The Times March 10 2000 UNITED STATES
Eugenics victim sues over ordeal of 60 years ago
FROM DAMIAN WHITWORTH IN WASHINGTON
A VICTIM of the notorious eugenics programmes that once flourished in
America is suing the local authority that forcibly sterilised him in a
landmark case that could precipitate thousands of similar lawsuits.
Fred Aslin, 73, has brought an action against the state of Michigan more
than half a century after he was rendered unable to have children by a
policy seeking to achieve "race betterment".
Mr Aslin was one of a family of nine Indian children who were taken from a
mother struggling to care for them and placed in a mental institution.
There, when they reached the age of 18, each was sterilised.
"They said it was because we were feeble-minded morons and that any children
we might have would be just like us, or worse," Mr Aslin said. In fact,
records show that there is no evidence that the Aslins were backward in any
way.
The issue of racism hangs heavy over the case because of the children's
Ottawa and Chippewa heritage. "My brother John always thought it was just
because we were poor Indians," Mr Aspin told The Washington Post yesterday.
The eugenics movement started in the early decades of the last century, and
although Hitler's sterilisation of as much as 1 per cent of the German
population forced many to reconsider, it remained popular in many states in
America.
More than half the states introduced legislation permitting the forced
sterilisation of "mental defectives" after such prominent figures as J. H.
Kellogg, the cereal tycoon, championed the cause. Kellogg, who held a
conference on the subject, once declared: "We are supporting an idle
population of defectives. And we permit these defectives to breed more and
worse lunatics, idiots, criminals and paupers."
It is believed that 60,000 or more Americans were sterilised in the 1930s,
1940s and 1950s. Mr Aslin and his siblings were regarded as just another
batch who should not be allowed to procreate.
After his 1944 operation, Mr Aslin spent four more years in the Lapeer State
School before he was released and got on with his life. He fought in the
Korean War, where he was wounded, and then became a successful farmer,
married and brought up two stepchildren.
He tried not to think about the years of his incarceration. But a couple of
years ago he used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain records from that
time in which he was both labelled a moron and praised for his academic
abilities. He decided to sue.
Michigan has a three-year statute of limitations and his case was initially
rejected on that ground. But his lawyer will argue that there is a precedent
for older cases to be heard when the victim was unaware of what exactly was
done to him and where his rights were violated.
Mr Aslin says that he was never told exactly what had occurred and that he
was not allowed to attend hearings on his case back in 1944 or even meet his
so-called guardian.
If he wins, the floodgates could open. Already he has been sent "personal
apologies" from Michigan's director of community health, James Haveman.
"Looking back on it now, it is clear that the treatment you and others
received was offensive, inappropriate and wrong," said Mr Haveman in a
letter shown to The Washington Post. "I am saddened that it took so long and
so many had to suffer before the medical profession and judicial system
realised how offensive the practice of sterilisation was."
Eugenics sprang from the philosophy of social Darwinism, which envisioned
society in terms of natural selection and suggested that science could
engineer progress. US advocates of sterilisation worried that the survival
of old-stock America was being threatened by the influx of "lower races"
from southern and eastern Europe. (Reuters)
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