ABSTRACT
Robert A. Wilson treats dehumanization as a useful concept for understanding disability and eugenics and the relationship between them. His chapter provides a broad overview of the history of eugenics and the contemporary significance of both that history and eugenics itself with an eye to exploring the centrality of disability. After reprising the history of eugenics up until 1945 and outlining the ideas at the core of eugenics, he focuses in the remainder of the chapter on the perhaps surprisingly large part of that history that comes after 1945 and why dehumanization remains an unfortunately continuing issue for people living under regimes of ableism today across a variety of contexts. As he claims, eugenic and newgenic thinking continue to structure the challenges that people with disabilities, especially cognitive and psychiatric disabilities, face in a world with enhanced capacity for technological intervention in reproductive decision-making.
