Demographic Patterns of Eugenic Sterilization in California

 描述(由申请人提供)：从1907年印第安纳州通过全国第一部绝育法到20世纪60年代，大约有60,000人根据优生标准进行绝育，该标准试图规范“不适合”和智力缺陷的生育。加州进行了大约2万例绝育手术，占全国记录在案的绝育手术总数的三分之一。关于这一做法的经验历史分析很少。2007年，斯特恩在萨克拉门托的精神卫生部(现为州立医院)进行历史研究时，找到了这个时代的19个缩微胶片卷轴，其中包含1.5万份绝育建议，以及来自9家州立医院的补充信件和表格(总共超过3万份个人文件)。在过去的两年里，斯特恩博士和她的团队为这些建议创建了一个不符合HIPAA标准的数据集，从1921年到1952年。我们现在建议对包含212个编码变量的优生绝育数据集进行定量分析，以描述绝育随时间的趋势，并根据性别、年龄、种族、国籍、诊断、机构所在地和许多其他变量描述绝育的模式。我们建议将优生绝育数据集与个人一级的人口普查微观数据和地区一级的人口普查报告联系起来，这将使我们能够 计算基于人群的绝育率估计，并检验关于性别、年龄、种族、国籍和诊断与绝育风险的关系的假设。或者，我们假设，在加州的机构中，青少年和西班牙姓氏患者进行了不成比例的绝育。此外，我们将分析数据中有关家庭对绝育的抵抗力、患者拒绝以及制度化和绝育经验的定性模式。这项研究与当代人类基因组学中的伦理、法律和社会问题相关，因为它将提供一个基于经验的、更丰富的理解，即在美国优生学时代，医学家长主义和基因决定论的特定变体是如何运作的，以及关于种族、性别、性行为和智力残疾的优生学刻板印象如何影响国家的干预 进入收容所的人的生殖生活。此外，我们的发现可以为当代的对话提供信息，即“健康”和“不健康”、异常和正常的社会价值观可以在多大程度上影射到疾病预防和人类进步的规范中，这些规范指导着一些基因技术和测试。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): From the passage of the country's first sterilization law in Indiana in 1907 until the 1960s approximately 60,000 people were sterilized based on eugenic criteria that sought to regulate the reproduction of the "unfit" and mentally deficient. California performed about 20,000, or one-third, of all documented sterilizations nationwide. Few empirical historical analyses of this practice are available. In 2007, while conducting historical research at the Department of Mental Health (now Department of State Hospitals) in Sacramento, Dr. Stern located 19 microfilm reels from this era that contain 15,000 sterilization recommendations along with supplemental letters and forms from nine state hospitals (in total, over 30,000 individual documents). Over the past two years Dr. Stern and her team have created a de-identified HIPAA-compliant data set of these recommendations, which date from 1921 to 1952. We now propose to conduct quantitative analyses with the eugenic sterilization dataset, which contains 212 coded variables, to describe trends in sterilization over time and to describe patterns of sterilization according to gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, diagnosis, institutional home, and many other variables. We propose to link the eugenic sterilization dataset to individual-level census microdata and tract-level census reports, which will allow us to calculate population-based estimates of sterilization rates and test hypotheses about the associations of gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, and diagnosis with the risk of sterilization. or example, we hypothesize that teenagers and Spanish-surnamed patients were disproportionately sterilized in California institutions. In addition, we will analyze qualitative patterns in the data with respect to familial resistance to sterilization, patient refusal, and experiences of institutionalization and sterilization. This study is relevant to contemporary ethical, legal, and social issues in human genomics, as it will provide an empirically-based, richer understanding of how medical paternalism and a particular variant of genetic determinism operated during the eugenics era in the United States, and how eugenic stereotypes about ethnicity, gender, sexual behavior, and intellectual disability influenced the state's intervention into the reproductive lives of institutionalized persons. Furthermore, our findings can inform contemporary conversations about the extent to which societal values of "fitness" and "unfitness," abnormality and normality, can insinuate themselves into the norms of disease prevention and human improvement that guide some genetic technologies and tests.