CW: Naizism, Eugenics, & Death
Eugenics is easy to recognize when it is historical. It becomes more difficult to recognize when the language changes.
Most people think of eugenics as an antiquated belief, something relegated to museums and history books. Looking back, the moral lines can appear impossibly bright. We know the language and we know the consequences, which makes it easy to believe we would recognize those ideas if we encountered them again. History becomes more complicated when what survives is less obvious.
In the UK, a recent Channel 4 documentary, The Experiment, focuses on that idea. Members of the public enter what they think is a progressive model of supported living for disabled people, unaware that its ideas come from Nazi-era approaches to disability. The premise is deliberately provocative, but the question underneath it reaches much further than television. How much would we recognize if the language changed?
Today, conversations about disabled people are more likely to revolve around the cost of care, dependency, capacity for work, pressure on public programs, and decisions about limited resources. These are real questions. Providing care and support costs money, and acknowledging that is fine. What becomes more uncomfortable is the point where the cost of supporting someone begins, however subtly, to shape how that person’s life is valued.
Aktion T4 did not emerge from nowhere. Before the killings came ideas about which lives were valuable, what made somebody useful, and how disability should be understood in relation to productivity and dependency.
There is an enormous distance between that history and the questions disabled people face today. Britain is not Nazi Germany. Canada is not Nazi Germany. Assisted dying is not Aktion T4. Those distinctions matter, particularly when discussing a history in which disabled people were murdered.
But history cannot protect us very well if its lessons only become relevant once another society reaches the same endpoint. What came earlier matters too, including the quieter assumptions societies make about dependency, productivity, and which lives are considered worth supporting.
Canada’s medical assistance in dying system has brought some of those questions into particularly difficult territory. Under Track 2, some people with serious and incurable medical conditions can qualify even when their natural deaths are not reasonably foreseeable. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has called for Track 2 to be repealed.
The circumstances surrounding a choice matter. Someone with accessible housing, adequate personal assistance, reliable health care, and financial security makes that choice in a very different landscape from someone whose essential support is uncertain. Recognizing that difference does not mean denying anyone agency. It means acknowledging that inequality does not disappear simply because a decision is described as a choice.
That question extends well beyond assisted dying. So much of disabled life can already be translated into dollars, hours of care, eligibility requirements, and judgments about what is considered necessary. Resources are not unlimited, and support has to be funded. But it is one thing to ask what someone needs and what that support will cost. It is another to start wondering if the person has become too costly to support.
Dependency is part of this too. Disabled people are often described as dependent. In reality, everyone relies on healthcare, infrastructure, other people, and systems that make an ordinary life possible.
Much of that dependence fades into the background because society has already accommodated it. Disability makes certain kinds of dependency more visible. What is visible is easier to quantify, assess, and ration.
A culture can reject eugenics while still placing enormous cultural value on productivity. It can believe in equality while repeatedly asking disabled people to justify their needs. Perhaps this is where the history becomes most uncomfortable. Not because the past has returned, but because some of the rhetoric surrounding usefulness, dependency, and human worth never disappeared.
Recognizing eugenics once somebody calls it eugenics is relatively easy. The harder question is whether an antiquated idea about whose life is worth supporting would still be recognizable after the language around it changed.
Sources:
“Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) Law.” Government of Canada, Department of Justice, https://justice.canada.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/bk-di.html.
Concluding Observations on the Combined Second and Third Periodic Reports of Canada. United Nations, 2025, https://docstore.ohchr.org/SelfServices/FilesHandler.ashx?enc=D%2Bz3%2FxkdXDUICs0n3MpPeASyn91Pjy9MACIou2OCso0O6eZ9sq5pux3jc%2FAkzM6V3bdXdr%2B1hL57wtkwQ9zwqw%3D%3D.
“Euthanasia Program and Aktion T4.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program.
Health Canada. Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, 2024. Government of Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-medical-assistance-dying-2024.html.
Meltzer, Milton. Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust. Harper & Row, 1976.
Morris, Lauren. “The Experiment.” The Independent, 20 Oct. 2026, https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/tv/news/channel-4-nazi-the-experiment-b3070016.html.
Peterson, Andrew, Jason Karlawish, and Emily Largent. “Supported Decision Making With People at the Margins of Autonomy.” The American Journal of Bioethics, vol. 21, no. 11, 2021, pp. 4–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1863507.
Remington, Alexander M. “‘Life Unworthy of Life’: Aktion T4, the First Nazi Genocide.” Student Publications, no. 1063, 2023, https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/1063.