From Buck to Madrigal: Eugenics, Forced Sterilizations, and Reproductive Justice

These curricular units seek to move away from a framing of the “eugenics” movement as a self-contained movement, but rather as a series of logics that were strategically deployed in the light of changing understandings of science as a tool of social control. The focus on forced sterilization is not necessarily to simply outline a historical continuity, but to understand how the eugenic regulation of reproduction has worked to accommodate national anxieties surrounding marginalized populations, albeit drastically different ways depending on the time period involved.