A representative of Australia’s Stolen Generations’ Alliance of Aborigines has told a Senate committee that some Aboriginal children were used for medical experimentation. The projects included testing a leprosy medicine on children who had been taken from their parents to be brought up in the white community.
The accusations that Aboriginal children were used in medical experiments is not far fetched. For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”
In the 1970s, thousands of Aboriginal children were taken from their families to be brought up by white foster parents or in children’s homes. At the time, the policy was seen as helping the integration of Aborigines into Australia’s dominant culture. The removals occurred in the period between approximately 1869 and 1969, although, in some places, children were still being taken in the 1970s.
The extent of the removal of children, and the reasoning behind their removal are contested. Documentary evidence of a range of rationales exists in newspaper reports, reports to and appearances before parliamentary committees. Motivations evident include child protection, beliefs that given their catastrophic population decline post white contact that Aboriginal people would “die out”, fears of miscegenation and a desire to maintain Caucasian racial purity. Indigenous Australians in most jurisdictions were “protected”, effectively being wards of the State.
Something like this can tend to remind us of what happened to American Indian children. In all more than 100,000 American Indian children attended 500 boarding schools that were established in the late 1800′s through the 1970′s. These schools were established far away from reservations so that students would have no contact with their families and friends. Parents were discouraged from visiting and, in most cases, students were not allowed to go home during the summer. Indian students were told that Indian people who retained their culture were stupid, dirty, and backwards. Those who most quickly assimilated were called “good Indians.” Those who didn’t were called “bad” Indians.
Now comes an allegation that Aboriginal children were used in medical experiments.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd officially apologised in parliament to the Aboriginal community for the policies of his predecessors.
The accusations that Aboriginal children were used in medical experiments is not far fetched. For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all.
The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”
Originally posted April 2008
agreed…totally