History: The Eugenics Movement

1. The Eugenics Movement was a movement that wanted to improve the human race. They had an idea that there were superior human hereditary traits as well as inferior human hereditary traits. Superior human traits involved having blue eyes, blonde hair, and light skin, all of these traits lead to assumptions that these people were intelligent as well as great athletic ability. Inferior human traits included dark skin and dark colored eyes which lead to the assumption that these people with these traits were unintelligent. The Eugenics Movement used multiple strategies to promote improvements of human hereditary traits, such as anti-miscegenation laws, birth control experimentation, and coercive sterilization. The relationship between the Eugenics
The Madrigal v. Quilligan case involved women who filed a law suit against Dr. Quilligan due to the abuse of sterilization they had undergone due to Dr. Quilligan. The Madrigal side argued that the women who had been sterilized had their civil rights violated as well as their right to bear children. While the Quilligan side argued that they had the idea that overpopulation had to be eased through the sterilization of poor women who tended to have larger families due to their ethnicity/race. The women who were on the Madrigal side of this case explained how doctors and nurses would make them sign papers without know what they were signing. An example of this is when a woman was having contractions and she was not getting the medical attention she required she asked a nurse that she needed help. The nurse responded by telling her that the only way they could help her was if she signed the papers to go into surgery for her labor. The woman signed without realizing they were the papers for her to get her tubes tied. Many women did not know that they were sterilized for years until they tried to have another child and could not. A large issue to the misunderstanding of the papers was that they were all in English which these women were not capable of reading or understanding. Of course the LACMC physicians claimed that these women were aware of what was going on to them and if they did not know, then it was their fault for not reading the papers they signed. The final decision that was made in the Madrigal v. Quilligan case was the Quilligan won and therefore the women on Madrigal’s side would not receive any commission. Although these women lost they did make awareness of this issue to other women so that the same thing would not happen to them. Not only did they receive media coverage, but they also managed to stop the LACMC to stop using federal funds for the sterilization of minors as well as provide Spanish language information at a sixth grade reading level