Legislative Seminar is one of the crucial points for ACB’s legislative agenda for the year. With members and advocates from all over the country with both interest and expertise in policy issues visiting our nation’s capitol, this is one of our greatest opportunities for not just Congressional education and discussion, but also information-sharing amongst ourselves.
It is said that ‘those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.’ ACB has always been a strong supporter of knowing where the blindness movement came from and works forward, looking to where it is going. In the spirit of that broad perspective, after the welcome, introductions, and follow up ACB’s 2006 imperatives, Sunday’s presentation and discussion for Legislative Seminar looks both backward at a terrible piece of history and forward to the very cutting edge of bio-technology. It is a reminder of why we must remain vigilant.
Museum senior historian, Dr. Patricia Heberer from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will be giving a presentation - Nazi Persecution of People with Disabilities: Murder of "the Unfit" at 2:45pm. From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to “cleanse” German society of threats to the nation's “health.” People with disabilities regarded as “unproductive” and “life unworthy of life” and poor people classified as “feebleminded” and “anti-social” were systematically sterilized.
Later, during the war, 200,000 institutionalized Germans were killed by gassing in “euthanasia” facilities and by lethal injection and starvation. Only in Nazi Germany was forced sterilization implemented on a mass scale and only there did it lay the groundwork for mass murder. The coercive practice occurred elsewhere, however, including the United States, where California and Virginia took the lead among states enacting and enforcing sterilization laws.
This compulsory sterilization of the "hereditarily ill" was enforced through the German legal system and involved physicians in the role of enforcers of sterilization policy. Four hundred thousand Germans were legally sterilized under this measure from 1934-1945. Dr. Heberer will discuss the acceleration of discriminatory policies, enforced by physicians and public health officials, against individuals living in institutional settings, to serve as a bridge to National Socialist euthanasia (T4) policy. This Nazi program served as a model and staff training ground for the genocide of Europe’s Jews.
This example from history shows how a government turned on its own people. Following her presentation will be a question and answer period followed by a short presentation and group discussion led by Anne Sommers, Policy Counsel and bio-ethics and disability advocate for the American Association of People with Disabilities. The discussion focuses on how some of these activities are still prevalent today and how we as individuals with disabilities must continue act as advocates and how critical it is speak out for the rights of people who are blind and visually impaired. That even today, this can still be a life-or-death matter.
Day Al-Mohamed
Director of Advocacy and Governmental Affairs
American Council of the Blind
1155 15th St. NW
Washington DC 20005
Tel. 202-467-5081
dalmohamed@acb.org