The black stork: eugenics and the death of "defective" babies in American medicine and motion pictures since 1915

1. The birth of a controversy. The public death of Baby Bollinger. Debates and investigations. The doctor and the parents. Haiselden and history. A word about words

2. Contexts to the conflict. before Baby Bollinger: Infanticide, eugenics, and euthanasia. U.S.A., 1915. Taking sides: Some rough images of the debate

3. Identifying the unfit: Biology and culture in the construction of hereditary disease. Heredity, environment, and the scope of eugenics: Scientific conceptions to 1915. Heredity, environment, and the scope of eugenics: Haiselden and mass cultural meanings. Constructing the socially defective crime, race, and class. Defects and desires: Eugenics, Aesthetics, and sex. Elite priorities and mass culture: Physical and mental defects. Degrees of difference: Normality or perfection? Opposing expansive concepts of hereditary defect: equal worth or entering wedge? Fitness and objectivity

4. Eliminating the unfit: Euthanasia and eugenics. From prevention to death. Killing or letting die, For whose benefit? Loving and loathing. Objective science and moral obligation

Who decides: The ironies of professional power

Doctors, families, and the state. Support for medical power. Opponents of medical decision making. Eugenics and gender politics within families and in society. Specialization and the limits of objectivity

Mass-media medicine and aesthetic censorship

Publicity, public health, and professional power. Medical movies and the rise of aesthetic censorship

Eugenics on film

The Black Stork

The movie, making and distributing The Black Stork

Medicine, media and memory

From Haiselden to Hitler: Infanticide, eugenics, and euthanasia, 1919-1945. Baby Doe, Doctor Death, and the Human Genome Project: Comparing Haiselden's America with the present.