Presented in H-Diplo Roundtable Review of Dagmar Herzog, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018, New York, January 2019.
To whom do we make ourselves vulnerable? This is a question we all confront. To be human is to be vulnerable: to be dependent on others, human and non-human, living and dead, to whom we owe our existence, identity, and ability to thrive. To be human is to be vulnerable to the vulnerability of others – to feel the grip of our obligation to those we have taken into our care, those who are joined with us in relationships that define who we all are.
Our particular vulnerabilities are not simply given. To take another into one’s care is to neglect the other others.[1] We can’t rely on an existing set of preferences and ideal types to guide us at such moments, since our identities emerge through such experiences, and we will only know who we are becoming after the fact. For this reason, the language of choice isn’t quite accurate, to the degree it calls to mind individual consumers selecting from an array of goods. To make ourselves vulnerable is to sacrifice the selves we might have become in concert with those from whom we are turning away. This is the sacrifice a woman confronts when she considers whether to continue a pregnancy. It is the sacrifice political leaders make when they stop asylum seekers at the border and determine which government programs to preserve, and which to cut. When we give someone a gift or invite someone to a party, when we start a conversation with a stranger on a crowded street, we are gambling with the future. We can place this dilemma in the context of reproductive politics Dagmar Herzog brilliantly analyzes in this very necessary book. But it ramifies much further. To whom do we make ourselves vulnerable? How do we decide?
In Unlearning Eugenics, Herzog traces how this question has been asked and answered in European debates over abortion. She offers us the origin story of a paradox: why have right wing Christians found it so easy to pit two progressive social movements against each other? Across Western Europe, in Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Eastern Europe, and in Poland and Hungary, a new assault on reproductive rights is underway, spearheaded by international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by right wing Christian movements. Conservative critics of abortion have gained traction by appealing to the specter of eugenics, which they see as haunting women and their partners when faced with the wrenching decision of whether to bring a disabled fetus to term. How did the struggle for disability rights become a resource in an international campaign to curtail women’s ability to decide? And why is Europe the place where this strategy has emerged with particular force at a moment when cuts to government budgets are threatening disabled people’s ability to live satisfying lives? This impasse, Herzog argues, is a legacy of the Nazi past. Or, to put it more precisely, it is a legacy of a failure to confront the disdain for difference that justified Nazi efforts to eliminate disabled men, women, and children from the German population in the years immediately preceding the Holocaust. The current impasse reflects an inability to ‘unlearn’ eugenics: to grasp the implications of this shameful episode in European history and to make sense of what it would take to leave it behind.
The problem, Herzog shows us, is not that Europeans have forgotten the sterilization and murder of disabled people; it is that they have remembered these atrocities in partial and interested ways. Herzog builds on her previous work in Holocaust studies and the history of religion and sexuality in making this argument. The project began with Herzog’s discovery of a trove of primary documents by Christian thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s; she went on to cast her net much more widely, across countries, constituencies, and historical moments time, drawing on government reports, surveys, media coverage, websites, art works, and writings by activists on all sides of the debate.
Drawing on this wealth of sources, Herzog walks us back from the current moment to earlier phases in the debate over abortion. Protestant and Catholic leaders, fashioning themselves as the moral conscience of their societies, play a central role in the story Herzog relates. Immediately after World War II, German Catholic leaders condemned Nazi eugenicists less out of empathy for their victims than concern over their use of sterilization at a time when the Church forbade all forms of birth control. German Protestant leaders tacitly condoned them at a time when the German government was advancing its own program of ‘voluntary’ sterilization in cases not unlike those the Nazis addressed. In the 1960s and 1970s, Protestant and Catholic theologians, inspired by the sexual revolution and the struggle for women’s rights, introduced a new thread into the conversation. By this point, historians had come to label Nazi policies towards the disabled as a form of racism. This did not stop Protestant and Catholic activists from advocating for the legalization of abortion to save women from being forced to bear ‘defective’ children against their will. It was left to disability rights activists in the 1980s and 1990s to underline the connection between the disabled and other victims of Nazi atrocities in their public protests against ethicists who called into question the moral personhood of the severely disabled. In the early 2000s, with nationalist governments taking hold in Eastern Europe and Christian political activism taking a sharp turn to the right, the ingredients were there for an assault on reproductive freedom that evoked the Nazi past to justify the curtailment of present rights.
Herzog weaves together these moments into a contrapuntal history, with themes from one moment reprised in another, often to do very different work. There was the demographic argument against reproductive rights, grounded in a commitment to the abundance of the nation. There was the gender argument against them, which turned on the need to control women’s labor and their access to the varieties of female pleasure non-reproductive sexuality could bring. On the opposing side, there were the religious arguments for them, which prioritized the interests of “already living women” (26) and assigned ethical standing to “incipient life” only when it was “called to be born” (27).
Finally, serving as a resource for both camps, there was the “contempt for the disabled” (31) that directed the Nazi assault on “useless eaters” (29) and continued unabated in its wake. Both religious and secular progressives who fought to decriminalize abortion in the 1970s found a useful nightmare in the image of a woman forced to bear a disabled son or daughter. When the ethicist Peter Singer came to Germany in the 1989, disability activists found themselves fighting their battle on the terrain set by Singer’s question: do the disabled have a right to life? International Christian advocacy organizations have revived the controversy to justify new limitations on abortion and prenatal diagnosis. Over much of history, in much of the world, women’s vulnerabilities have been chosen for them. As the philosopher Eva Feder Kittay has shown, this is a source of injustice and exploitation for caregivers, who are often poor and minoritized women: caught in a sense of obligation to their charges, they accept poor working conditions and little pay.[2] As their reproductive rights are eroded, more women will become trapped by their vulnerability to the vulnerability of others, living lives in which there are no decisions left to make.
But at the same time, Herzog uses this contrapuntal history to show us a way beyond the current impasse. Out of feminism grew movements on behalf of sexual minorities that moved beyond the limits of the gender binaries that had served as the basis of rights. Out of the fight for disability justice has come a form of activism that has insisted on contesting taken-for-granted models of intimacy and embodied norms. Unlearning Eugenics draws on the insights of those who have lived with disability not as a tragedy, or a challenge to be overcome, but as an incitement for new ways of living together with others. The book ends with a discussion of Duncan Merceira’s reflections on the agency exercised by his students with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities.[3] Merceira drew on the insights of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to understand his relationship with these individuals, who used their minds and bodies in ways that diverged dramatically from how he used his own.[4] In making himself vulnerable to his students, Merceira opened himself to the adventure of “becoming disabled” (98) – taking on the embodied experience of his students in his effort to forge a connection — a decision fraught with possibility and risk.
To whom do we make ourselves vulnerable? How do we decide? Herzog steers clear of a direct confrontation with this question. This is a principled strategy, if Jacques Derrida is correct: such decisions are made in secrecy and silence, and often in agony, by people who can’t be sure they are doing the right thing.[5] Yet Herzog’s book has something to tell us on this topic that resonates far beyond the particular history it relates. The Korowai of West Papua, an indigenous group in the area where I have conducted research, have a way of thinking about the gamble involved in bringing a new person into the community.[6] A child will survive you, they say, and preserve your name for future generations, but at the same time, a child will kill you. The work and worry involved in raising them will wear down your healthy body. The baby is both a pleasurable weight in your lap and a reminder of your mortality: a source of life and a sign of death.
As Rupert Stasch points out in his wonderful study of kinship and alterity in this society, the Korowai have a word for a newly born infant; it means flesh-devouring demon. In the past, they left the outcome of every pregnancy undetermined until shortly after the moment of birth, when parents and other relatives decided in the flash of an instant whether to abandon the baby or carry it into the house. In picking up the baby, a mother, aunt, or friend of the father did more than simply affirm the humanity of the infant when they suddenly imagined a future made pleasurable and fulfilling by its presence. This person’s gesture created more than just one person; it created a pair: from then on, she or he and the child would know each other by the same nickname – say “my compassion” or “my carrying and climbing” – which memorialized this foundational event.[7]
I recognize the risks in bringing up this kind of example. The Dutch, then the Indonesian government, collaborated with missionaries to close this space of decision, seeing the prevalence of infanticide as a marker of Korowai savagery – yet more evidence that New Guinea was trapped in the past.[8] And yet Korowai understandings of personhood contain a usefully critical edge – they add another theme to the Herzog’s score. Eugenics constrains reproductive decision making by subjecting it to racist and ableist guidelines. Whatever we make of the abandonment of Korowai newborns – which today’s Korowai do not defend — this is not what this past practice did. It brought forward the ambivalence at the heart of all relationships. It presented reproduction as a leap of faith.
I am not the first feminist mother of a severely disabled child who has thought back to her own experience with prenatal testing from the perspective of the person she has become. It’s not my beautiful daughter, who is so similar to the students Merceira came to desire, who comes first to mind at these moments. It’s her typical older brother.[9] Is there any way I could have predicted the particular joys and heartbreak parenting him would bring? In a world in which there was more support for those who care for the disabled, prospective parents facing a prenatal diagnosis might make different kinds of decisions. Without contempt for disability, people’s dreams and nightmares would change. We all might find it easier to “give ourselves up to the intensities, forms and forces” wrapped up in the becoming of others. This is the wisdom at the heart of Dagmar Herzog’s wonderful study. “This too,” as Herzog puts it, “[is] not solely a minoritizing message, but also a potentially universalizing one. A message that could speak to us all” (98).
[1] On the problem of the other others, see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
[2] See Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge, 1999.
[3] See Duncan P. Merceira, Living Otherwise: Students with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities as Agents in Educational Contexts (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2013).
[4] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking, 1977). See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
[5] The Gift of Death, p. 62. See also Jacques Derrida, Given Time I: Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
[6] I am drawing on Rupert Stasch, Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
[7] Rupert Stasch, Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), Kindle location 2029.
[8] See Danilyn Rutherford, Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
[9] I was surprised by how much his birth delighted me. I was also surprised by how much it scared me. Now life could hurt me in ways it never could before.