The Origins and Development of Catholic Opposition to Eugenics

Eugenics became a major focus of intellectual consideration in the first half of the twentieth century. While some Protestant social reformers were often enthusiastic supporters of the transatlantic eugenics movement before and after World War I, Catholic opposition to eugenics has received increasing attention in recent scholarship. Sustained attention to the arguments and strategies of opposition to eugenics is a serious lacuna in transatlantic eugenics historiography. The primary focus in the extant literature seems to be on the impetus given to eugenics promotion by its enthusiastic defenders. This essay offers a few connecting points between Catholic moral theology and science in the period between the Great War and the papal encyclical Casti Connubii opposing eugenics. Here I argue that Catholic opponents to eugenics raised political, scientific, and natural law objections in a multipronged intellectual expression of dissent toward eugenic ideology and involuntary sterilization as social policy in Great Britain and North America.

Thomas J. Gerrard and the Boundaries of Eugenics Acceptance

As recently as 2011 an article on religion and eugenics in England in the early decades of the twentieth century observed that “the participation of Catholic, Anglican, and other Christian leaders in the movement or on the other hand, their opposition thereto, has been almost entirely neglected in published scholarly discourse.” The author further notes: “The Catholic and Nonconformist factors in the debates surrounding the [eugenics] campaign have been almost completely ignored.”[1] This observation comports well with my own investigations of transatlantic eugenics and its religious connections. Much secondary literature focuses on the proponents of eugenics; treatments of its opponents have tended merely to mention these as a foil or in passing remarks on the opposition of the Catholic church to eugenics in the context of birth control debates.

The posthumous 1917 release of the second edition of The Church and Eugenics by British Jesuit Rev. Thomas J. Gerrard (1871-1916) marked an important moment in Catholic engagement with what had become an international movement. Historian Frederick Hale calls Gerrard “arguably the most eminent British Christian opponent of eugenics.”[2] Gerrard had authored the article of the same title for the influential multivolume Catholic Encyclopedia earlier in the decade. Gerrard expressed caution as he warned: “In the modern eugenic movement there is much that is opposed to Catholic principles.” Yet he seemed loath to appear fully out of step with modern trends marking the popularity of eugenics. He added: “But at the same time there is much in it that is in harmony with Catholic principles, and indeed highly conducive to the end for which God’s church exists.”[3] To be sure, Gerrard criticized radical eugenics and neo-Malthusians for departing from Christian norms. His remarks on the horrors of the Great War decried its “terribly dysgenic” results, a criticism of war also leveled by promoters of positive eugenics. On negative eugenics, however, Gerrard, like many Catholic churchmen, opposed legalizing sterilization and marriage restriction for the feeble-minded and epileptics.[4]

On the treatment of the cognitively disabled, Gerrard surveyed efforts to study the problem by the Royal Commission on the Mentally Deficient, which met in Great Britain from 1904-1908.[5] In a defense of the civil liberties of those whose mental state is less than ideal, Gerrard insisted: “they cannot be deprived of their right without very grave reason.” On sterilization, Gerrard admitted the Holy See had not yet weighed in on the morality of vasectomies. Yet Catholic theologians and physicians had already urged opposition to the operation as it could “tend to increase immoral practices,” and “open the door to malpractices in matrimonial relations.”[6] Gerrard insisted that the church is the best guardian of eugenic marriages, taking care in applying “eugenics” to the process of guarding their moral and physical healthfulness.[7] For Gerrard the term “eugenics” was not beyond some form of nuanced and cautious utility, particularly in its positive form of promoting good births and health. For his fellow-countryman and Catholic G. K. Chesterton the term “eugenics” was beyond redemption, for he urged that it should be opposed along with “other evils.”

G.K. Chesterton and the Evils of Eugenics

Essayist G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) began to formulate his famous critique of eugenics prior to the Great War. Popular playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) had provocatively urged that social good would follow a policy of selective breeding wherein humans were to be bred like Carthorses. According to one biographer, Chesterton and Shaw were good friends, even if inveterate intellectual antagonists. They carried out running debates over sundry issues in the press between 1905 and 1927.[8] The attitude of Shaw to marriage and procreation may be discerned from a passage in his essay Getting Married, first published in 1908. Here he lamented that both the poor and the rich tend to breed too indiscriminately. He saw this as a minor problem in the case of the rich, since they are few. In the case of the poor, slum conditions tended to winnow their numbers by high infant mortality, in a nod to Thomas Robert Malthus and Herbert Spencer and arguments for the survival of the fittest. Shaw resorted to animal metaphors as part of his rhetorical strategy. “It is harder to keep up the supply of elephants than of sparrows and rabbits; and for the same reason it will be harder to keep up the supply of highly cultivated men and women than it now is of agricultural laborers.” Insects also served as an analogical repository of ideas for Shaw on the theme of procreation: “Bees get out of this difficulty by a special system of feeding which enables a queen bee to produce 4,000 eggs a day whilst the other females lose their sex altogether and become workers supporting the males in luxury and idleness until the queen has found her mate” after which she and the other females kill the males. Shaw added the sardonic parenthetical quip: “(such at least are the accounts given by romantic naturalists of the matter).”^[9] Given the satirical thrust of much of Shaw’s writing, the interpretive task is surely challenging. His flippant style, at least, on such a sacrosanct topic as the family, likely gave the staunchly Catholic Chesterton profound pause.

Chesterton labeled eugenics as a form of quackery, but recognized it as symptomatic of a larger problem in modern England. He became convinced that a discussion of eugenics had to be broadened to a criticism of a consequential political trend toward scientific and bureaucratic control of society.^[10] He published Eugenics and Other Evils four years after the war, a conflict in which the German way of tyranny had not triumphed, at least militarily.  Yet on Chesterton’s reading of events, the German ethos of the will to power had extended a troubling form of triumph into the arena of ideology, and his work stood as a prophetic warning against the abuses of an ostensibly “scientific” education saturated by what he conceived to be a Prussian mindset.^[11]

By the early twenties, The Second International Eugenics Congress had been widely covered in the transatlantic press. Under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in September of 1921, the event coincided with Chesterton’s tour of the USA. The gathering brought together numerous eugenicists from a dozen different nations, while most of the published essays emerging from the confab came from the pens of American reformers.^[12] The time seemed right for the publication of Chesterton’s book-length critique of the eugenics movement in 1922.

The question of negotiations of cultural authority between church and state nagged at Chesterton throughout the text. Chesterton resisted vesting the state with the authority to sterilize citizens on the basis of their alleged mental defects. In his worldview authority had to be grounded on more than the mere opinions of current experts: “In the matter of fundamental human rights, nothing can be above Man, except God. An institution claiming to come from God might have such authority; but this is the last claim the Eugenists are likely to make.” This last phrase indicates that for Chesterton eugenics was of a piece with other secularizing trends. Chesterton also resisted vague rhetoric about the good of society, a common bromide that simply masked impositions of the will of elites upon the public under a fraudulent and self-serving notion of authority.[13]

Chesterton offered his rebuttal to pro-eugenics arguments as a Catholic layman and popular essayist. In the United States some Roman Catholic scholars soon mustered the wherewithal to write their own critiques of a eugenics movement then gaining steam among social elites. Eugenicists were laboring to tighten their grip on the social control of those less fortunate than themselves, and this trend met with the challenge of both theologians and sociologists in the Catholic fold.

Charles P. Bruehl and Eugenics

Located in Overbrook, Pennsylvania, Rev. Charles P. Bruehl served as Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Seminary of St. Charles Borromeo. His regular column in The Homiletic and Pastoral Review represented one of the clearest sustained American Catholic articulations of opposition to eugenics policies at the peak of its popularity in the late 1920s. Several articles in that journal provided the raw material collected in his 1928 tome Birth-Control and Eugenics in Light of Fundamental Ethical Principles. Bruehl was widely read in the fields of science, medicine, moral theology, and sociology. The opening salvo of the book made it clear that Bruehl espoused a broadly argued case against modern eugenics. His burden was to show that “the schemes advocated by radical eugenics and advocates of birth-control” stood in opposition to clear Christian doctrine. Eugenics policies were objectionable not merely on religious grounds, but were also defective in philosophical and practical terms. Eugenic schemes, he wrote, “are derogatory of human dignity, destructive of freedom, unfavorable to true human development, and conducive to degeneration.”[14]

The basic meaning of the term “eugenics” is “good births.” With the general desideratum of healthy children ready to thrive in the modern world nobody would have been likely to argue. The challenge therefore for the eugenics resistance movement was to define eugenics in such a way that its radical, unjust, and even speculative character could be accentuated. It was not unusual for Bruehl, as it had not been for Gerrard a decade earlier, to insist that the “ends” of eugenics, i.e., “the improvement of the human race,” were themselves unobjectionable. In his chapter “The Church and Race Improvement,” Bruehl noted that many Catholic authors had concluded that “the basic ideas of eugenics may be detached from the excrescences with which they may have become overlaid.” He added that the goal of eugenics, namely, “the physical and mental good and improvement of the race of mankind, is part of the object of Charity.”[15] This positive account of eugenics, alas, was not the most aggressive form it took in public policy however.

Bruehl credited Catholicism for promoting genuine racial improvement for humanity. The Catholic church, by his lights, was “the most powerful and efficacious agency for racial betterment that ever existed.”[16] Part of the historical context of this rhetoric may well be that the third of three “Race Betterment Conferences,” organized by leading eugenics enthusiast John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) was held the year before Bruehl’s book appeared in print.[17] The moral question therefore always centered on the “means” by which such ends of human betterment were ostensibly to be achieved. Those means, promoted by radical eugenicists, included sterilization, marriage restriction, and selective breeding. While the somewhat vague proposals of positive eugenics received some support from Catholic thinkers, negative eugenics met their principled opposition in most cases.

In Protestant-dominated America, eugenics was in a sense all the rage. By 1927, under the authorship of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the United States Supreme Court had declared “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” in its 8-1 decision in Buck v. Bell. The one dissenting vote was by Roman Catholic justice Pierce Butler. Butler left no written opinion on the case in the public record, so the motivation for his opposition remains somewhat a mystery. Holmes criticized Butler for being afraid of the Church, even as Holmes expressed fear that the Church (i.e., the Catholic Church) would be able to overcome the law.[18]

By 1928 Catholic opposition to eugenics had a focal point in Buck v. Bell and its opening of the door to widespread involuntary sterilization legislation. Opposition to such a procedure was not merely theological, but deeply philosophical. The first principle Bruehl announced was couched in the negative: the rejection of utilitarian arguments, namely that the end justifies the means. The good that purportedly would obtain from eugenic sterilization (in hindsight, quite dubious at best) could not justify the means, namely, physical mutilation that violated the basic right of bodily integrity of a citizen. Bruehl decried this violation in strong terms: “Without scruple the modern eugenist will concede to the State the right of making sterilization compulsory in the case of defectives, and thus depriving them of the power of reproduction.” Such a policy, on Bruehl’s analysis, betrays “not even the faintest notion” of such Jeffersonian ideals as “fundamental, inalienable human rights, which the state must respect.”[19]

While arguments before the Supreme Court in 1927 had stressed the relatively painless nature of the surgeries (castration, sterilization, or tubal ligation) under anesthetic, degree of physical pain did not determine the morality of the act itself. “Though it is in itself neither a dangerous nor very painful operation, sterilization must be looked upon as a very grave mutilation, since it deprives man of a power that forms an essential complement of the human personality,” Bruehl objected. Further, such a procedure constituted for the patient “a drastic curtailment of his natural rights.”[20] Two Catholic authors, Fr. Stephen M. Donovan of the Catholic University of America, and T. Loaboure, O.M.I. of San Antonio, Texas, had argued for sterilization as a punitive measure in 1913 in the Ecclesiastical Review. Yet this had garnered significant pushback from several scholars and clergymen, as documented by historian Christine Rosen.[21] Bruehl thus represented a growing trend of generalized Catholic opposition to the involuntary sterilization policies of the eugenics movement.

Commonly found in the eugenicists’ arsenal were arguments drawn from the science of heredity. Increasingly, the eugenics movement insisted that procreation had to be prevented among the putatively “unfit,” and that the condition of the so-called “feeble-minded” could not be improved by education or environmental reforms. Bruehl acknowledged that “feeble-mindedness must be kept under control,” and yet that the means to this end had to be both humane and effective. In light of the many unknown features of human heredity then remaining, Bruehl urged that “rights are very serious things, and may not be trifled with.” In light of the limits of the knowledge of biology and heredity, “the State must abstain from enacting indiscriminate sterilization laws, for by so doing it might commit a serious injustice.”[22] Additionally, the laws of heredity at the time, on Bruehl’s reading of the science, were “shrouded in great obscurity.” At the precise point of determining the degree of menace the feebleminded and their procreation portended toward society “our knowledge of heredity breaks down lamentably.”[23]

On marriage restriction, Bruehl’s rhetoric hardened when considering the “mental defectives of the lowest grade.” Since moral theology did not espouse an absolute right to marry, he applauded efforts to prevent such unions by segregation in institutions or rigid surveillance of such persons. But Bruehl found the case of “the higher grade defectives” to be more nettlesome. He urged persuasion rather than legislation to handle such cases. These citizens should be counseled not to marry because they could not support or properly raise a family. Moral suasion, not legislation, was the answer for such persons. “It seems better to leave this matter to the individual conscience and to an enlightened public opinion,” he concluded.[24] In this limitation of the power of large institutions, Bruehl reflected a version of a principle later more fully articulated by Pope Pius XI, namely, subsidiarity. This received its first formal statement a few years later in the 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, a document honoring the nineteenth-century social teachings of Pope Leo XIII. The applicability of subsidiarity to social policies that might undermine smaller institutions such as the family may be seen in the statement of Pius XI: “So, too, it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and a disturbance of right order, to transfer to the larger and higher collectivity functions which can be performed and provided for by lesser and subordinate bodies.” While the original target of such a warning was the rise of socialism, other extensions of state power, including eugenics policies, could also be curtailed by an awareness and application of the principle of subsidiarity.[25] This also illustrated the use of natural law reasoning as applied in critiques of the rising implementation of state policies seen as troubling by the Catholic faithful.

As Birth-Control and Eugenics wound to its conclusion, the intellectual as well as theological grounds for opposition crystalized in Bruehl’s rhetoric. Though individual eugenicists may have been well-intentioned, it was too tied to utilitarianism, i.e., “economic usefulness.” Such an emphasis betrayed “materialistic ideals,” and reduced the rights of social welfare “to pagan levels of thought.” To clinch his argument against such a radical eugenics agenda, Bruehl added that the movement was spiritually blind as it espoused a “disregard for human dignity.”[26]

John Augustine Ryan and the Case against Sterilization

Published under the Auspices of the Catholic Social Welfare Conference, John Augustine Ryan (1869-1945) organized his 1927 monograph Human Sterilization into two major sections: “The Moral Aspect” and “The Constitutional Aspect.” Founder and editor of Catholic Charities Review during the period 1917-1920, as a sociologist and theologian Ryan was deeply attuned to the struggles of the urban immigrant poor. His books The Living Wage (1906), Distributive Justice (1916), and Social Reconstruction (1920) evinced his effort to implement social justice in harmony with the ideals in the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903). A highly educated elite whose writings nonetheless consistently challenged the spirit of elitism, Ryan articulated Catholic opposition to sterilization in the aftermath of the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision.

At the outset Ryan acknowledged that by 1927 there had been no magisterial teaching prohibiting sterilization proffered by the highest echelon of the Catholic hierarchy. At the same time, he was able to cite several prominent Catholic theologians, mainly from the Jesuit Order, in opposition to negative eugenics. H. Noldin, S. J., for instance held that sterilization is “never morally lawful” except for clear cases where it was needed to preserve health or life. As such “it may not be imposed by public authority for the purpose of preventing the existence of defective persons.” Ryan noted a concurring opinion by The Rev. Francis S. Betten, S. J., that sterilization should be forbidden under the same natural law that eschewed “‘race suicide, stealing, and murder’” as intrinsically immoral.[27] Ryan added to these arguments the objections of the editorial board of the Jesuit America magazine, as well as the aforementioned Rev. Charles P. Bruehl.[28] A decade earlier, Ryan himself had articulated his critique of eugenic marriage restriction. He defended those with limitations to mental capacity as having worth in the eyes of God, as persons with souls able to experience happiness in this life and the hereafter.[29]

Under the “Constitutional Aspect,” Ryan surveyed the arguments both for and against upholding the Virginia sterilization statute. The counsel for the plaintiff had argued that the law violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Beyond this, natural rights arguments had been raised during arguments before the Supreme court on behalf of the plaintiff. Violation of “bodily integrity,” along with “deprivation of life and liberty,” and assertion of the right not to undergo “mutilation of the organs of generation,” rounded out the objections to the statute on behalf of Carrie Buck, the Virginia victim of sterilization. Eight of nine justices were not swayed by such arguments. They relied in part on a Massachusetts case in favor of state-mandated vaccinations to empower Virginia to perform sterilization on alleged mental defectives. Holmes, writing for the majority, had asserted: “the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”[30]

As a result of such language, Ryan acknowledged that the Supreme Court could not be counted on to uphold natural law, as many Catholics had presumed it would. Yet in Ryan’s estimate, the case Buck v. Bell presented the opportunity to grant an impetus to greater social activism on the part of Catholic citizens. He remarked, “If the decision in the Virginia sterilization case has the effect of dissipating this excessive trust in the Court and arousing Catholics to the necessity of actively opposing such dangerous measures as sterilization before they have taken shape in statutes, it will prove to that extent a blessing.”[31]

After Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) weighed in with key paragraphs declaring eugenic sterilization immoral and a violation of Catholic teaching in Casti Connubii, Ryan re-wrote the pamphlet. In his 1931 revision, Ryan brought forward the Holy Father’s position on the topic. While there had been some differences of opinion among Catholic moral theologians on eugenics prior to the encyclical, the issue had been settled in Catholic academic circles by Pope Pius XI.[32] The text of the encyclical in English translation reads: “Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason.”[33]

As I hope I have shown, before Pius XI condemned eugenics as a form of birth control in his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, figures like Chesterton, Bruehl, and Ryan, and to a lesser degree Gerrard, were on record against the practice. Numerous other opponents to sterilization statutes are being identified, and further research into Catholic protests of the practice, post-Buck, is vital.[34] For Bruehl, birth control was a practice “revolting to moral sentiment” as well as “at variance with Christian ideals.” Further, the practice was even dysgenic rather than eugenic in its tendencies. It was widely believed even among secular eugenicists that the “best” stock was being denied a chance to flourish due to the rise of birth control among the well-educated classes.[35] The Catholic position blended natural law, moral theology, and scientific reasoning in its opposition to involuntary sterilization.

In contrast to a commonplace prejudice against Catholicism as an unscientific religion, Pius XI did not appear to be writing out of animus toward eugenics based on some general hostility toward science. In the last two decades of his pontificate he promoted modern scientific research. One biographer describes him as “well-informed about scientific research and eager to promote dialogue between faith and science at a moment when positivism was advancing rapidly.” He would go on to re-establish the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the year 1936, including 80 scholars representing a broad international and disciplinary variety. He averred that “science, when it is real cognition, is never in contrast with the truth of the Christian faith,” while citing past popes who had promoted science.[36]

Arguments against eugenics, while multi-pronged, were at their strongest when presented as violations of natural rights and of constitutional norms, and clarified the limitations of the scientific arguments routinely set forth in the name of eugenics. The story of the eugenics resistance movement, in which principled Catholic arguments took a leading role, awaits a telling that draws together threads from both the American and the European contexts. Eugenics scholarship is gaining an awareness of the role of religion both in promotion and opposition to the eugenics movement. Historians are carefully putting in place the raw materials that may one day enable such a needed account.

Conclusion:

As I have argued elsewhere, however, the weight of Protestant Social reform, especially progressive wing of mainline denominations of this period in history, tended to favor eugenics as social policy.[37] Estimates range from 60,000 to 70,000 American citizens as victims of involuntary sterilization.[38] After the popularity of eugenics peaked in England by WWI, the legislative implementation of involuntary sterilization was never realized in England, making the number of those actually sterilized exceptionally difficult to ascertain.[39] Religious opposition to such trends play one part in explaining the stalling of eugenics, but how much weight to give this remains uncertain. By 1920, the scientific credentials of eugenic thought had waned significantly as human genetics was becoming more well-understood, and this too eroded the persuasiveness of eugenics as an idea. The dissemination of the scientific weaknesses of eugenics lagged behind its popularity as social reform, as evinced by Buck v. Bell.

Catholic opposition to eugenics did not develop all at once, nor was it articulated along a single disciplinary trajectory. The concept of “eugenics” or good births at first had the ring of social benevolence to it, and early thinkers such as Gerrard gave the concept some opportunity to outline positive contributions to society and family life. Soon however the specter of negative eugenics led Catholics, from educated laymen such as Chesterton, to moral theologians such as Bruehl, and theologically-educated sociologists such as John Ryan, to offer counter-arguments.[40] Eugenics policies violated natural law, moral law, and constitutional principles. They proved to be deeply suspect both theologically and scientifically. Positive law, however, paid scant attention to such objections, and many individuals desiring to start families were subjected to great heartache as a result.

NOTES:

[1] Frederick Hale, “Debating the New Religion of Eugenics: Catholic and Anglican Positions in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” Heythrop Journal 52 (2011), 445.

[2] Ibid., 452.

[3] Thomas J. Gerrard, The Church and Eugenics 2^nd ed. Rev. (London: P. S. King & Son, 1917), 7.

[4] Ibid., 8-10. According to Hale, 453, Gerrard had taken an early retirement due to ill health, and his death occurred at The Home for Sick and Infirm Priests in Southampton. Such experiences of a disabling condition may well have sensitized him to the harsh rhetoric of eugenicists toward the allegedly unfit.

[5] See Simon Jarrett and Jan Walmsley, eds., Intellectual Disability in the Twentieth Century: Transnational Perspectives on People, Policy, and Practice (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2019), 177-80.

[6] Gerrard, 27.

[7] Ibid., 40.  He even included a chapter defending “The Eugenic Value of Celibacy,” pp. 47-50.

[8] Michael Ffinch, G. K. Chesterton (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 139-40.

[9] George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (London: Constable & Company, Ltd., 1911), 135-6.

[10] G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell, 1922), “To the Reader,” n. p.

[11] Chesterton was highly influential on C. S. Lewis who also held misgivings about misanthropic approaches to British education in his book The Abolition of Man. According to Ffinch, 282, Shaw’s review of the book in The Nation, jibed that the book could have just as well have been entitled Obstetrics and Other Evils, or even Mathematics and Other Evils. In other words, Shaw represented social elites who simply regarded eugenics as an incontestably established science.

[12] A photo of the Certificate for Meritorious Exhibits at this conference is available online at URL:  http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/static/images/543.html.

[13] Chesterton, 60-61.

[14] Charles P. Bruehl, Birth-Control and Eugenics in Light of Fundamental Ethical Principles (New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1928), 11.

[15] Ibid., 45-6.

[16] Ibid., 42.

[17] John H. Kellogg, “The Race Betterment Conference,” Good Health 62 (November, 1927), 5-6.

[18] Indispensable discussion of the court decision is found in Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 157-73.

[19] Bruehl, 78-9.

[20] Ibid., 91.

[21] Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 48-9; 148-64.

[22] Ibid. 152-3.

[23] Ibid., 141.

[24] Ibid., 175-80.

[25] Cited in Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism, rev. ed., (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1994), 1001-2.

[26] Bruehl, 248.

[27] John A. Ryan, Human Sterilization (Washington DC: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1927), 1.

[28] Ibid., 2.

[29] See Clement Anthony Mulloy, “John A. Ryan and the Issue of Family Limitation,” The Catholic Social Science Review 18 (2013), 96; cf. John A. Ryan, Family Limitation and the Church and Birth Control (New York: Paulist, 1916), 17-19.

[30] Ryan, 7. According to Donald K., Pickens, “Both conservatives and liberals began to abandon natural rights in the twentieth century.” Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 93.

[31] Ryan, 9.

[32] Sharon M. Leon, “’A Human Being, and Not a Mere Social Factor:’ Catholic Strategies for Dealing with Sterilization Statutes in the 1920s.” Church History 73 (2004), 410-11.

[33] Pope Pius XI, “Casti Connubii,” (December 31, 1930), par. 70. Online at: https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19301231_casti-connubii.html. Accessed March 1, 2022.

[34] See Especially Sharon M. Leon, An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 66-88.

[35] Ibid., 169-71.

[36] Battista Mondin, The Popes of the Modern Ages: From Pius IX to John Paul II (Rome: Urbaniana University Press, 2004), 89. A biographical entry in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2^nd ed., (2002), 11:394, notes of Pius XI: “Having come from a scholarly background, Pius XI gave sustained support to art and science,” and adds that 1his 1931 encyclical Deus Scientiarum Dominus sought to unify and improve the quality of studies in Catholic higher education.

[37] See Dennis L. Durst, Eugenics and Protestant Social Reform: Hereditary Science and Religion in America, 1860-1940 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 12-30, 157-71; cf. Rosen, 53-84.

[38] Paul Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization Laws,” online at: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay8text.html, accessed March 2, 2022; NPR, “The Supreme Court Ruling that Led to 70,000 Forced Sterilizations,” online at: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/07/469478098/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations#:~:text=The%20Supreme%20Court%20Ruling%20That%20Led%20To%2070%2C000%20Forced%20Sterilizations,-Listen%C2%B7%2037%3A37&text=In%201927%2C%20the%20U.S.%20Supreme,case%2C%20known%20as%20Buck%20v, March 7, 2016, accessed March 8, 2022.

[39] Philip R. Reilly, “Eugenics and Involuntary Sterilization: 1907-2015,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 16 (2015), 358.

[40] On Ryan’s objections to eugenics on pragmatic grounds, see Mulloy, 98-99.

Print