In policy debates, bowing to "science" can lead down dark paths – NewsOK.com

AMONG the most intellectually offensive tactics of some activists is to proclaim science a cudgel for silencing debate. That's not a new practice, and it's worth noting how acquiescence to such tactics played out in the past.

Throughout much of the first half of the 20th century, the science of eugenics was aggressively promoted by prominent politicians, attorneys and medical professionals, particularly political progressives. Darwinian evolution and advances in genetics and biology were cited as scientific justification for a wide range of policies, including forced sterilization.

In 1915, Dr. W.C. Rucker, associate surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service, flatly declared, Eugenics is a science. It is a fact, not a fad.

In 1916, an Oklahoma State Board of Health column, which ran statewide, declared the object of eugenics was the improvement of the inherent type and the mental and physical capacities of the individual in the future. The board advised the most important eugenic recommendations included segregation of defectives so that they may not mingle their family traits with those on sound lines and sterilization of certain gross and hopeless defectives.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of forced sterilization laws. The lone dissenter was Justice Pierce Butler, a devout Catholic. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. derided Butler as someone who knows this is good law, and pre-emptively questioned whether Butler would have the courage to vote with us in spite of his religion.

By the 1930s, Oklahoma's Legislature authorized sterilization of inmates at prisons and mental asylums. Sen. Louis Ritzhaupt, a Guthrie Democrat and medical doctor who would serve as president of the Oklahoma Medical Association, championed the law.

In 1934, Ritzhaupt warned that the number of jail and mental hospital patients was growing steadily, draining taxpayer dollars. The only way to curtail this expense is to stop production of potential inmates. He claimed people subjected to sterilization, during any sane interval, will welcome the procedure.

In 1935, Ritzhaupt said some form of eugenic control was required to create a nation of physically and intellectually superior human beings. Otherwise, he warned, certain people revert more or less to the animal type.

In practice, those subjected to sterilization often included people whose chief defect was poverty or minority status.

According to 2012 research by Lutz Kaelber, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, 556 individuals were sterilized in Oklahoma with 78 percent being female. And that doesn't include numerous American Indian women sterilized at an Oklahoma City federal facility in the 1970s. Citing a 1976 Government Accounting Office report, Kaelber writes that many associated consent forms were improperly filled out or provided no clear indication of consent by the woman sterilized.

It took the Nazi Holocaust to discredit eugenics. Before then, critics were dismissed as backward, anti-science zealots.

Science is one thing. People's interpretation of science is something else. And policy proposals based on debatable interpretations of science should certainly be debated.

Otherwise, history shows that failure to engage in such discussions can lead society down a very dark path.

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In policy debates, bowing to "science" can lead down dark paths - NewsOK.com