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Abortion-Eugenics Discourse in Dobbs: A Social Movement History
Siegel, Reva
Siegel, Reva
Abstract
References to eugenics in recent abortion opinions—including Dobbs v.
Jackson Women’s Health Organization—have only begun to attract scholarly attention
as a distinctive form of constitutional discourse. In the early twentieth
century, the term “eugenic” appeared frequently in legal, scientific, and other
books, as a policy objective or subject of scientific study concerned with “improving”
the quality of the nation’s “racial stock.” After peaking in the 1910s,
use of the term steadily declined in the World War II era as Western democracies
came to repudiate the politics of Jim Crow and the Holocaust. Usage
spiked again at the turn of the century, a period when historians began critically
to examine the eugenics movement in Europe and the United States. As condemnation
of eugenics has grown, the term “eugenic” has become a term of
opprobrium—a way to shame or discredit.