In this second of a series of columns on the Supreme Court’s decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, SMU Dedman School of Law professor Joanna L. Grossman and Stanford Law professor Lawrence M. Friedman describe how abortion law arose alongside the eugenics movement. As Professor Grossman and Friedman explain, early abortion restrictions were, in part, an effort to encourage the “right” people to have babies (positive eugenics), used in conjunction with negative eugenics, which involved forced sterilization of people deemed “unfit.”
Joanna L. Grossman, SMU Dedman School of Law professor, and Lawrence M. Friedman, a Stanford Law professor, comment on a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court last month upholding a provision of Illinois law that prescribed the disposition of fetal remains. Grossman and Friedman focus their discussion on Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion and his discussion of eugenics, which they argue is inapt and a distorted telling of history.
