Category Archives: Eugenics

Walter Isaacson. Photo: Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Human beings newfound mastery of RNA may usher in a new era of disease control. It could also lead to something far darker. On the latest Pivot podcast, author and journalist Walter Isaacson discusses the revolutionary leap being made in gene editing and what it may portend for the future.

Scott Galloway: All right, lets bring on a friend of Pivot.

Kara Swisher: Walter Isaacson, someone Ive known forever, is the author of a new book called Code Breaker. Hes also the best-selling author of so many things, including Steve Jobs. Walter, welcome. I feel like youve got so many things behind your name that I dont know which one to pick, but weve known each other for decades, I guess.

Walter Isaacson: I think friend of Kara is probably the most important Im somebody who when I go to the gym listens to both of you all the timeand somebody who

Galloway: Charmer.

Swisher: Very nice. Walter is from the South. So this is his very polite way of saying such nice things about us. Anyway, lets talk about you and this new book. Tell us about Jennifer Doudna. I did an interview with her on Sway, but talk about why you chose her as a subject and where she fits into the other narratives youve written.

Twice weekly, Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher host Pivot, a New York Magazine podcast about business, technology, and politics.

Isaacson: You and I grew up in the digital revolution with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And it produced amazing things it brought microchips into our homes, and iPhones became platforms. And that was totally transformative. But as Im looking at the beginning of the 21st century starting with the sequencing of the human genome and, of course, climaxing with gene-editing tools and, for that matter, RNA vaccines that we can program I realize that molecules are the new microchip. And the first half of this century will truly be a biotech revolution just like you and I lived through the digital revolution.

And Jennifer Doudna, who Ive spent the past four or five years hanging out with, is a perfect entre into that because she discovers the structure of RNA just the way Watson and Crick helped discover with Rosalind Franklin that of DNA. And she and her adviser figured out how RNA can replicate and be the source of life on this planet and then how it can be a guide for gene-editing tools. And now were using it as a messenger to create vaccines, and shes thrown herself into the moral and ethical issues. So theres a lot of colorful characters in my book. But like any writer, its good to have a central character I can hold their hand, and the reader can hold our hands and we go step-by-step through a journey of discovery.

Swisher: Can you generally explain CRISPR for those who dont know what it is? Just very briefly.

Isaacson: Yeah, its simple. Its something bacteria have been doing for a billion years. They have clustered repeated sequences known as CRISPRs in their genetic material that take mug shots of any virus that attacks it. So if the virus attacks again, they cut it up using a guide RNA. Thats pretty useful in this day and age of us getting attacked by viruses. What Jennifer Doudna and others discovered was a way to repurpose this, to recode that guide so it would cut our own DNA at a targeted spot. So we could say, Cut out this genetic flaw, cut out this gene or fix this. So they repurposed the CRISPR system of bacteria to be a gene-editing tool for us.

Galloway: With any exciting technology that hits sort of this parabolic increase and outcomes, theres externalities. Youve really gotten to know this field what do you see as the two or three biggest risks we face with this explosion, or this envisioned explosion, in biotech?

Isaacson: I think that, first, we should say its going to be a godsend in so many ways. People who are blind, who have sickle cell anemia, Huntingtons, Tay-Sachs, cancer. All these things it can fix. Having said that, the two biggest things I worry about are (a) if this sort of genetic supermarket isnt free and it wont be the rich could buy better genes, and we could exacerbate the inequality we have in our society. Not just exacerbate it but encode it into our species like in Brave New World or Gattaca.

Swisher: Meaning they dont get sick, or they dont get

Isaacson: Or they have children that are six inches taller than the rest of us. Or they decide, with all due respect to Scott, that I want a full head of blond hair for my kid. And they edit their own children, and they buy better genes for them. Eventually, it could even be things like memory or intelligence or height or muscle mass or eye color or anything. Secondly, I think if we let this just be a free-market thing, that it could end up being what I would call a free-market eugenics. Now, with eugenics we think about the Nazis or even Cold Spring Harbor,where the government mandates master-race kind of things.

Im not worried about that. Im worried about individual choices where people edit out the diversity of our species. Behind me, you can see on your little SquadCast thing these big doors behind me that open to a balcony on Royal Street. I remember walking with your two sons; they were visiting once. Royal Street is filled with all sorts of characters short and tall and fat and skinny and Creole-colored and black and white and gay and straight and trans and deaf and hearing enabled. Thats what makes our species so cool and so great and creative and resilient. If we allow people to say, I want to edit out anything that I call a deviation from typical, thats a bad thing too.

Swisher: Depending on what typical is, correct?

Isaacson: Right, I use typical because whenever I use normal, people say, Well, thats a normative term. So Im trying to figure out typical for me on height is, say, whatever I am, five-seven. But if somebody is born at four-six, you might say, If thats a genetic condition, we should fix it, and they can be typical species height. But if somebody is going to be born like I am at five-seven, then thats an enhancement if you give me another eight inches.

Swisher: This is not for existing people, right? Its your children.

Isaacson: Right. Although even with muscle mass, that can be regulated. We have myostatin; thats a genetically controlled hormone in our body. In theory, you could, especially in younger children, have greater muscle mass. But height is something you probably yeah, no, no, I wont get into your Twitter feed, but I know that Scott doesnt need more muscle mass.

Galloway: Even Walter Isaacson is mocking me? By the way, Walter, when I read your stuff, you definitely sound five-eight, just so you know.

Isaacson: Thank you.

Pivot is produced by Rebecca Sananes. Erica Anderson is the executive producer.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Why Molecules Are the New Microchips - New York Magazine

Mansur Shaheen | Apr 9, 2021

A bill that would prohibit the practice of disability abortions passed through the Florida House Health and Human Services committee on Tuesday, though not without its detractors.

House Bill 1221 was filed by Rep. Erin Grall in late February. Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez filed the identical SB 1664 within the same week. The bill would make it a felony for a physician in the state to perform an abortion if they knew the mothers sole reasoning for wanting the procedure was because they had found out their child would be born with a disability.

Disabilities included in the bill are any physical disability, physical disfigurements, Down syndrome, scoliosis, dwarfism, Albinism, amelia or a physical or mental disease.

Grall received pushback from Democrats in the committee on the bill. Representative Nicholas Duran questioned whether or not the bill may prevent physicians from asking key questions to patients seeking medical treatment. Representative Tracie Davis believes the law would be struck down by federal courts due to past decisions such as Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.

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Grall said the questions fell outside of the scope of her bill and responded by saying her bill was filed to combat eugenics, a process where certain traits are systematically removed from the gene pool.

Whether or not disability abortions are eugenics has been a point of contention for many in recent years. As technology improves, parents can now find out a lot about their children while they are still in the womb. Some experts fear that parents may be more willing to abort their children based on certain traits, which can be considered eugenics. Some, including Grall, compare these types of abortions to the eugenics performed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party to Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Representative Michelle Rayner said that many disability advocates she had spoken to opposed the bill, though. She also said the bill did not truly do enough if the goal was to help the disabled community:

It is claimed that this bill is about valuing [the] lives of people with disabilities. Then I would pose the question, wheres the rest of the bill? This bill is based on the premise that disability is static, it is not. Its also based on the misconception that disability is strictly defined by pathology, that is also incorrect. More often than not, it is our environments that are far more disabling than our disabilities. When people with disabilities have the supports and resources, we know many people with disabilities are more capable of being fully functional members of society.

Wheres the part of the bill that fixes the patchwork of systems we spend literally years of our lives waiting on? Where is the part of the bill that addresses medical institutional bias? What is being done to ensure that these kids and their families have the support that they need to thrive and opportunities when they grow up, instead of joining the rest of us in log jams that are weightless for services? This bill isnt about disability, it uses disability to push forward an agenda having nothing to do with disability.

The bill does have its advocates, though. Rep. Tyler Sirois lauded the bill and praised Grall for filing it. A representative for Florida Voice for the Unborn, an anti-abortion group in the state, gave testimony:

The goal of this bill is simple: To stop the legal discrimination against unborn children who have been diagnosed with a genetic disability or a potential genetic disability prior to their birth. All abortions, in my opinion, are heinous, but these types of eugenic abortions are particularly evil because they purposely target the handicapped for elimination from society.

The bill passed the committee by a 12-8 vote. It will now go to first reading on the house floor.

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Florida abortion bill passes through tense committee meeting - State of Reform - State of Reform

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) The University of Richmonds board of trustees has suspended its decision to leave names associated with racism on two campus buildings.

The Richmond Times Dispatch reported Monday that the board is reviewing options for a broader and more inclusive process. The board said it expects to share its plans soon.

The university announced in February that it would not change the names of two buildings. A dorm was named for Douglas Southall Freeman, a university trustee and rector from 1925 to 1950. He had supported segregation, white supremacy and eugenics.

The university had changed the buildings name earlier this year to Mitchell-Freeman Hall. It added the name of John Mitchell Jr., a former enslaved man who became editor of the Richmond Planet newspaper.

Another building is named for Robert Ryland. He was instrumental in founding what is now the University of Richmond and was the schools first president. He owned at least seven slaves.

The boards decision followed complaints from students and faculty.

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U of Richmond to reevaluate decision on renaming buildings - Associated Press

We can now properly analyse the effect of a four-year-old Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) policy. Its caused poverty to increase. And the policy may also have caused an increase in abortions. But exclusive research by The Canary has also found birth rates among the poorest women have dramatically fallen; potentially also due to the policy. Yet so far, the DWP maintains that there isnt a problem.

The two-child limit is a DWP policy. The then Tory government brought it in on 6 April 2017. It meant the DWP would only pay Child Tax Credit and Universal Credit for two children in a family; any more than this the DWP would not count in benefits calculations.

The policy has been controversial. A court ruled in June 2017 that the policy was discriminatory against single mothers with children under two. Then, in April 2018, another court said the cap was unlawful. This was in relation to young carers. The so-called rape clause, where women have to prove theyve been raped to get an exception to the two-child limit, also sparked outrage.

Now, four years on, the long-term effects of the two-child limit are clear.

The Canary reported in 2018 that the number of households likely to be hit in the future by the cap would explode. In April 2018, just under 71,000 households were subject to the limit. Now, as of April 2020, the number has rocketed to 250,000:

In April 2018, around 200,000 children were affected. Now, this figure is over 900,000:

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) data on poverty, there has been a four percentage point increase in the number of households below average income where three or more children live; up four percentage points from 43% to 47%. Thats nearly a 10% increase:

As the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) wrote:

estimates suggest that by the end of this Parliament, more than 600,000 families are likely to be subject to the limit, pushing an estimated 1.3 million children into, or deeper into, poverty.

The CPAG also looked at abortions.

It found that there was a sharp overall increase after 2017:

In 2016 in England and Wales there were just over 185,000 abortions. By 2019, this had increased by 11.74% to just over 207,000.

But crucially the CPAG said that abortion rates for women who already had two or more children increased most rapidly after 2017:

The Canary analysed the birth rates for women by socioeconomic status; that is for the richest and poorest women.

Our research found that birth rates fell generally. This was comparing 2017 and 2019 figures. The biggest falls have been among the poorest households. In the table below, 1.1 is the richest, 8 is the poorest:

We cannot directly say that the falls are due to the two-child limit. But given the effect of the policy on abortion and poverty rates this additional impact is likely. Moreover, the reduction in birth rates in the poorest groups is sudden.

As The Canary previously reported, between 2013 and 2016 birth rates in groups 5-8 fell overall by 0.9%. Now, between 2017 and 2019 this accelerated to a 12.4% fall. But this drop also correlated with the 11.74% increase in abortions. Because the poorest women are having abortions at over twice the rate of the richest:

There is no comparative yearly data for abortion rates per socioeconomic status prior to the two-child limit being introduced. But abortion rates had been rising across all groups between 2013-2018. It appears from the data that between 2018 and 2019, increases in abortion rates were most marked in the poorest groups (a 0.9 point increase in the poorest versus a 0.4 point increase in the richest):

The Canary asked the DWP for comment. A spokesperson told us:

Universal Credit has provided a vital safety net for six million people during the coronavirus pandemic and is supporting people back into work through our comprehensive Plan for Jobs.

In 2020, 85% of all households had two or fewer children, which is reflected in our policy. There are appropriate exemptions in place.

But the DWPs own research shows that these exemptions are tiny. In April 2018, the number of households with three or more kids the DWP gave an exemption from the limit to was just over 2,800. By April 2020, the number was around 12,500; an average of 4.75% of households hit by the policy across the UK. This is actually a reduction on 2018, where the percentage was around 8% of the total households having an exemption.

The two-child limit has been perhaps the Tories most noxious policy. Its hard not to look at it and think that the DWP and government intentionally designed it to stop poor people having children. Because as the CPAG noted:

If these findings are related to the two-child policy, it is horrifying. Chinas one-child policy was driven by burgeoning birth rates. We have sub-replacement fertility. There is no other country in history that has adapted social security policy to increase child poverty to reduce fertility or encourage abortion. It is a completely outrageous assault on liberty.

The word for this would be eugenics. And successive Tory governments and the DWP have meted it out, without recourse.

Featured image via The Canary and Wikimedia

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The DWP policy that is nothing short of eugenics - The Canary

by: Christine Sexton

News Service of Florida

Physicians who terminate pregnancies solely because women dont want children with disabilities could face felony charges under a bill moving through the Florida House.

Members of the House Health & Human Services Committee voted 12-8 on April 6to advance the controversial bill (HB 1221), which would apply tophysicians who know or should know abortions they perform were requested solely because of prenatal diagnoses, tests or screenings that indicated fetuses would have disabilities.

The Republican-controlled committee approved the bill on a nearly party-line vote, with Rep. Mike Caruso, R-Delray Beach, the only GOP member to vote against it.

Bill sponsor Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, argued the bill was necessary to prevent eugenics, which involves using reproduction to try to lead to people with certain characteristics.

She said the Legislature has a duty to have difficult conversations and that she believes the proposal would help prevent abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.

Members of the committee spent more than an hour asking questions and debating the bill, with the debate passionate and, at times, personal.

Committee member Allison Tant, D-Tallahassee, discussed her experience of raising a child with an intellectual disability. Tant said she was first advised something was wrong after a sonogram when she was 11 weeks pregnant.

My doctor threw up his hands and he said, I dont know what to do. Theres something wrong. I dont know what it is. Go see a specialist and you might need to consider termination, Tant recalled. The termination I considered was the termination of my doctor. I couldnt take that step. I worked too hard to get there.

But her decision against having an abortion made in consultation with her husband and physicians and, she said, prayer --- has come at an emotional and financial cost, she said.

Tant told committee members she had to fight to get her son early intervention services when he was as young as 3 and had to fight for him throughout his education. While its been hard, its not a decision she regrets, Tant said.

Every single family must have the right to determine their own family issues, she said. They must make their own decision without mandate from people like us who are not directly involved in their lives.

The bill includes in the list of disabilities such things as physical disabilities, intellectual or mental disabilities and Down syndrome. The bill includes an exception that would allow abortions necessary to save the life of a mother whose ife is endangered by a physical disorder, illness or injury, provided that no other medical procedure would suffice for that purpose.

Physicians who know or should have known that abortions were being performed because of prenatal diagnoses of disabilities would face third-degree felony charges and regulatory consequences.

If lawmakers ultimately pass the bill, Florida would be the 10th state to enact a law to prohibit so-called disability abortions. According to a staff analysis, such restrictions have been passed in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio and Tennessee.

Indianas law has been permanently enjoined, while legal fights continue about the laws in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee. Bans remain in Mississippi and North Dakota.

Committee member Kelly Skidmore, D-Boca Raton, said the bill would put another layer of shame on women who choose to have abortions and said it would force women to potentially lie to their physicians or shop for doctors who will performabortions.

Tant also said the bill is moving forward while the House considers making a $40 million reduction to a Medicaid program that helps people with intellectual and developmental disabilities live in their homes and communities.

So the message is clear, we really dont value people with disabilities, she said, adding more than 23,000 people are on a waiting list for what is known as the iBudget program.

After the approval Tuesday by the Health & Human Services Committee, the bill is positioned to go to the full House.

But the Senate version (SB 1664), filed by Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez, R-Doral, remains stalled in the Senate Children Families and Elder Affairs Committee. That committee is chaired by Sen. Lauren Book, a Plantation Democrat who supports abortion rights.

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Ban on 'disability abortions' backed in Florida House - Palm Coast Observer

Later in life, the tall, shambling Scotsman (who lived from 1847 to 1922) embraced eugenics, arguing that the deaf should not intermarry lest their offspring make the general population deafer. As Booth writes, He wanted the deaf eradicated, their marriages to each other forbidden, their procreation ceased. Due largely to his faulty (and obtusely inhumane) research, 40 percent of the total German deaf population was sterilized during the Nazi era.

Bell was the nineteenth centurys chief oralist, at war with the manualists. Manualist teachers trusted those who found both comfort and efficiency in sign language. But Bell refused to see deaf people as individuals who could make their own choices. To him they were broken and needed fixing. Heres his beloved wife, Mabel Hubbard Bell: Your deaf mute business is hardly human to you. You are very tender and gentle to the deaf children, but their interest to you lies in their being deaf, not in their humanity.

Booths interest in the subject is intimate. Her grandparents on her mothers side were deaf, and as her grandmother lay in a hospital bed near the end of her life, doctors treated her like she was invisible, or a freak, as Booth looked on in seething rage. They showed no capacity to communicate.

Often they didnt look at her face at all, Booth writes. They avoided her eyes, which were hungry for information and seemed to embarrass them. If they spoke to her, they held their eyes big and moved their mouths in long, round shapes. They seemed to think that their distorted mouths could substitute for a certified interpreter, but my grandmother could make little meaning out of the charade. Like Bell, they could not, or would not, humanize the deaf.

Much of the book takes place in Boston and Cambridge, where Bell did the bulk of his research on making improvements to the telegraph and inventing the telephone. Theres some dramatic tension here, especially as Bell wrestles with patent deadlines in his attempt to be first with the phone (a process during which he seems to have cut in line and bent the rules). During these passages, however, Bell, like the book, is really biding time until he can return to the arena of deaf education.

All kinds of ideas are percolating beneath the surface of The Invention of Miracles. Assimilation is a big one: for Bell, the only worthy goal for the deaf was to meld into the hearing world, to leave their deafness behind, to come as close to being a hearing person as humanly possible. He wanted nothing less than to end deafness. Learn to talk; if you sign, do it in private, or only as a last resort.

But as oralism came to dominate deaf education, largely through Bells reputation, deaf communities responded by further embracing sign. Bell, unwilling to accept that he might be wrong, forever stuck in his own head, barely seemed to hear his opponents. If he had, perhaps he would have recognized the cruel irony that the deaf, to whom he devoted so much of his life (however wrong-headedly), grew to hate him. Today there is a Deaf culture, a Deaf community, and Bell is widely perceived as an enemy. Within the culture, Booth writes, he is sometimes referred to as the father of audism, of discrimination against the deaf.

The concept of language is never far from these pages. As Booth writes, in popularizing the approach of teaching the deaf to speak above all else, Bell helped create a crisis of language deprivation. Bells methods of teaching the deaf to speak were difficult to grasp, and extremely time-consuming. Among the consequences: many students ended up with no language at all. And many were shortchanged on the rest of their education, which went by the wayside as Bell and his adherents fixated on the priority of speech at the expense of all else. Booth saw the consequences in her grandfather, who, discouraged from signing, became functionally illiterate.

In spite of her admitted enmity for Bell, Booth never portrays him as less than human. His mistakes created destructive ripples that hurt those he most wanted to help. This tension fuels the book, as does Booths wonderfully descriptive language and her skill in capturing her characters interior lives. Mabel worked on sketching him, Booth writes, marveling at her husbands mind, moving without a moments notice from torpedoes to telephones, tides to ruins to flying machines.

Despite his more monstrous ideas, Bell was no simple monster; if he were, The Invention of Miracles would be a snooze. Booth has the courage and perspective to portray her subjects deeply flawed humanity, giving the book its poetry and tragic resonance.

The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bells Quest to End Deafness

By Katie Booth

Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $30

Chris Vognar, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, is a freelance cultural critic.

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New biography of Alexander Graham Bell complicates the picture - The Boston Globe

Its not hard to see whats coming at the end of Voyagers, but like all things, its about the journey and not the destination. Thankfully, both aspects of this doltish sci-fi are equally worthless. Its central mission comes about because, due to global warming, humanity will have to abandon ship. The first step in that process is a mission thatll take 86 years and necessitate its crews reproduction. So, a diverse group of American kids (naturally, the main characters are still the same ol interchangeable white folks while everyone else fulfills sideline stock roles), created through some sort of barely addressed eugenics program, are shot into space, their only purpose being to procreate and prepare their descendants to scout a presumably inhabitable planet. Writer/director Neil Burger, a filmmaker whose stints in vapid YA (Divergent) and treacle (The Upside) seem to most inform Voyagers, is in rare form here: Everything in the film is done worse than the media it mimics.

The crux of the sci-fi is a nature vs. nurture debate tackled by stories both classic (Lord of the Flies, Voyagers most obvious influence) and recent (Raised by Wolves). What is natural for people? Laziness? Aggression? Justice? Order? What Voyagers suggests is that, left to their own devices, humans raised in isolation will revert to movie tropes.

The scientific expedition/thought experiment adds an additional wrinkle when Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead) figure out that, as an additional safeguard to the already outrageously unethical creation and brainwashing of these kids, the ships passengers are being drugged to tamp down potentially problematic feelings. Each kid drains a daily glass of blue that keeps them in check. Its like The Giver or THX-1138 or Vonneguts Welcome to the Monkey House orwell, you get the picture. Decreased pleasure response? I want increased pleasure, Zac says, somehow keeping a straight face.

That lines indicative of the utterly silly script, which sci-fi fans will love to poke holes through. How did this organization not see this potentiality coming? Why would they ever allow Colin Farrells ultra-dad and his stockpile of Earth mementos to accompany kids specifically raised away from human society? The subdued aesthetic, all digital displays and white interiors, doesnt do much to distract from these nagging questions, which only get harder to ignore as the film goes on.

As soon as they start skipping their medsa la Brave New World orok, ok, Ill stop doing thisthey start doing whatever comes naturally, be that fantasizing about Sela (Lily-Rose Depp) or wrestling in the exercise room. The changes (immediate and unfettered by conditioning or withdrawal) come signified by rapid montages of Earthling home video footage and flashes of stereotypical imagery: Flowers bloom, hairs stand on end, waves churn. They somehow want what theyve never had and know nothing of: Sex, violence, sensation. After one skipped dose, theyre so hungry for novelty that theyre zapping each other with live wires and making out in the cafeteria. Will this turn into some kind of weird space-Crank by way of Gaspar No?

Pretty wild stuff considering that before this, they all start off as interchangeable, robotic figures whose stoic faces mirror their shared monochrome uniform. It seems that throughout their extended childhood/training, they never got any sort of socialization nor developed any personalities. That emotionlessness translates to actors without much to do, with everyone turning in wooden performances (through no real fault of the performers themselves, who all fall in line with their dull characters) besides Whiteheads Zac, whoas soon as hes off the druginstantly becomes a slimy sociopath. A bit irresponsible and shortsighted for humanitys last hope to be a stolid group that turns out to be one step away from reverting to horny id monkeys.

Well, ok, you say. Lets see how this weird horndog story plays out, I guess. But Voyagers isnt content to let its drama unfold. That might mean having to do something with its characters. So, theres also the rumor of an external force that may or may not be threatening its inhabitants. (Another full-scale lift from Flies). POV shots tracking through the ships corridors creep up on unsuspecting passengers, score mounting like a slasheras if they didnt have enough to deal with already.

Needless to say, the film quickly abandons its orgiastic (yet obviously always PG-13) sensory explorations in favor of a tired tale of desperate factionalismjust in case you were worried that the film might actually push some unique boundaries. Its action is shot shakily and without meaningful attempts at comprehensibility; its lust is shot with a bit more tactile interest, but with the unnatural barriers of the ratings system keeping things constrained. Moral debates feebly come up in obvious scenes that screech the film to a halt, but from the very premise to its ultimately cowardly conclusion, Voyagers is clearly only interested in the most simplistic and titillating angles of its setting: Airlocks, secret caches, security footage. Ideas of civilization, of morality and colonizationof what it means when we think of humanity forming a new homeare ironically far from this sci-fis mind.

The reason its so easy to get hung up on all the facile writing is because the film is so dulla result of narrative predictability and aesthetic familiarity. These stark white walls have kept many more interesting premises and compelling characters sequestered in the lonely vacuum of space. We start picking at contradictions just for something to pass the time.

Lord of the Flies was a provocative (if flawed and cynical) work because of the inherent imperfections in humanitys social structures. When kids are raised inhumanlyisolated from society and trained from birth by computers for a single missionand face what amounts to the same scenario, that relevance disappears. It becomes less a commentary on human nature and more a critique of a narratives own contrivances. And as far as criticism goes, the tedious and trite, regressive and ridiculous Voyagers doesnt need any more than its already going to get.

Director: Neil Burger Writer: Neil Burger Starring: Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp, Fionn Whitehead, Colin Farrell, Chant Adams, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Viveik Kalra, Archie Renaux, Archie Madekwe, Quintessa Swindell Release Date: April 9, 2021

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

For all the latest movie news, reviews, lists and features, follow @PasteMovies.

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Voyagers' Sci-Fi Lord of the Flies Riff Is Painfully Dumb - Paste Magazine

(Graphic illustration by Malia Berry | The Collegian)

Erika Cohns documentary Belly of the Beast exposes the human rights violations happening in California womens prisons while centering the voices of the brave women, both in and out of prison, who fought to put an end to it.

This documentary was part of this years ACT Human Rights Film Festival at Colorado State University, and after watching it, it is incredibly clear why the film was chosen. It addresses issues of intersectionality, especially against women of color in correctional facilities. The film is centered on the story of Kelli Dillon and the legal battle and process of Senate Bill 1135, which now prohibits sterilization as a form of birth control in California prisons.

By centering the story on these women and their fight for justice, the film is able to convey the heartbreak, trauma and courage that was behind the passing of (Senate Bill) 1135. Hearing Dillons testimonies, both from her personal case and in support of SB-1135, makes you want to be in that courtroom to support her.

While serving time at the Central California Womens Facility,Dillon was a victim of involuntary illegal sterilization without her knowledge, but after her surgery, she started experiencing symptoms of surgical menopause. Dillon wrote a letter to Cynthia Chandler, co-founder of Justice Now, a nonprofit organization that provides legal advocacy to people in womens prisons.

After reading the letter, Chandler worked with Dillon to uncover abuses at California womens facilities and discovered a trend of involuntary sterilizations, primarily against Black and Latinx populants. The findings point toward a dark history of eugenics in California, with illegal sterilizations performed to prevent women of color from reproducing.

The audience gets an in-depth look at Chandlers life, job and even the colorful shoes that she wore when visiting the prison to help brighten the room. Despite the harsh subject matter, the documentary is much more than dark and depressing.

By centering the story on these women and their fight for justice, the film conveys the heartbreak, trauma and courage that was behind the passing of SB-1135. Hearing Dillons testimonies, both from her personal case and in support of SB-1135, makes you want to be in that courtroom to support her. It makes you want to do anything in your power to stop this from happening to any other woman ever again.

The hardest part about watching this film is learning how long this human rights violation was able to go on for and the countless women who were sterilized. Its also the difficult realization that this is not the only problem women in prison face but this isnt the only instance of forced sterilization in America.

The legacy of eugenics still exists today, and its something we should be vigilant about in our society. The documentary does a wonderful job celebrating the successes, such as the passing of SB-1135, while still recognizing the lack of overall justice for these women. I would recommend that everyone takes the time to learn about the battle these women fought and are still fighting.

Maddy Erskine can be reached at entertainment@collegian.com or on Twitter @maddyerskine_.

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'Belly of the Beast' documentary reveals eugenics in prisons The Rocky Mountain Collegian - Rocky Mountain Collegian

CW: This article discusses issues of sexual abuse, violence.

When activist group Justice Now distributed surveys about a bill banning forced sterilization to inmates in the Central California Womens Facility, they received an overwhelming response. Women recalled being kept in the dark about their medical status and lied to about having ovarian cancer or other severe diseases. They were forced to sign surgical consent forms that they were not given sufficient time to read and recounted the negative health effects of sterilization procedures they did not know they had undergone. In the midst of these recounted experiences, there was enormous support for legislation that would finally give women recourse for the abuses committed against them.

Director Erika Cohns revealing documentary Belly of the Beast, shown at this years Athena Film Festival, exposes Californias complicity in what Cohn essentially amounted to a modern-day eugenics program in California, as well as the legal and bureaucratic barriers obfuscating those abuses from the public. Shot over the course of seven years, the documentary follows Justice Now and Kelli Dillon, a former inmate at the Central California Womens Facility, as they attempt to uncover the extent of the sterilizations and win reparations for the victims.

It goes even deeper than we whove been working on this for a decade now, Justice Now Communications Director Courtney Hooks said.

After Dillon awoke from what should have been a routine gynecological examination, she immediately felt something was wrong. Over the next nine months, her period stopped. She lost over 100 pounds. Her concerns over her health were dismissed by the doctor at the prison, who told her that she should be glad to have lost weight.

Disturbed, Dillon wrote a letter to Justice Now, an activist organization co-founded by human rights lawyer Cynthia Chandler that investigates the extensive medical abuses in the California prison system. Chandlers investigation uncovered a terrifying revelation: Dillon had been forcefully and secretly sterilized against her will. Before the operation, Dillon had only given permission for a hysterectomy in the case that cancer cells were found in her ovaries. But the symptoms Dillon had experienced all corresponded to surgical menopause, a medical procedure she had not approved.

I feel like I was robbed of the fullness that could have been given to me had this not happened, Dillon said in the film.

Dillon soon discovered, however, that she was not alone. After speaking to more women in the prison, she was alarmed by numerous stories frighteningly similar to hers: pap smears given at medical center visits for unrelated health problems, a sudden increase in womens reproductive problems, and reports of surgeriesjust like the one Dillon receivedafter abnormal cells were supposedly found in the womens bodies.

Her case, she realized, was part of a greater trend of sterilization in Californias prisons. She began carrying around a briefcase filled with forms to help affected prisoners contact Justice Now, helping provide crucial information to Collins team of investigators on the outside.

Finding justice and transparency in the United States legal system, however, has been difficult. The team hit barrier after barrier starting from the very beginnings of their legal actions in 2006 when Dillon became the first inmate to sue the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for damages. Because forced sterilization was explicitly illegal under federal law, Dillons lawyers believed her case should be a transparently open-and-shut victory. Despite this, the majority-white jury believed the prison doctors version of events, eventually dismissing the case on the basis that its statute of limitations had expired. The loss was devastating for Dillon.

I was looking at these documents that [were] confirming that as a Black woman, my life wasnt shit, Dillon said as she recounted the trial. It didnt mean anything. It had no purpose.

Further investigation into the sterilization of prisoners became even more difficult by the prison systems culture of silence and control. The lopsided power dynamics of the prison meant women were entirely subjected to state control with little opportunity for recourse. This environment made it difficult for women to give informed consent legally required for hysterectomies and other sterilization procedures. It was also difficult for women to find recourse as figures who spoke up faced retaliation through additional years added to their sentences.

Regardless, the team at Justice Now, with the help of investigative reporter Corey Johnson and an anonymous whistleblower within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pieced together the facts related to the abuses occurring behind bars. Tubal ligation, a procedure that results in sterilization, was reclassified as a medical necessity that could be financially reimbursed by the state. Over half of pregnant women were forced to undergo Caesarian sections for security purposes, a procedure that allowed doctors to easily sterilize women through tubal ligation. The publication of these facts in an expose by Johnson triggered public controversy and the introduction of a bill banning forced sterilization in California prisons.

Potentially the most chilling part of the documentary is the point at which it touches on the underlying rationale of the procedures. The film features the case of OB-GYN doctor James Heinrich, who made numerous judgment calls for women to be sterilized. In a particularly revealing moment, Johnson recalls confronting Heinrich with information that the state had, at his behest, spent over $100,000 in taxpayer money on a supposedly banned procedure. The doctors response was blunt:

Thats cheaper than welfare, he said.

Here, Cohn situated the film within the historical context of the United States extensive propagation of eugenics. Heinrichs attitude, as University of Pennsylvania Law professor Dorothy Roberts notes, mirrors the rationale of the leaders of Californias eugenics movement who justified sterilizing disabled and minority women with the rhetoric of cost efficiency and taxpayer savings. At the peak of the United States eugenics movement in the early 20th century, California led all other states in sterilization; German scientists even came to study Californias program as a model for the Nazis later eugenics system. After eugenics itself became taboo after the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, population control policies continued to target women of color.

Heinrich was part of a legacy, Roberts said. If you just stop and make him the face of it, do you really get at the problem?

Indeed, the problem extends well beyond Heinrich. A state document leaked by the whistleblowersigned by the Federal Receiver appointed to enforce federal laws governing the ethical medical treatment of prisonersechoes Heinrichs justification for sterilizing women during labor and delivery: cost-efficiency.

The film focuses on the root cause of the problem: state policy that continues to dehumanize Black and Latina women, targeting them as criminals who must be stopped from reproducing for the good of society. It recognizes that Justice Nows advocacy is a small microcosm of a systemic problem across the nation. A title card at the end of the film notes that the true extent of sterilization programs across the country remains unknown.

Ultimately, through Dillon and Collins work with Justice Now, the bill banning the forced sterilization of prisoners was passed into law. Despite this victory, however, the film refuses to offer neat resolutions. Justice Now is still working on uncovering information on sterilization programs in other states, and even today, Collins and Dillon still fight for justice for the victims of sterilization who have still not received reparations from the state.

We have yet to get an apology. We have yet to be acknowledged. We have to crack this thing wide open. CDC has to be made accountable, Dillon said. This is just the beginning.

Staff Writer Julia Tong can be contacted at julia.tong@columbiaspectator.com.

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Excerpt from:

'Belly of the Beast' exposes forced sterilization in the U.S. justice system - CU Columbia Spectator

When Kelli Dillonwas a 24-year-old inmate at a California womensprisonin 2008, shebegan to experience abdominal pain. A doctor at thecorrectional facilitytold her he suspected cancer and that he needed to perform exploratory surgery. He found no cancer, butsterilized her withoutherconsentor knowledge.

Dillonsstoryis the focus of a new documentary aboutthe unconscionable practice of coerced sterilization of womenmostly Black and Latinain Californias prisonsand the history of eugenics in the United States.

Belly of the Beastwill bepresented online at 6 p.m. this Monday,March29by theWomen and Girls Fund of The Community Foundation, GermannaCommunity College and theUMWWomen and GenderStudy Program.

Believing in eugenics, California state legislators passed a law in 1909 authorizing involuntary sterilization. By the time the program ended 70 years later, Californiahadsterilized 20,000 peoplemostly women and girlsinstate institutions whowerelooselyclassified as having disabilities or deemed unfit for reproduction.

#BellyoftheBeast does not reach for happy endings and is most absorbing in its thesis, which makes the stakes of this battle against human rights violations loud and clear. NYT review

REGISTER: cfrrr.org/belly-of-the-beast/

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Germanna, UMW, Community Foundation host virtual documentary "Belly of the Beast" tonight - Fredericksburg Today