A whisper past. Childless after eugenic sterilization in Alberta ‐ by Leilani Muir
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A whisper past. Childless after eugenic sterilization in Alberta Muir, Leilani Friesen Press, Victoria, BC, Canada, 2014. xii + 212 pp., $19.99. ISBN 978-1-4602-3469-3 Discussions about eugenics usually are theoretic. After all, this was a 19th century movement that ended with the atrocities committed during World War II by the Nazi regime. Correct? Actually, no, it did not end then and victims of misguided eugenic interventions are still among us. Astonishingly, the Canadian province of Alberta was one of the places still performing involuntary sterilizations based on eugenics-inspired laws way into the 1960s and the Sexual Sterilization Act was only repealed in 1972. One of the victims was Leilani Muir, who has now published her autobiography showing in great detail her life story and her suffering caused by eugenics. Muir sued the Province of Alberta in 1995. I had the privilege to meet and talk with her just prior and attend the first day of the proceedings, when she gave her testimony. Words fall short of describing what a profound experience this was. Here was a woman, telling us in great detail the physical and psychological pain that had been inflicted upon her by people using research in behavior genetics as a justification. When a young girl and adolescent, Muir was institutionalized and diagnosed as ‘Mental defective Moron’. Subsequently, based on this ‘diagnosis’, she was involuntarily sterilized, without even being told exactly what had been done to her. Years later, when failing to conceive and only after exploratory surgery, Muir learned that her Fallopian tubes had been removed, a non-reversible procedure. Muir's story is a tragedy in more than one way. Anybody who has talked with this woman for even a few minutes will realize that she's anything but a ‘mentally defective moron’. On the contrary, Muir is an eloquent and obviously intelligent woman. She had been completely misdiagnosed by caretakers who failed to see the truth, namely that this was a battered child, victim of an abusive and manipulative mother. In addition, even if for the sake of the discussion we assume that this diagnosis had been correct, this still does not justify an involuntary sterilization. After the Second World War, many lessons were taken from the Nazi abuses and that interventions like this are morally and ethically wrong had been one of them. On top of that, it has been well established that such eugenic measures would only achieve a minuscule increase in the mean IQ of a population if maintained meticulously over centuries. That is, this kind of measure is ineffective to reach the goal of the eugenicists that designed them, even if one would accept the underlying rationale. The book describes Muir's struggle to find peace with the injustices of which she has been victim. It also describes her trial against the Province of Alberta, which she won, and gives many details about the eugenicists that were behind her suffering. A more minor point is Muir's description of her trip to France to present her story at the very first meeting of IBANGS, which, I am sure, all those attending will remember vividly. This book should be required reading for any researcher working in the field of behavior genetics, whether with humans or animals. The reason for this is that even though hardly any modern behavior geneticist, or indeed any geneticist, will seriously propagate eugenics, our work is often interpreted by non-geneticists and used, like it or not, to justify this kind of abuse. This book will motivate us to speak out vocally against these practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".