Neo-Eugenics [1]: The Quinacrine Sterilisation of Women in India

Abstract

There can be little doubt that the last two hundred years have seen advances in health which have seldom before been witnessed in human history. These include unparalleled advances in the expectation of life at birth, remarkable decline in infant and child mortality, a marked decrease in the birth rate and so on. The large majority of health professionals, as indeed social scientists and the lay public, assume that these improvements in human health occurred due to advances in medical technology. Thus it is that planners frequently measure advances in health provision by indices such as the number of doctors and hospital beds per thousand population. In other words, there is an ahistorical, unproblematised consensus, seldom if ever scrutinised, that science and technology in medicine offer a veritable cornucopia to humankind.