Summary and Reflection of Eugenics in New Zealand

Sheela G. Marasigan

“Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness,
negativity, pain… To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make
mistakes and choices – today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but
embrace it.” –Kevyn Aucoin
Modern eugenics, better known as human genetic engineering, changes or
removes genes to prevent disease, cure disease or improve your body in some
significant way. Though it may serve as a preventive measure on propagating unwanted
genes still this practice for me it closing the doors of equality for life and embracing
decimation on wanting to eliminate a life that has a value and rights which is set to live a
beautiful one.
Eugenics is a philosophy that advocates controlling reproduction to produce better
offspring. It flourished in the early 1900s but lost credibility after the Nazis' horrifically
extreme version of eugenics in the Second World War. Organized New Zealand
eugenics groups in the early 1900s advocated sterilizing those who were 'unfit' to breed.
They urged upper-class and middle-class women to stop using contraception and to
breed more, to stop the country being dominated by 'defectives'. This report of the
establishment of a Eugenic Society in Christchurch appeared in the Poverty Bay Herald
in August 1911.
It is a pseudo-science concerned with improving the quality of the human race. It
underpins the discrimination of those who are disabled or culturally or ethnically
different by those who consider themselves to be morally and physically superior.
Eugenics borrow the language and concepts of science, particularly evolutionary theory
of ‘survival of the fittest’, to legitimize this discrimination. The flawed hypothesis
underpinning eugenics is that some individuals, families and population groups are
tainted with hereditary physical and intellectual defects causing consequent moral
deficiency, making them less ‘fit’ than others.It offered women a discourse of moral and
social reform that fitted neatly with the ideals of colonial feminism and, by extension,
enabled them to participate in national debates about racial health.

Eugenic attitudes and public policy were particularly significant in the early decades of
the twentieth century in many countries, including New Zealand. A common perception
in Britain and much of the ‘western’ world at the beginning of the twentieth century was
that evolutionary theory of 'survival of the fittest' had not caused society to rid itself of
problems related to crime and poverty. Being part of the British Empire, it was not
surprising that the eugenic debate here was influenced by the British one.

In the nineteenth century many migrants left Britain and Europe for a better life in
New Zealand. Although infectious illness and accidents were common, disability was
unwelcome as it conflicted with the ideals of a new society. Disability support was left to

Sheela G. Marasigan, LPT

the benevolence of families or groups providing charitable aid. The immigration acts that
restricted people from China (an ‘unfit race’) also banned ‘cripples, idiots, lunatics,
infirm, blind, deaf and dumb’. The 1882 Imbecile Passengers Act required a bond from
the person in charge of the ship before one of these ‘undesirables’ was discharged, and
the 1899 Immigration Restriction Act went further banning the idiot, the insane and the
contagious.

By the beginning of the 20th century the middle class white birth rate was dropping in
New Zealand. The blossoming ‘scientific’ justification of eugenics was taken up by both
white liberals and conservatives concerned about consequent fears of losing their moral
supremacy. In 1903, W. A. Chapple, a Liberal MP in New Zealand and later in Britain,
published an influential booklet, The fertility of the unfit. Sterilisation of the wives of
‘degenerate’ men was his preferred option for reducing the numbers of ‘the unfit’. His
pamphlet was welcomed by many prominent men and women. Eugenics became a
political cause. ‘Negative’ eugenists sought to limit fertility while ‘positive’ eugenists
supported interventionist pro-natalist policies to increase population ‘fitness’.

The 'unfit' encompassed a whole range of 'other' including the following groups
described in the language of the time: alcoholics, imbeciles, illegitimate children (and
their mothers), prostitutes, criminals, the feeble-minded, lunatics, epileptics, deaf-mutes,
the unemployable, the tubercular, the immoral (e.g. homosexuals), anyone from another
race, those with incurable diseases such as Syphilis or tuberculosis, and even ‘mouth-
breathers'. What they had in common was that they were all 'other' and were apparently
breeding faster than the eugenists. Eugenists constructed a monster that gobbled up
taxes, and provided images of the 'unfit' for people to measure themselves against.

In conclusion, I believe that a new human life is created at the moment of conception
and has the same rights as any other human, therefore Eugenics is a form of
discrimination prohibiting a human the right to live. Ruling out someone’s possibility to
experience the life he/she was supposed to live and explore.
References:
https://teara.govt.nz/en/document/26996/eugenics
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.001.0001/ox
fordhb-9780195373141-e-14
https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/7xw9gb/the-dark-unknown-story-of-eugenics-in-new-
zealand

Sheela G. Marasigan, LPT

Sheela G. Marasigan, LPT