Eugenics and Institutionalization (1880–1945)

All disabled people have the right to life (CRPD Article 10), freedom from torture and cruel treatment (Article 15), and freedom from exploitation, violence, and abuse (Article 16). Between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, eugenics and institutionalization became dominant global systems for controlling, segregating, and erasing disabled people. Understanding this history is essential because its effects remain deeply embedded in modern law, medicine, immigration policy, and public attitudes. This page centers disabled people’s expertise and is informed by disabled-led organizing globally.

Why This Matters

This era shaped modern disability systems in ways we still live with: special education classifications, IQ testing, immigration disability exclusions, guardianship laws, psychiatric commitment, group home models, and public attitudes about disabled people as “burdens.” Eugenic sterilization continued into the 2010s in some US states. Japan’s sterilization law was not repealed until 1996. Understanding this history helps us understand modern disability discrimination, medical violence, and the fight for autonomy.

Quick Overview

From 1880 to 1945, governments and scientists across the world:

Labeled disabled people as “unfit,” “defective,” or “degenerate”
Expanded institutions, asylums, and “training schools”
Passed sterilization, marriage restriction, and immigration laws
Used disability to justify racism, xenophobia, and colonial rule
Embraced eugenics as a scientific and moral ideology
Increased surveillance, classification, and medical control

This period set the stage for mid-century human rights movements—and for the modern disability rights struggle.

What Eugenics Claimed to Be

Eugenics presented itself as a “scientific movement” to improve the population. Its tools included marriage bans, segregation, institutionalization, sterilization, immigration restrictions, classification systems, and IQ testing with “mental age” categories.

Eugenicists argued they were protecting the public from “burden,” “degeneration,” and “feeble-mindedness.” In reality, these policies targeted disabled people, poor and working-class families, immigrants, Indigenous communities, Black and Brown people, women labeled “promiscuous” or “unruly,” and anyone considered socially undesirable.

This was social control—not science.

The Growth of Institutions

Between 1880 and 1930, many countries dramatically expanded asylums, “training schools” for disabled children, psychiatric hospitals, epileptic colonies, poorhouses and workhouses, and “feeble-minded” institutions.

Why Institutions Expanded

Institutions grew because of rising industrialization and urban poverty, fear of “degeneracy,” pressure on families lacking support, racial and class anxieties, growth of the medical profession, and eugenic ideology promoting segregation.

What Institutions Were Like

Conditions varied, but common patterns included overcrowding and understaffing, forced labor, physical and chemical restraints, abuse and neglect, lack of education or skill development, permanent confinement, and no legal rights or autonomy.

Many institutions relied on unpaid labor by residents—laundry, farm work, cleaning—to run their own operations.

Sterilization as State Policy

Sterilization laws became one of the strongest tools of eugenics.

Countries That Passed Sterilization Laws (1900–1940s)

United States (over 30 states)
Canada
Germany
Sweden
Switzerland
Norway
Denmark
Japan
Estonia
Several Latin American countries considered or attempted programs

The United States sterilized more than 60,000 people under state laws—mostly disabled, poor, or institutionalized. California alone sterilized over 20,000, disproportionately targeting Mexican and Mexican-American women.

Who Was Sterilized

People labeled “feeble-minded,” “insane,” or “epileptic”
Deaf, blind, and physically disabled people
Poor women and girls
Indigenous women
Black women and girls in the South
Immigrants and children of immigrants

Sterilization almost always happened without true consent. Many survivors discovered the truth decades later.

Immigration, Race, and Eugenics

Eugenics shaped immigration policy in the US, Canada, Australia, and across Europe.

Common Justifications for Exclusion

“Low intelligence” or “mental defect”
“Likely to become a public charge”
“Unfit stock”
“Racial degeneration”

Disabled immigrants were regularly excluded at ports like Ellis Island. Racialized groups—including Chinese, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Jews—were also targeted using pseudo-scientific disability language.

Colonization

Eugenics merged with colonial ideologies, declaring colonized peoples intellectually inferior, “childlike,” “primitive,” or biologically “weak.” This justified forced labor, sterilization programs, and medical experimentation.

Nazi Germany and Aktion T4

Eugenics reached its most extreme violence under the Nazi regime.

What Happened

Between 1940 and 1941, the Nazi state murdered over 70,000 disabled children and adults (70,273 by the program’s own records) under the centralized T4 “euthanasia” program, claiming it was “mercy killing” or “relieving burden.” Decentralized killings continued covertly until 1945; historians estimate around 250,000 disabled people were murdered in total (USHMM).

Methods included gas chambers, lethal injection, starvation, and medical neglect. Doctors and nurses were directly involved. Institutionalized people were used as testing subjects for killing technologies later used in concentration camps.

Why This Matters Globally

German eugenics was inspired by US sterilization statutes and racial laws. After World War II, many countries quietly kept their own sterilization programs. Survivors of T4 and their families often received no recognition for decades.

Resistance: Disabled People, Families, Communities

Despite repression, disabled people and allies resisted.

Forms of resistance included:

Families hiding children from institutions
Disabled people escaping or exposing abuses
Deaf communities protecting sign languages
Blind communities building independent education networks
Lawyers contesting sterilization cases
Journalists documenting asylum conditions
Clergy and local leaders speaking against killings in Germany

Resistance is a critical part of this history—it shows that disabled people were never passive.

Global Afterlives of Eugenics (Post-1945)

Even after Nazi atrocities were exposed, many countries continued sterilization programs into the 1970s–2000s, expanded psychiatric institutions, maintained marriage bans for disabled people, refused to deinstitutionalize, and allowed coercive medical practices.

Examples:

Sweden sterilized thousands into the late 1970s
Japan’s sterilization law was not repealed until 1996
Canada and US residential schools combined eugenics and colonialism
Some US states performed coerced sterilizations into the 2010s

This era is not “past.” Its structures continue to shape disabled people’s lives today.

Sources and Further Reading

Foundational Disability Histories

Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States
Douglas C. Baynton, Defectives in the Land
Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws
Liat Ben-Moshe, Decarcerating Disability

Eugenics and Segregation

Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation
Paul Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, multiple works on bodily difference
Articles from the American Journal of Public Health on sterilization history

Global and Colonial Contexts

Chris Bell (ed.), Blackness and Disability
Karen Soldatic, Globalizing Inequality
Disability and colonial archives across Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Survivor Testimony

T4 survivor testimonies (German Federal Archives)
Sterilization survivors’ accounts from California, Alberta, and Japan

This page centers disabled people’s expertise and is informed by disabled-led organizing globally. For questions or to suggest additions, see How to Contribute.

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