[The crispr / cas9 techniques applied to human genetic enhancement: a biotechnological, anthropological-philosophical and legal dialogue]. / Las técnicas crispr/cas9 aplicadas al mejoramiento genético humano: un diálogo biotecnológico, antropológico-filosófico y jurídico.

The CRISPR editing method is revolutionary. This technique opens the possibility of countless operations in the genome of living beings. However, the risks are high and, in some cases, unpredictable. Therefore, based on an anthropology that recognizes the human person with an inherent dignity that includes the body, this article intends to propose bases for a regulation capable of facing the challenge of CRISPR, especially, given the possibility of confusing its therapeutic resource with the eugenics, also before the imminent risk of unleashing unforeseen consequences such as mutations, malformations and side effects that could be devastating for human life.

The Degenerating Sex: Female Sterilisation, Medical Authority and Racial Purity in Catholic Brazil.

This article examines female sterilisation practices in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It argues that the medical profession, particularly obstetricians and psychiatrists, used debates over the issue to solidify its moral and political standing during two political moments of Brazilian history: when the Brazilian government separated church and state in the 1890s and when Getúlio Vargas's authoritarian regime of the late 1930s renewed alliances with the Catholic church. Shifting notions of gender, race, and heredity further shaped these debates. In the late nineteenth century, a unified medical profession believed that female sterilisation caused psychiatric degeneration in women. By the 1930s, however, the arrival of eugenics caused a divergence amongst physicians. Psychiatrists began supporting eugenic sterilisation to prevent degeneration - both psychiatric and racial. Obstetricians, while arguing that sterilisation no longer caused mental disturbances in women, rejected it as a eugenic practice in regard to race. For obstetricians, the separation of sex from motherhood was more dangerous than any racial 'impurities', both phenotypical and psychiatric. At the same time, a revitalised Brazilian Catholic church rejected eugenics and sterilisation point blank, and its renewed ties with the Vargas regime blocked the medical implementation of any eugenic sterilisation laws. Brazilian women, nonetheless, continued to access the procedure, regardless of the surrounding legal and medical proscriptions.

Sterilization of those with intellectual disability: Evolution from non-consensual interventions to strict safeguards.

Non-consensual sterilization is one of the characteristic historical abuses that took place mainly in the first half of the 20th century. People with intellectual disability (ID) were a prime target as part of the ideology of negative eugenics. In certain jurisdictions, laws were in force for several decades that permitted sterilization without the need for consent or with consent from third parties. The long-term adverse effects on those sterilized against their will have only more recently been recognized. In the latter half of the 20th century, human rights treaties were introduced and developed; they have, in the main, curbed sterilization abuses. Courts have developed more stringent criteria for making decisions on applications for sterilization, and nowadays there are mostly adequate safeguards in place to protect those with ID from non-consensual sterilization. The only exception should be the particular case in which, all medical and social factors having been taken into account, sterilization is overwhelmingly thought to be the right decision for the individual unable to give consent.

Deviancy, Dependency, and Disability: the Forgotten History of Eugenics and Mass Incarceration.

Three widely discussed explanations of the punitive carceral state are racism, harsh drug laws, and prosecutorial overreach. These three narratives, however, only partially explain how our correctional system expanded to its current overcrowded state. Neglected in our discussion of mass incarceration is our largely forgotten history of the long-term, wholesale institutionalization of the disabled. This form of mass detention, motivated by a continuing application of eugenics and persistent class-based discrimination, is an important part of our history of imprisonment, one that has shaped key contours of our current supersized correctional system. Only by fully exploring this forgotten narrative of long-term detention and isolation will policy makers be able to understand, diagnose, and solve the crisis of mass incarceration.

Legalised non-consensual sterilisation - eugenics put into practice before 1945, and the aftermath. Part 1: USA, Japan, Canada and Mexico.

In the late 19th century, eugenics, a pseudo-scientific doctrine based on an erroneous interpretation of the laws of heredity, swept across the industrialised world. Academics and other influential figures who promoted it convinced political stakeholders to enact laws authorising the sterilisation of people seen as 'social misfits'. The earliest sterilisation Act was enforced in Indiana, in 1907; most states in the USA followed suit and so did several countries, with dissimilar political regimes. The end of the Second World War saw the suspension of Nazi legislation in Germany, including that regulating coerced sterilisation. The year 1945 should have been the endpoint of these inhuman practices but, in the early post-war period, the existing sterilisation Acts were suspended solely in Germany and Austria. Only much later did certain countries concerned - not Japan so far - officially acknowledge the human rights violations committed, issue apologies and develop reparation schemes for the victims' benefit.

Disproportionate Sterilization of Latinos Under California's Eugenic Sterilization Program, 1920-1945.

OBJECTIVES: To compare population-based sterilization rates between Latinas/os and non-Latinas/os sterilized under California's eugenics law. METHODS: We used data from 17 362 forms recommending institutionalized patients for sterilization between 1920 and 1945. We abstracted patient gender, age, and institution of residence into a data set. We extracted data on institution populations from US Census microdata from 1920, 1930, and 1940 and interpolated between census years. We used Spanish surnames to identify Latinas/os in the absence of data on race/ethnicity. We used Poisson regression with a random effect for each patient's institution of residence to estimate incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and compare sterilization rates between Latinas/os and non-Latinas/os, stratifying on gender and adjusting for differences in age and year of sterilization. RESULTS: Latino men were more likely to be sterilized than were non-Latino men (IRR = 1.23; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.15, 1.31), and Latina women experienced an even more disproportionate risk of sterilization relative to non-Latinas (IRR = 1.59; 95% CI = 1.48, 1.70). CONCLUSIONS: Eugenic sterilization laws were disproportionately applied to Latina/o patients, particularly Latina women and girls. Understanding historical injustices in public health can inform contemporary public health practice.

Ethical Issues Regarding CRISPR Mediated Genome Editing.

CRISPR-Cas9 has emerged as a simple, precise and most rapid genome editing technology. With a number of promising applications ranging from agriculture and environment to clinical therapeutics, it is greatly transforming the field of molecular biology. However, there are certain ethical, moral and safety concerns related to the attractive applications of this technique. The most contentious issues concerning human germline modifications are the challenges to human safety and morality such as risk of unforeseen, undesirable effects in clinical applications particularly to correct or prevent genetic diseases, matter of informed consent and the risk of exploitation for eugenics. Stringent regulations and guidelines as well as worldwide debate and awareness are required to ensure responsible and wise use of CRISPR mediated genome editing technology. There is a need for an extensive dialogue among scientists, ethicists, industrialists and policy makers on its societal implications. The opinion of different elements of the society including the general public as well as religious scholars is also critical. In countries with existing legislative framework, it might be appropriate to allow CRISPR based research to proceed with proper justification. However, much anticipated future clinical applications must be strictly regulated with newly established regulations.

Care-ful definition of consent.

This proposal is an attempt to intervene in psychology's violent past and troubling present by calling for notions of "care-ful" practice, compelling us to recognize and celebrate the permeable, porous, and flexible boundaries between bodies and selves. With this heuristic of care, this article hopes to trouble the separation between rigor and relational responsibility, to trouble objectivism, to oust the illusion of cool rationality, and to offer an affective understanding of consent that refuses to deny sexuality in bodies oppressed with the label of intellectually disabled.

An Evil Hitherto Unchecked: Eugenics and the 1917 Ontario Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Mentally Defective and Feeble-Minded.

In 1917, the Ontario government appointed the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Mentally Defective and Feeble-Minded, headed by Justice Frank Hodgins. Its final report made wide-ranging recommendations regarding the segregation of feeble-minded individuals, restrictions on marriage, the improvement of psychiatric facilities, and the reform of the court system, all matters of great concern to the eugenics movement. At the same time, however, it refrained from using explicitly eugenic vocabulary and ignored the question of sterilization. This article explores the role the commission played in the trajectory of eugenics in Ontario (including the province's failure to pass sterilization legislation) and considers why its recommendations were disregarded.

Consideraciones bioéticas y jurídicas sobre la biotecnología con fines eugenésicos / Considerações bioéticas e jurídicas sobre a biotecnologia com finalidades eugenésicas / Bioethical and legal considerations about biotechnology with eugenic goals

Los nuevos avances biotecnológicos vinculados con la reproducción plantean cuestiones bioético-jurídicas de no poca envergadura. En efecto, a medida que las posibilidades reproductivas proliferan, también lo hacen los conflictos éticos relacionados con el favorecimiento de la eugenesia: la selección de embriones, la selección de sexo de la persona que va a nacer, el uso de personas con finalidad terapéutica para terceros. En este artículo se analizarán los aspectos bioéticos en conflicto, sin olvidar la regulación jurídica que existe al respecto de estas prácticas biotecnológicas vinculadas con la reproducción.

New biotechnology achievements linked to reproduction raises bioethical-legal questions of great importance. Indeed, as reproductive possibilities proliferate, ethical conflicts proliferate as well favoring eugenics: embryo selection, sex selection of the person to be born, use of persons with therapeutic end for others. In this article, bioethical issues in conflict will be analyzed, not forgetting existing legal regulation of these biotechnological practices linked to reproduction.

Os novos avanços biotecnológicos vinculados com a reprodução propõem questões bioético-jurídicas de não pouca envergadura. Com efeito, a medida que as possibilidades reprodutivas proliferam, também o fazem os conflitos éticos relacionados com o favorecimento da eugenesia: a seleção de embriões, a seleção de sexo da pessoa que vai nascer, o uso de pessoas com finalidade terapêutica para terceiros. Neste artigo se analisarão os aspectos bioéticos em conflito, sem esquecer a regulamentação jurídica que existe a respeito destas práticas biotecnológicas vinculadas com a reprodução.

Eugenics and Involuntary Sterilization: 1907-2015.

In England during the late nineteenth century, intellectuals, especially Francis Galton, called for a variety of eugenic policies aimed at ensuring the health of the human species. In the United States, members of the Progressive movement embraced eugenic ideas, especially immigration restriction and sterilization. Indiana enacted the first eugenic sterilization law in 1907, and the US Supreme Court upheld such laws in 1927. State programs targeted institutionalized, mentally disabled women. Beginning in the late 1930s, proponents rationalized involuntary sterilization as protecting vulnerable women from unwanted pregnancy. By World War II, programs in the United States had sterilized approximately 60,000 persons. After the horrific revelations concerning Nazi eugenics (German Hereditary Health Courts approved at least 400,000 sterilization operations in less than a decade), eugenic sterilization programs in the United States declined rapidly. Simplistic eugenic thinking has faded, but coerced sterilization remains widespread, especially in China and India. In many parts of the world, involuntary sterilization is still intermittently used against minority groups.

[RESEARCHES ON EMBRYO: THE RISKS OF EUGENIC DRIFTS AND LIVING MATTER UNDER PATENT]. / RECHERCHES SUR L'EMBRYON, RISQUES DE DÉRIVES EUGÉNIQUES ET BREVETABILITÉ DU VIVANT.

As a result of scientific progress, embryo, once classified as part of the maternal body, gained recognition in particular with medically assisted reproduction. It became a genuine topic of study, from being analyzed in its development to its characteristics of being a reserchers's object of desire due to its multiple possibilities of reserch and study. Despite belonging to the human species, and even though they are not completely classified as objects, supernumerary embryos, out of parental projects, were gradually reified in order to become the object of all genetic engineering fantasies, especially the quest of the perfect child, free of diseases and anomalies. Notwithstanding all the precautions taken by the legislator and the European institutions, future drifts concerning the enlargement of prenatal diagnostics and of living matter under patent possibilities are to be feared.

Reprogenética: avance técnico y avatares subjetivos / Reprogenetics: technical progress and subjective avatars

La especie humana es por esencia una extraordinaria torsión, única y singular. Allí radica algo de la peculiaridad de la condición humana. El desarrollo de las tecnologías reproductivas han cambiado el mundo tal como lo conocíamos. ¿Podemos hablar –siguiendo a Kuhn– de un cambio de paradigma? Eso habrá que verlo. Por el momento presentamos diferentes escenarios que ponen en interlocución el avance científico, el campo normativo y la dimensión subjetiva. Entre necesidad y azar el campo de la reprogenética nos confronta con interrogantes que atraviesan el devenir de la condición humana, mina las bases y hace estallar el modelo de familia tradicional dando lugar al amplio abanico de las nuevas conformaciones familiares. Siguiendo los desarrollos propuestos por Foucault en Historia de la sexualidad I, La voluntad de Saber se da entrada a un discurso que permite reflexionar en torno a la incidencia del poder en las prácticas cotidianas. Poner al deseo en discurso, implica analizar cuáles son los “mecanismos de poder para cuyo funcionamiento el discurso sobre el sexo ha llegado a ser esencial.” “Sexualidad” y “familia” serán entonces nuestros disparadores para pensar la articulación de la biopolítica en el discurrir de las narrativas sobre el cuerpo. Por último, un escenario cinematográfico será la ocasión ideal para desentrañar los aspectos oscuros y controvertidos del planteo eugenésico en las antípodas de la reprogenética...

The human being is an extraordinary torsion, essentially unique and singular. We might find there something of its particular value. The development of assisted reproductive technologies has changed the world as we knew it. Following Thomas Kuhn ideas, can we argue that we are under a "paradigm shift" in terms of this revolution? We´ll see… For instance we will present some specific scenarios in which the scientific breakthrough, the regulatory and legislative field, and the subjective dimension are interconnected. In-between chance and necessity, the concerns of reprogenetics faced us with huge question which cross the evolution of human condition, erode the foundations and crush into the traditional model of the "contemporary" family leading to a wide range of new family conformation. Following some ideas of Michel Foucault proposed in The History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge we will analyze how power affects daily practices. To put the desire into discourse suppose to analyze which are the mechanism of power in which the discourse on sex has become essential. "Sexuality" and "Family" will be our triggers to reflect on the impact of biopolitics in the narrative discourse over the body. Finally we have chosen a film to explore the dark and controversial aspects of the eugenics strategy opposed to reprogenetics approach

"A visitation of providence:" Public health and eugenic reform in the wake of the Halifax disaster.

The Halifax Explosion provided the opportunity for an "experiment in public health" that was meant not only to restore but also to improve the city and its population in the process. The restructuring that occurred during the restoration was influenced by pre-existing ideals and prejudices which were reflected in the goals of the newly formed committees in charge of the reconstruction. The primary emphasis on improvement as well as control was the result of existing regional concerns regarding the emigration of the province's most "desirable" stock, in the form of healthy, educated young men and women, to central Canada and the eastern United States. Public health reforms reflected the eugenic goal of improving the overall quality of the population through education, surveillance, and inspection, resorting finally to institutionalizing people who public health officials determined were genuinely deficient.

Sterilization and birth control in the shadow of eugenics: married, middle-class women in Alberta, 1930-1960s.

The history of eugenic sterilization connotes draconian images of coerced and involuntary procedures robbing men and women of their reproductive health. While eugenics programs often fit this characterization, there is another, smaller, and less obvious legacy of eugenics that arguably contributed to a more empowering image of reproductive health. Sexual sterilization surgeries as a form of contraception began to gather momentum alongside eugenics programs in the middle of the 20th century and experiences among prairie women serve as an illustrative example. Alberta maintained its eugenics program from 1929 to 1972 and engaged in thousands of eugenic sterilizations, but by the 1940s middle-class married women pressured their Albertan physicians to provide them with sterilization surgeries to control fertility, as a matter of choice. The multiple meanings and motivations behind this surgery introduced a moral quandary for physicians, which encourages medical historians to revisit the history of eugenics and its relationship to the contemporaneous birth control movement.

Eugenics in the community: gendered professions and eugenic sterilization in Alberta, 1928-1972.

Scholarship on Alberta's Sexual Sterilization Act (1928-1972) has focused on the high-level politics behind the legislation, its main administrative body, the Eugenics Board, and its legal legacy, overlooking the largely female-dominated professions that were responsible for operating the program outside of the provincial mental health institutions. This paper investigates the relationship between eugenics and the professions of teaching, public health nursing, and social work. It argues that the Canadian mental hygiene and eugenics movements, which were fundamentally connected, provided these professions with an opportunity to maintain and extend their professional authority.

Contraception or eugenics? Sterilization and "mental retardation" in the 1970s and 1980s.

Nonconsensual sterilization is usually seen as the by-product of a classist and racist society; disability is ignored. This article examines the 1973 sterilization of two young black girls from Alabama and other precedent-setting court cases involving the sterilization of "mentally retarded" white women to make disability more central to the historical analysis of sterilization. It analyzes the concept of mental retardation and the appeal of a surgical solution to birth control, assesses judicial deliberations over the "right to choose" contraceptive sterilization when the capacity to consent is in doubt, and reflects on the shadow of eugenics that hung over the sterilization debate in the 1970s and 1980s.

Public goods and procreation.

Procreation is the ultimate public goods problem. Each new child affects the welfare of many other people, and some (but not all) children produce uncompensated value that future people will enjoy. This essay addresses challenges that arise if we think of procreation and parenting as public goods. These include whether individual choices are likely to lead to a socially desirable outcome, and whether changes in laws, social norms, or access to genetic engineering and embryo selection might improve the aggregate outcome of our reproductive choices.

"Forced sterilisation": clarifying and challenging intuitions and models.

In the context of the current Senate Community Affairs Reference Committee Inquiry entitled "The Involuntary or Coerced Sterilisation of People with Disabilities in Australia" this column considers the history of judicial decisions and associated reports and articles concerning the issues raised by sterilisation and menstrual management for intellectually disabled women and girls in Australia. It is by no means an exhaustive coverage, but it critically analyses a number of concepts and arguments, including terminological questions, models of disability, conceptualisations of human and reproductive rights, definitions of last resort treatment, usage of the therapeutic/non-therapeutic distinction, ideas about eugenics, and the contested notion of best interests, among others. It is intended as a critical, conceptual contribution to the current debates concerning "forced sterilisation".