Only the Beautiful

by Susan Meissner

There was a life growing inside me. I stroked the slight mound, astonished to realize the little thing nestled inside my body that I had wanted gone was actually precious and amazing.

“The law makes provision for it. I’m pretty sure many states still have eugenics laws on the books.” “Eugenics laws?” Lila asks. “I mean legislation that allows states to decide who among the institutionalized with so-called genetic flaws should be made unable to have children.” “For what purpose?” Lila says, frowning. “So that they can’t perpetuate a burden on society,” I say. “That’s the rationale behind it, isn’t it?”

1915 World’s Fair right here in San Francisco. It was all about education back then, teaching people that the best way to strengthen society was to bring into it strong, healthy, and intelligent children. But the focus morphed rather quickly to the practice of sterilizing those with genetically undesirable traits.

what gives you the right to decide who is worthy to be a mother or a father and who is not? What gives you the right to judge whose life has value and whose doesn’t as if you were—”

the T4 program?” “It’s for one purpose only.” Emilie swallowed before continuing, as though to fortify herself for speaking the rest of the answer. “Krankenmorde.” The word fell on my ears like a hammer. Krankenmorde. Mercy killing.

The 1927 Supreme Court ruling that allowed Carrie Buck to be forcibly sterilized gave every state the green light to continue or begin sterilizing those deemed unfit to produce children, all in the name of “race betterment.” Over the next five decades more than sixty thousand men and women in thirty states were forcibly sterilized. And while these sterilizations diminished somewhat after eugenic ideology at its worst was exposed in the liberated concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the practice continued in some states for decades afterward. Many states had eugenics laws in place until the 1970s.

but I styled him after early eugenic leaders like Sir Francis Galton, Charles Benedict Davenport, Harry Laughlin, and Margaret Sanger.