The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
Alison Bashford (ed.), Philippa Levine (ed.)
Published online:
18 September 2012
Published in print:
24 September 2010
Online ISBN:
9780199940417
Print ISBN:
9780195373141
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The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
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Susanne Klausen,
Susanne Klausen
History, Carleton University, Ottawa
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Susanne Klausen is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa. She writes about reproductive control in twentieth-century South Africa and is author of Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–39 (2004). She is at work on a study of criminalized abortion under apartheid. Klausen has published in numerous journals, including the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Journal of Southern African Studies, and South African Historical Journal.
Alison Bashford
Alison Bashford
History, University of Sydney
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Alison Bashford is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on the modern history of science and medicine, including Purity and Pollution (1998) and Imperial Hygiene (2004), and has coedited Contagion (2001), Isolation (2003), and Medicine at the Border (2006). She is currently completing a history of geopolitics and the world population problem in the twentieth century. In 2009-2010 she was Visiting Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University, with the Department of the History of Science.
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98–115
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Published:
18 September 2012
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Klausen, Susanne, and Alison Bashford, ' Fertility Control: Eugenics, Neo-Malthusianism, and Feminism', in Alison Bashford, and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford Handbooks (2010; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Sept. 2012), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.013.0006, accessed 14 May 2025.
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Abstract
This article analyzes the preoccupation of eugenics with fertility control—a broad term denoting all methods by which humans seek to induce, prevent, or terminate pregnancy. It also discusses the role of eugenicists in establishing birth control clinics, and to advocate for more controversial technologies of reproductive control such as sterilization and sometimes abortion. It also shows the link between feminist, eugenic, and neo-Malthusian discourses. It begins with the classic definition of eugenics and then indicates that contraceptive information would be offered to married women who are too young, ill, or weak for pregnancy, or who experienced pregnancy too frequently. This article also provides an understanding of the role played by feminism in the social acceptance of technologies of reproductive control. It concludes that eugenic feminists often connected by neo-Malthusian ideas have played a leading role in developing new reproductive technologies.
Keywords: eugenics, fertility control, neo-Malthusian, feminists, pregnancy
Subject
Gender and Sexuality History
Series
Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
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