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.
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 Japan's sterilization law was not repealed until 1996.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.
From 1880 to 1945, governments and scientists across the world:
This period set the stage for mid-century human rights movements—and for the modern disability rights struggle.
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.
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.
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.
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 laws became one of the strongest tools of eugenics.
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.
Sterilization almost always happened without true consent. Many survivors discovered the truth decades later.
Eugenics shaped immigration policy in the US, Canada, Australia, and across Europe.
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.
Eugenics merged with colonial ideologies, declaring colonized peoples intellectually inferior, "childlike," "primitive," or biologically "weak." This justified forced labor, sterilization programs, and medical experimentation.
Eugenics reached its most extreme violence under the Nazi regime.
Between 1939 and 1941, the Nazi state murdered over 70,000 disabled children and adults under the T4 euthanasia program, claiming it was "mercy killing" or "relieving burden."
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.
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.
Despite repression, disabled people and allies resisted.
Forms of resistance included:
Resistance is a critical part of this history—it shows that disabled people were never passive.
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:
This era is not "past." Its structures continue to shape disabled people's lives today.
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.