by eugenicists in 1913.

Your article further underlines how entangled the histories of youth and disability are. What do you think the field of childhood studies can learn from disability studies?

They are intellectual sisters in several ways. (1) They arose at the same time seeking to reposition objectified groups as rights bearing subjects who shape their worlds. (2) They became committed to examining how childhood and/or disability are structurally and institutionally produced. The first feature (subject-centeredness) stands in generative tension with the second (structural analysis). There are legitimate reasons to side-step, negotiate, or engage with this tension. For example, I tend to be more focused upon the structures of childhood and (dis)ability, because this is the way I understand the production of the subject. But this has not led me away from writing about the dignity of ordinary people.

Do you have any advice for fellow scholars working on painful topics in the history of childhood and youth? What keeps you going?

I had not thought about my work that way until some years ago when Jim Block asked why I always wrote and gave talks on such ‘dark matters.’ I did not have an answer for him then; I’m not sure I do now. I try to shape my investigations around issues that seem structurally important for childhood and youth. Some lead to unhappy stories, but I don’t construct them to create shock or grief.

Let me offer an example. In the book, I take readers through the legal journey of Willie Blackwater – the named plaintiff in a case that created the legal leverage for Canada’s historic 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. Most of this chapter is about the law of torts. It can be heavy sledding. I hope readers will work through the unfamiliar legal reasoning of the Blackwater decision, because they care about the former students and want to better understand what it helped foster: cultural and identity rights.

The human element always matters. The culminating scene of Blackwater’s legal story was a State Apology. After briefly outlining the structure of the Apology, I do not miss the opportunity to draw readers to the tears visibly rolling down Blackwater’s resolute face as the Prime Minister of Canada personally addressed him with nine others on the floor of the House of Commons. Thinking about this moment in his life in the context of the enormous harm caused by Indian Residential Schools should evoke emotion from all. This was an inflection point in an ongoing national reckoning. And yes, Blackwater’s story remains painful. To echo Canada’s Apology, it is right for the burden of that pain to be shared. This is one reason for writing histories of ‘dark matters’ and it keeps me going.

To end on a personal note, we’d like to ask you about a few of your favorite things…

a. Favorite way of managing notes/citations?

I have a large database of citations in Mendeley and another database of notes in Access. But, over the last two years I’ve gone away from taking notes on a computer and have returned to paper notebooks. 

b. Best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read recently?

I don’t really think in terms of best books, but it would be appropriate to thank Molly Ladd-Taylor for Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century.

c. Favorite childhood book?

I had a blast reading Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to my children.

d. Best piece of advice you remember receiving as a child?

I don’t recall much advice, but I do remember questions. A good one was posed to me by Sister Ellen-Marie Dolan when I was about 13 years old.  Q: “What are the three most important words in the bible?”  An: “Be Not Afraid.”


Patrick Joseph Ryan is Chair of the Department of Childhood and Youth Studies at Kings University College at Western University in London, Ontario. He is a past-President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, and has published on diverse matters of policy, law, discourse, and power relations. He is author of Master-Servant Childhood: a history of the idea of childhood in Medieval English culture (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and Childhood and the Law in Canada – the family/state relationship (Lexisnexis, 2024).


Latest from Blog

A Good Reader!

Reading has been considered a central part of children’s developmental process for a long time now. From selected moral texts aimed at

Student Rest Homes

Located in the shadow of Mont Blanc in southeastern France, the Chalet international des étudiants, International Student Chalet, became the world’s first

Age, language and power in the Andes

Alfredo Luis Escudero’s article The New Age of Andeans (Hispanic American Historical Review 103:1) won the 2023 SHCY Fass-Sandin Article prize. The fascinating piece