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The ‘Soft Eugenics’ Presidency
But people are still being sterilized against their will today—namely, disabled people under guardianship, and people in prisons or jails. “The story that we’re told about forced sterilization is that it’s something that was confined to this dark period in history,” said Ma’ayan Anafi, senior counsel for health equity and justice at the National Women’s Law Center. “But the reality is that laws explicitly allowing the forced sterilization of disabled people exist right now—not just in a handful of states, but in the majority of them.”
To advocates like Anafi, the existence of these laws is all the more alarming given the views espoused by the White House. “The president has shamelessly relied on eugenics in service of his anti-immigrant agenda as he attempts to manufacture a moral panic,” they said. “Eugenics has always been an inherently racist ideology, and President Trump is giving us a textbook example of that.”