Disabled people have historically lacked legal protection and often faced discrimination in healthcare, reproductive rights, education, and more despite being the largest minority group in the United States. One of the most common ways that American disability activists have advocated for their rights is by challenging discriminatory behavior or regulations in court and advocating for policy change in local, state, and federal governments. As a result, understanding the relationships between legislation and the judicial processes by which American judges approach disability discrimination is crucial to protecting and expanding the rights of disabled Americans. This study analyzes five American disability rights cases from the last fifty years as well as two foundational pieces of federal legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). I conducted this research as a member of the Embryo Project, where I wrote and peer-reviewed articles for the Embryo Project Encyclopedia, which is an online open-access resource for topics relating to reproduction, embryology, and development. In my articles, I summarize the litigation and holdings of each case with additional contextualization in science and society. The passage of the ADA represents a watershed moment after which the American judiciary observed the rights of the disabled as legislatively codified rather than only subject to interpretations of the Constitution. Since laws can be repealed far more easily than constitutional amendments, precedent from legislative interpretation is only as secure as the law on which it is based. Lawmakers must understand the need to craft legislation with reduced textual ambiguity to prevent undermining the original intent of the law. With the recent overturning of long-standing precedent and the composition of the Supreme Court as of 2023, disability rights are on fragile footing. Judicial behavior in response to disability legislation has historically narrowed the protections offered by federal statute and failed to bolster disability rights by refusing to base decisions on Constitutional protections.

Vasectomy is one of few widely available methods of contraception for people with male reproductive systems aside from condoms, abstinence, and the withdrawal method, and it is the only one of those options that can be permanent (Amory 2016). The procedure’s prominence has led me to investigate the history of vasectomy and particularly the evolution in vasectomy technique over time. Since its introduction in the late nineteenth century, the procedure has had a variety of impacts on many people across the world. In this research project, I have sought to analyze what the technical evolution of vasectomy reveals about the changing priorities of the medical systems that use it. In particular, I point to ways the eugenics movement’s attempts to control individual reproduction have led to both vasectomy’s efficacy and its restrictiveness.

Lewis Madison Terman was a researcher and university professor who studied educational psychology and advocated for eugenics in the United States during the early twentieth century. The US eugenics movement, which Terman supported, was a collection of scientific research and social programs that aimed to improve human populations through control over human reproduction. One area many eugenicists studied was human intelligence as a means of determining how “desirable” a person may be. During the 1910s, while working at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, Terman helped devise the Stanford-Binet scale for intelligence testing. As of 2024, the Stanford-Binet test is one of the main methods for providing individual intelligence quotient, or IQ, scores. In addition to the Stanford-Binet scale, Terman promoted the idea that individuals had fixed and inherited capacities for intelligence. Through both his development of a widely used method for measuring human intelligence and his promotion of the idea of intelligence as hereditary, Terman supported widespread social efforts to control human reproduction in the US during the twentieth century.

In 1924, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, aka JBS Haldane, published Daedalus; or Science and The Future, hereafter Daedalus, which was a written version of a lecture that he gave in 1923. In his book, Haldane offers his personal predictions about what science will be able to achieve by the year 2073. He proposes that scientists will be able to perform ectogenesis, which he defines as the gestation of an organism in an artificial environment. He argues that the development of ectogenesis will help improve the human species by facilitating the selective breeding of individuals with desirable traits. Haldane’s vision of ectogenesis in Daedalus foreshadowed in vitro fertilization, or IVF, an assisted-reproductive technology in which scientists fertilize an egg in a laboratory dish, then implant the resulting embryo into a woman’s uterus where it then develops into a fetus. As of 2025, physicians deliver over 500,000 infants per year who were conceived using assisted-reproductive technologies such as IVF. Haldane’s concept of ectogenesis as he described it in Daedalus inspired both supportive and critical responses among readers and has shaped discussions about reproductive technologies down to the present day.

In 1960, the US-based pharmaceutical lab G.D. Searle and Company, or Searle, launched Enovid, one of the first oral birth control pills, following approval by the US Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. Prior to Enovid, there were no oral birth control options for women. Women were reliant on male condoms, homemade concoctions, and other contraceptive methods as barriers to provide them with protection against pregnancy. Women’s rights activists like Margaret Sanger aimed to address that gap by supporting the creation a birth control pill. Sanger collaborated with researchers to formulate a hormonal pill that gives women the ability to protect themselves against getting pregnant. Although some steps in the path to creating the pill were unethical by today’s standards, they did result in the creation of an oral birth control pill. Enovid offered a new method of family planning that gave women the ability to control pregnancy and served as a precursor to additional birth control pills, which over 150 million women use worldwide annually.

In 1933, an act of the North Carolina legislature created the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, or EBNC, to oversee the practice of sterilization, which is the removal of an individual’s ability to reproduce, in the state. Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the US eugenics movement involved both state and non-governmental entities attempting to improve human populations through selective breeding, which included sterilization of those labeled as genetically inferior. In North Carolina, the EBNC headed the state government’s eugenics program and oversaw decisions related to the sterilization of poor and disabled people. By the time of the dissolution of the EBNC in the late 1970s, an estimated 7,600 people had undergone forced sterilization under the board’s approval. Some of them later received funds in the 2010s from the state government in one of the first programs to provide compensation to involuntarily sterilized individuals. The EBNC presided over the sterilizations of thousands of people in North Carolina, prompting one of the first attempts at eugenics reparations in the US.

Paul Bowman Popenoe was a researcher, writer, and social advocate who studied breeding in the United States during the twentieth century, first in plants and then in humans. Popenoe advocated for eugenic policies in California and beyond in the early twentieth century, and he introduced and promoted marriage counseling as a professional service in the US during the mid-twentieth century. The US eugenics movement, in which Popenoe participated, was a scientific and political project in which eugenicists attempted to improve human populations through selective breeding. Participants of the movement often advocated for the implementation of compulsory sterilization laws for certain “undesirable” populations. Though largely disavowed as of 2026, eugenics persisted well into the twentieth century. Through dozens of publications and a lifetime of public advocacy, Popenoe supported policies that led to the forced sterilization of thousands of people in California and popularized counseling as an intervention into people’s marriages and reproductive choices.