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Eugenics Unbound: Race, Gender and Genetics

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By Marsha J. Tyson Darling, Center for African-American and Ethnic Studies, Adelphi University, United States

THIS DOCUMENT APPLIES TO THESE EVENTS:

	Plenary #2: Feminist Approaches to Reproductive and Genetic Technologies: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Now more than a century old, eugenics initiatives have remained attached to many scientific practices that have and continue to affect women, people of color, the disabled and the poor [i]. Eugenics policies and practices have consistently intensified a disdain for the poor, especially poor women, people of color, especially women of color of childbearing age, and the differently-abled, especially the physically disabled and the mentally impaired, and ethnic, caste and religious minorities.ii Further, through much of the twentieth century, neo-malthusian belief, values, policies and programs have played a prominent role in furthering the design and use of population planning interventions (surgical and non-surgical quinacrine sterilization, birth control pills, insertible contraceptive devices, injectable contraceptive drugs, physician installed contraceptive drug pellets, and anti-fertility vaccines), particularly in global South countries.iii

As many debate the implications of emerging biomedical technologies for women’s human and reproductive rights, “techno-eugenics” unbounded compels the bioethical and social justice concerns that are the backdrop of this essay’s discussion of the increasing prominence of eugenics in everyday discourses about the women’s reproductive rights movement. Viewed in an historical context, state eugenics faltered, particularly after the revelations of Nazi human rights violations at the Nuremburg trials, and the involuntary sterilization of approximately 70,000 Americans. However, eugenics initiatives are again being unpacked, this time as new reproductive and therapeutic technologies that are coupled with the scientific promises of emerging genetics interventions. As such, what failed as a state imposed mandate is now being offered as an appropriate women’s reproductive rights consumer “choice”.iv

At the same time that neo-malthusian population policies and practices often sterilize poor women, technologies that expand fertility options for privileged women in the global North, and that promise the ability to provide inheritable genetic modification and pre-implantation technologies, like sex selection technology are being promoted and marketed. Increasingly, some women’s groups and individual women are grasping hold of these technologies under the rubric of “choice” without examining and coming to terms with the eugenics and social justice implications of many of the new reproductive technologies. As in the past, the merging of science and eugenics (a pseudo-science) initiatives promises and seeks to deliver on the goal of providing technologies that pursue a human biological, hereditary ideal.

The danger is that very real social justice issues and challenges that affect the human and reproductive rights of the world’s marginalized women and girls may be intensified by the aggressive marketing of inheritable genetic modification, genetic enhancements and reproductive cloning technologies. The most alarming dimension of the promotion of the new inheritable genetic technologies, is that like some other aspects of globalization, its proponents imply that the science, like markets, stands alone, and should be autonomous and hence, exempt from regulation and social control. There is even the inference that humans might be incompetent to regulate the post-human life forms created with the use of genetic enhancements:

“The GenRich, who account for 10% of the American population,

all carry synthethic genes. All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry are controlled by

members of the GenRich class…Naturals work as low-paid service

providers or as laborers…The GenRich class and the Natural class will

become entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with

as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have

for a chimpanzee. Indeed, in a society that values individual freedom

above all else, it is hard to find any legitimate basis for restricting

the use of repro-genetics…the use of reprogenetic technologies is

inevitable…[W]hether we like it or not, the global marketplace will

reign supreme.”v

Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton, is the author of the above statement, but he is not alone in calling for a reprogenetics future:

“[M]aking babies sexually will be rare…[M[any parents will leap at the

chance to make their children smarter, fitter and prettier. Ethical concerns

will be overtaken by the realization that technology simply makes for

better childen.”vi

Increasingly, through much of the print and visual media we exeprience, many in the scientific community offer us an imagery that presents emerging technologies in images that often captivate and intrique the public, precisely because many medical protocols and emerging technologies are presented to us in terms of their effective and even remarkable human biological or curative potential. These “best case” scenarios, often bearing the promise of optimal possibilities reflect an unbridled optimism that some number of emerging technological interventions hold the key to liberating us from the perils of affliction, the dread of feared diseases, or even more fantastical, of creating “perfect humans”.

Images crafted to create and sustain a rather one-sided imagery of technological advancement are not new, but have taken on increasing importance and potential danger as the capacity to craft an acceptable imagery of a “life industry” emerges.vii Most recently, research into the workings of the human genome stand at the center of at least a decade of interest and commercialization of life forms. Much of our media present best case ideological constructions of medical research, scientific innovation and technological reach that present a one-sided imagery of what are actually often very risky biological interventions or inventions. Hence, such images and messages are an integral part of the ideologically narrowing social construction of techno-science in our times, and the enclosure of knowledge by self-serving interests intent upon gaining a widening circle of approval, research funding, and stock market gains, by restricting and narrowing information about the way in which many emerging technologies present serious risks and further drain human and financial resources.

The social construction of generating a selective range of affirming information is all about cultivating and buttressing acquiesence for the choices and decisions of those scientists, politicians and corporate leaders who appear disinterested in consensus building through consumer activism. The corporate takeover of the media under the most recent phase of global capital expansion means that those in charge of packaging public information about medical science often limit what is known about a scientific issue, and through those limitations, shape, mold and control the debate, dissent, scrutiny and even disapproval of a number of scientific intitiatives.

What should be said is that because ideological agendas drive and construct the choices and decisions about the range of information that is offered to the public, ideological ambitions continue to undergird how information about science is shared. Since the goal is greater acquiesence from the public and civil society, the science itself remains shrouded in the ideological imperatives of its practitioners, because increasingly they are not called upon to answer the most contientious and challenging questions about their practice of science, or its escalating research costs to taxpayers. Sometimes this veiled corporate agenda becomes unmasked, exposing the escalating divide between consumer interests and corporate influence over governmental oversight. Recently, even in the face of significant public disapproval, corporate, media, important governmental agencies, like the Food and Drug Admnistration, appear intent upon capitulating to corporate interests, even over clearly articulated consumer interests.viii

In contexts where civil society institutions, consumer and public welfare institutions and agencies of the government fare less well articulating and enforcing a common good, historically marginalized and disempowered groups in society are more at risk for social justice and human rights encroachments and violations. At the present, the issue of selective dissemination of medical science research, and the continuing ideological fascination with promoting eugenics against a backdrop of racism, sexism, classism and the marginalization of the disabled and the differently-abled continues, though altered from state mandated eugenics to consumer constructed eugenics.

Biodiversity and natural evolution are at risk as the rush to create new scientific modalities and life forms threatens to alter and even eclipse natural evolution as we have known it. For instance, many are concerned that the rush to commercialize the genome under bioengineered evolution has generated new organisms that are a result of crossing species boundaries. Natural evolution diversifies life forms within species. Hence, a pressing concern now arises as to the short and long term impact of casting bioengineered life forms into nature. Many are alarmed at the seemingly cavalier attitude with which some scientists seek to blur the concern about combining genetic materials that have derived from different species, as though leaving this area open to deregulation and boundary setting is acceptable. Indeed, in terms of human genetic modification, the question of where do we set a scientific boundary becomes compelling as the creation of post-human and even sub-human species are now the goal of some in the scientific and policy communities.ix

The gradual evolution of a natural rights ideological imperatives as the foundation for the exercise of human rights and the exercise of self-determination as a civil right is now challenged by the resurgence of eugenics derived ideological formulations. Not so curiously, women, especially privileged white women and the small numbers of class-privileged women of color in the global North and South are the targets of what might aptly be called consumer eugenics, whereby eugenics advocates have undertaken to infuse eugenics imperatives into the women’s reproductive rights movement.

Fertility reduction and population control of those women less well off and “colored” stands in stark contrast to the ambitious use of medical technology to increase and genetically enhance fertility for well off women. For years, the in-vitro fertilization industry has been creating reproduction options, including fertility enhancement protocols for the well to do. Over the past several decades, the multi-million dollar IVF industry and multinational chemical companies have been engaged in privatizing and implementing efforts to develop sophisticated techniques for embryo transfer, and fetal tissue research. Several years ago the centerpiece of IVF technology focused on embryo transfer following non-reproductive sex fertilization.x

It is clear that genetic technologies hold tremendous promise for helping and healing. But, existing societal governance institutions must take responsibility for bringing biotechnologies and reprotechnologies under regulation and responsible social control. Human cloning and inheritable genetic modification are especially suspect, as they generate social outcomes that intensify conflict between groups and the social marginalization of women and girls. Human cloning is asexual reproduction, and the most important reason to ban human cloning is because it encourages eugenics modification of individual genes, thereby creating “designer babies”. Also, human cloning serves no really good purpose, as it will encourage the creation of other techniques of human genetic manipulation that will also be presented as an end unto itself. Finally, while human cloning is often defended for use by infertile couples, there are other options and alternatives available for those seeking to parent.

Inheritable genetic modification is the second area of reproductive technologies that presents important ethical and governance challenges. To be clear, non-inheritable genetic modification permit changes to body cells other than egg and sperm cells. This modality is called somatic genetic modification. These changes are not transmitted intergenerationally to future children. Such medical modalities could be used to medically correct genes that cause diseases, and while state regulation and oversight is important this medical protocol is perceived by many in the scientific and ethics communities, as being a beneficial technology.

However, inheritable genetic modification alters egg and sperm genes, and the genetic makeup of prospective children, as well as that child’s future descendants. This modality is called germline genetic engineering. Germline genetic modification undertakes to construct or “manufacture” children, and transform the human species itself. Recalling that no scientific protocol stands apart from the dominant social constructions that we already grapple with, germline engineering should be opposed because it would be a protocol accessed by already privileged persons for the purpose of dramatically furthering their children’s social advantage over others, thereby intensifying social inequalities. Germline genetic modification should also be banned because it is a protocol that would used primarily by elites, thereby diverting resources from research on other much more pressing medical and scientific challenges and protocols that would benefit the many instead of the few. Germline modification will lead to “enhanced,” or giving children genes that neither parent already possesses.xi

People who desire to eliminate transmitting a disease to their progeny can change genetic outcomes through pre-marital, pre-natal, or pre-implantation screening and testing. However, pre-implantation technology is not without its perils, especially for female fetuses. Unless pre-implantation technology is limited to use for interventions that prevent dangerous medical conditions, it will increasingly be used as a sex selection protocol. Already there is very disturbing evidence that pre-implantation technology is being used to intensify gender discrimination against female fetuses. Among many other organizations and groups, the Center for Genetics and Society (CGS), the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment (CWPE), Manavi, Inc., a New Jersey based organization for South Asian women, Andolan, an organization of South Asian low-wage workers in New York City, and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective have opposed the use of PGD other than for serious conditions, and the targeting of South Asians for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) under the rubric of “gender variety”. PGD is being used to promote eugenics in that it is being used for sex selection, to abort female fetusues, and to emphasize certain traits like eye and hair color.

Hence, the eugenics use of PGD to achieve boy preference intensifies the historic and persisting social and cultural marginalization and disempowerment of females as a social group, especially in societies that have historically discriminated against females. Hence, pre-implantation technology makes killing a female fetus easier, because the eugenics use of the technology empowers those forces that have historically targeted females for infanticide and deprivation, because they are not males Any science that exasperates such a cultural pattern must be viewed as part of the problem of misogyny and violence against females, rather than just a helping technology of science. This issue takes on tremendous proportion within the US, where PGD can legally operate within a woman’s right to choose paradigm whether or not to carry a fetus.

While some would argue that the creation of scientific technology should be separated from how technology is used, eugenics abuses of marginalized and socially excluded groups have historically intensified social justice inequities, precisely because the historical problem of selectively isolating science from social context, pretends that the abuses present in society’s social context are disassociated from the development of science in the first place. Biologist Jonathan Marks insights on this issue are instructive, “Connecting the hard and soft sciences, however, is a bridge of pseudoscience….When Darwinism emerged, it was applied to human behavior by Galton (and independently by Spencer and others). But the application of an advance in science is simply a means of validating the social program that actually preceded it. Galton’s program differs little at root from Gobineau’s or from any other social tract of the 19th century that saw the wrong people proliferating and the destiny of civilization localized in their constitutions.”xii If social context is always present, then science is always a part of existing social contexts, whether or not we admit to it.

Ideologically, state eugenics agendas often have been enticing to those groups who have not been historically marginalized or excluded, or worse, openly persecuted under state eugenics directives, primarily because their potential use and applicability in society has always been cast in best case, optimal results scenarios.xiii For instance, in the opening decades of the 20th century eugenics was promoted as responsible science and sound public policy. Eugenicists initially attached themselves to Darwinism and selective breeding. Later eugenicists attached their social constructions to Mendelism and the inheritance of societally “desirable” traits.

In truth, many were seduced by the science and medical community’s promises of improving humanity’s hereditary stock. Further, contemptuous of the poor and racist politicians, ministers, intellectuals and scholars were drawn into an ideological fraternity that channeled their energies into restricting access to the nation by non-white, Christian, western European immigrants. Eugenics zealots also sought their most enduring impact on society, namely, the practice of impacting the exercise of reproductive rights for many thousands of politically, economically, and socially marginalized Americans. In an age of virulent racism, strong xenophobia, and religious marginalization and intolerance, eugenics took hold not only of the concern to limit, curtail or restrict biological reproduction of mentally impaired women and men, but the sterilization of thousands of people of color, the poor, the differently-abled, prisoners, and many asylum patients.

In the same decade in which the Restrictive Immigration Johnson Act of 1924 institutionalized eugenics driven restrictive immigration policy, eugenics thinking took hold of the infant United States Public Health Service, furthering racist notions of a biological binary divide between the races. The infamous Tuskegee Experiment happened because white public health professionals were influenced by scientific racism and the eugenics belief that brown skin translated into Black biological difference, and, so goes racist thinking, Black hereditary inferiority. Hence, the white belief in Black inferiority formed the policy that shaped the manner in which medical and scientific racism was applied. To date, the Tuskegee Project was the longest known experimentation project involving human subjects.xiv

Similarly, skin color differences between Black and White females had been used to justify medical experiments on enslaved Black women in the 19th century. Arguably, the social construction and emphasis on Black inferiority created and sustained with alarming intensity during the decades of African enslavement in North America immediately influenced, shaped and molded eugenic thinking from its inception in the United States. The virulent racism of the 19th century, which afforded whites absolute life and death power over enslaved Blacks, also opened the door for human rights abuses of enslaved Blacks. Records show that it was enslaved pregnant Black women who were first forced to undergo Caesarian section birth, without anaesthia. Hence, a social mileau existed in antebellum Virginia in which enslaved Black females had no human or social rights, and therefore no social standing with which to negotiate treatment by white male southern doctors who were as interested in using human subjects for medical experimentation.xv

Historical records reveal that the racist and sexist social constructions of the 19th century molded by the power of pro-slavery ideology’s many and varied defenses of American slavery, and by a virulent Nativist (pro-white, Protestant, western European ancestry) anti-immigration movement, shaped the terrain in which scientific racism and eugenics thinking grew through the middle of the 20th century. State sponsored and imposed eugenics was only curtailed following the monstrous debacle of the Nazi genocide against Jews, Roma, gays and lesbians, and the disabled in Europe and the Herero and others in Africa, and the revelations of mass state sponsored sterilizations in the United States (between 60,000-70,000), Sweden and other countries.

In the opening decades of the 20th century, Margaret Sanger organized the American Birth Control League and worked with medical providers to prevent and treat diseases, thereby circumventing the strongest moral arguments about contraceptive use. The birth control issue remained alive, but was subordinated to the public health issue of contraceptive use for disease prevention, except, and this is important, where nativist movement driven discourses and racist propaganda about Black people and the hordes of “swarthy immigrants” fanned white fears that attempts at birth control among middle-class whites of western European ancestry amounted to their committing“race suicide.” Fears of white racial suicide proved inseparable from efforts to implement birth control methods in many white communities.

By 1920, some women’s rights advocates, labor organizers, political progressives, and concerned citizens who had lost a female loved one to a botched abortion pressed for legal changes and greater reproductive rights for women. The ABCL continued and in the early 1940s became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), thereby sustaining a movement for family limitation, albeit at times influenced by many racist and misogynist eugenics doctors. Increasingly, eugenics driven policies and laws to use public funds to reduce and curtail fertility and birth rates among people of color emerged to dominate public health planning. Black women and men scrutinized the appearance of racially motivated eugenics, even though Sanger and many other feminists supported the emerging physician driven eugenics efforts. In “African American Women and Abortion, 1800-1970,” Loretta Ross recounts how the Birth Control Federation organized a “Negro Project in 1939” designed to target and sterilize poor southern Blacks.xvi Eugenics programs attempted to reduce the already declining numbers of Native Americans, and beginning in the late 1930s in Puerto Rico, eugenics doctors sterilized over 30% of women in La Operacion, funded by private US foundations, and the US and Puerto Rican governments.

Eugenics initiatives remained in the form of neo-Malthusian population control programs, and experimentation of risky invasive contraceptives on poor women of color in both global South and global North countries.xvii Then as now, racist beliefs based on privileging white skin and marginalizing people of color, sexist beliefs that the female womb and female reproductive capacity are a frontier waiting to be conquered and brought under the rationale control and determinism of men, class based beliefs that the poor are too numerous, dispensible, and lack the wherewithal to represent themselves, and ableist beliefs that the disabled and differently-abled are defective and should be marginalized, persist to envelope many who provided development aid resources for poor women in an eugenics framework in which the goal has been to irreversibly change the fertility of the poor, while leaving glaring social justice inequities and social development concerns of resource redistribution wanting. In such a context, failing to deal with the root causes of poverty, marginalization and exclusion which foster increased fertility for poor women, population control technology have intensified poor women’s poverty and oppression.

Recently, however, a new concern looms, namely, that the human genome project is being used to gather the genes of indigenous and global South people without their informed consent. In the early 1990s, under the aegis of the National Institute of Health, the Human Genome Diversity Project, the US government applied and received a patent for the cell lines of indigenous men and women.xviii Indigenous peoples networks and human rights advocates raised an alarm about the cell line patent. While the US government eventually revoked the patent, to date it has not returned the cell line to its biological owners. Fearing a new variant of colonialism, indigenous people’s networks the Rural Advancement Foundation International, and many human rights advocates have been vigilant in monitoring, reporting and challenging efforts to procure other people’s DNA as raw materials for US businesses, including the medical science industry at work on human genetic engineering. Such problematic biological piracy, or biopiracy is the expropriation of genetic materials, whether human, plant, insect or animal from indigenous and global South peoples.xix

With a century stretching out in front of us, horizons and vistas unseen, but pursued, with only a few frontiers left uncharted, especially on this planet, the use of much of medical science and biotechnology under capitalism seeks to privatize and commercialize the genus for all forms of life. The goal being pursued by some is the creation of a life industry, and a post-human destiny. Arguably, these initiatives are the most far-reaching ever enclosure movement, as they seek the enclosure of knowledge itself, and the enclosure of life’s genus. Emerging technologies are presented as promising and essential, and the media presents the risks when there is a failure. Hence, precautionary concerns that would preclude our taking the path of human cloning and inheritable genetic modification are being swept aside by some.

Regulation and the social control of human genetic technologies are essential, particularly, as we are living the social inequalities produced by the previous enclosure movement, namely the enclosure of the land and the objects located on its environmental landscape, including its minerals and metals, and the animals. That enclosure movement gave rise to bonded and enslaved human beings, and virulent racism and sexism. Now, humans, plants, insects and animals -- the entirety of life forms derived from natural evolution are being targeted as raw material for commodification and exploitation. In a context where seemingly, everything, privacy and even life itself can be devoured by stealth and greed, those committed to social justice and survival of the natural world must now confront, and for the sake of natural life on the planet, restrain and curtail the excesses of the enclosure movement.xx

NOTES

i This essay is derived from a paper I presented at the 9th International Women and Health Meeting, on August 14, 2002, convened at York University, Toronto, Canada.

ii Eugenics, a term penned by Sir Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) in the late 19th century, means well-born in Greek, and has been used to the posit the existence of a linear hereditary biological endowments that separate human being one from another. Importantly, eugenics, a pseudo-science has promised to provide a mechanism to distinguish “fitness” between individuals and groups of people. In fact, eugenics has functioned to do exactly what it socially constructed to do, namely, to distinguish and privilege white skinned people, especially white males, Christians, and those financially well off from those socially constructed as “other”. Eugenics strengthened itself and in turn fed and strengthened existing racial, sexual, class, and ethnic and religious intolerances. Eugenics also sheltered and nursed along an elusive quest for the perfect race or group of people. Eugenics was and continues to be so powerful an idea because initially many educated elites, and then many others have used it to explain, justify, sustain, and subsequently intensify existing group oppressions. Eugenics is unpacked and renewed so long as there are socially constructed hierarchies and group oppressions held in place by falsely constructed oppositional justifications of deservability and undeservability based on skin color, sex, class, religion, ethnicity, caste, physical and mental ability, and sexual orientation. Those unfamiliar with eugenics sordid and ugly past should read: George J. Sefa Dei, Budd L. Hall, Dorothy Golden Rosenberg.eds. Indigenous Knowledge in Global Contexts: Multiple Readings of Our World. Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2000; Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era. New York/ London: Routledge Press, 2003; William H. Tucker. The Science and Politics of Racial Research. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

iii See, Betsy Hartmann. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control & Contraceptive Choice. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1987; Jael Silliman and Ynestra King, eds. Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and Development. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999; Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee, eds. Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002.

iv See, Philip R. Reilly. The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilizations in the United States. Baltimore, MD/ London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; Dorothy Roberts. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.

v See, Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World. New York: Avon Books, 1997.

vi See, Arthur Caplan, Babies of the Future. http://abcnews.go.com/ABC2000/abc2000living/babies2000.html.

vii See, Miges Baumann, Janet Bell, Florianne Koechlin and Michel Pimbert, eds., The Life Industry: Biodiversity, People and Profits. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, Ltd., 1996.

viii The public outcry for better scientific testing and regulatory oversight over genetically modified foods by the Food Drug Administration have all but fallen on deaf ears, as the significant public pressure for federally mandated food labeling that was expressed at congressionally mandated hearings convened across the United States, failed to move the FDA toward labeling gmos. See, Food Safety Review, email: info@centerforfoodsafety.org/ International Forum on Globalization, http://www.ifg.org/ GeneWatch, www.gene-watch.org/ “Agriculture and Biotechnology,” http://www.ucsusa.org/agriculture/gen.market.htm

ix See, Brian Tokar Brian Tokar., ed. Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering. London & New York: Zed Press, 2001.

x See, Janice G. Raymond, Women and Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom. Australia: Spiniflex, 1995, Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein and Shelley Minden, Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? London/Boston/Melbourne: Pandora Press, 1984, and Sherrill Cohen and Nadine Taub, eds. Reproductive Laws for the 1990s. Clifton NJ: Humana Press, 1989.

xi See, Worldwatch: Working for a Sustainable Future. Special Issue on Beyond Cloning, Vol. 15, No. 4, July/August, 2002.

xii See, Jonathan Marks. Human Biodivesity: Genes, Race, and History. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995, pgs. 80-81.

xiii For excellent histories of how scientific racism and sexism gave rise to eugenics initiatives, see: Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1985; Allan Chase. The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of The New Scientific Racism. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1975; Charles B. Davenport. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. New York: Henry Holt, 1911; Stephan Jay Gould. The Mismeasure of Man. New York/ London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981; John S. Haller, Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900. Urbana,/ Chicago/ London: University of Illinois Press, 1971; Jonathan Marks. Human Biodivesity: Genes, Race, and History. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995; and the documentary film La Opercion.

xiv See, James H. Jones. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. New York: Free Press, 1981; also, “Guinea Pigs: Secret Medical Experiments on Blacks,” Emerge Magazine, October, 1994.

xv See, Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978, page 118.

xvi In addition, see Jessie M. Rodrique,” The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement,” in Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multi-cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History. New York/London: Routledge, 1990.

xvii See, Suzanne Poirier, “Women’ Reproductive Health,” and Edward H. Beardsley, “Race as a Factor in Health,” in Rima D. Apple, ed. Women, Health, and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

xviii In the early 1990s, amidst a flurry of activity to patent the genetic materials of a number of indigenous peoples, on March 14, 1995, an Hagahai man’s cell line was patented by the US government. See, the Akha Heritage Foundation’s website: http://thailine.com/akha/patent.htm, or email: akha@loxinfo.co.th

xix See, Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1997, and Vandana Shiva and Ingunn Moser, eds. Biopolitics: A Feminist an Ecological Reader on Biotechnology. London/New Jersey: ZED Books, 1995, and Maria Mies, Ecofeminism. London/New Jersey: ZED Books., 1993.

xx See, Richard Sherlock and John D. Morey, ed. Ethical Issues in Biotechology. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, and the excellent science and ethics materials at the website for the Center for Genetics and Society, www.genetics-and-society.org