| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Frank Dikötter. Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics in China. New York: Columbia University Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 226. $27.50.

In early 1995, the People's Republic of China proposed a "Eugenics Law" aimed at discouraging reproduction by the physically or mentally impaired. Chinese leaders, who considered these "inferior births" a substantial fiscal burden on the society and state, seemed unprepared for the resulting uproar in the West. A change in title to the "Maternal and Infant Health Law" did not prevent denunciations by newspaper and journal editorialists or boycotts by a number of national genetics societies and many individual scientists of the International Congress of Genetics held in Beijing in August 1998. Because the law included provisions permitting doctors to sterilize individuals with (undefined) serious hereditary disorders, it was said to contravene the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that all adults have the right to found a family, and to violate basic norms governing the provision of genetic services, according to which no reproductive decision is right or wrong, and clinicians should be scrupulously neutral in their dealing with clients. 1

From the intensity of the reaction, it might seem that the principle of procreative liberty is long established in the West. However, as Frank Dikötter notes in his short but extensively researched account of the history of eugenics in China, the view that the larger society and state would be better off if certain kinds of people did not reproduce was common in the United States and Europe not just during the interwar period but into the 1950s, when on many conventional accounts of the history of eugenics, the movement was dead. Thus, sterilization rates in some Scandinavian countries reached their peak after World War II. . . .

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