To the medical historian Jacqueline Antonovich, Kennedy’s comments reminded her of eugenic arguments from the early 20th century — the idea that people with disabilities are, she wrote, “tax burdens therefore they shouldn’t exist.”
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This was not a fringe argument a century ago, Antonovich, an associate professor at Muhlenberg College, told me. Almost everyone accepted “the basic premise” of eugenics, she said — which is that “we need to improve our genetic pool” through proper breeding, behavior and environment.
Though there were different interpretations of what eugenics would mean in practice, most eugenic manifestoes of the day framed “feebleminded” people (an antiquated umbrella term that could be used to refer to all manners of intellectually disabled people) as a burden to society and their families. One such address to the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1912 described the “feebleminded” as “never capable of self-support or managing their own affairs,” adding that they cause “unutterable sorrow at home.”
The arguments we are having today about Kennedy’s speech are similar to the early-20th-century disagreements over society’s treatment of people with disabilities. In the book “The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of ‘Defective’ Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915,” the historian Martin Pernick catalogs the warring newspaper coverage around the Baby Bollinger case.
Baby Bollinger was a boy born to a Chicago couple in 1915. A doctor named Harry Haiselden saw that the baby had physical defects and did not treat the child, allowing him to die. Haiselden then went on a media campaign to promote what is called eugenic euthanasia — killing the “unfit.”
Haiselden had many prominent supporters, including Helen Keller, who wrote a defense of inaction toward the infant: “Our puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred only when it may be of some use to itself and the world … the world is already flooded with unhappy, unhealthy, mentally unsound persons that should never have been born.”
But he also had detractors, notably the social reformer Jane Addams, who cited the abilities of Keller and others to show how Haiselden was misguided. Pernick explains that Addams listed an “honor roll” of the “world’s great defectives,” including Keller, the mathematician Charles Steinmetz and the French diplomat Talleyrand.
Explaining the arguments against Haiselden, Pernick points out that “defining some people as defective would be the first step in an ever-widening circle.” If we start dividing “useful” or exceptional disabled people to distinguish their worth, we may risk leaving out the most vulnerable, who are just as worthy of our care, attention and, to extend Kennedy’s point, tax dollars.
That someone as morally and scientifically confused as Kennedy is in charge of guiding our children’s health is a grave mistake. It’s a mistake that could prove especially tragic because President Trump is threatening, if he can fully dismantle the Department of Education, to move federal special education programs under Kennedy’s purview. The administration is also proposing huge cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, so the disability supports that currently exist may be in danger. “The very, very, very hard-won gains that have been made since the 1960s” on disability rights “are being pulled back very quickly by folks like R.F.K. Jr.,” Antonovich told me.
We shouldn’t sit by and let Kennedy take us back a century.