Yes, Helen Keller openly supported eugenics during a significant period of her life. In 1915, she publicly endorsed a physician’s decision to let a disabled infant die, wrote in favor of euthanasia for severely disabled newborns, and argued for birth control as a tool to reduce what she called the “awful tide of misery” among the poor. Her views aligned with a broad eugenics movement that cut across political lines in early 20th-century America, embraced by both progressives and conservatives.
The 1915 Bollinger Case
The most concrete evidence of Keller’s eugenics support comes from a highly publicized case in 1915. A baby born with severe physical disabilities in Chicago was allowed to die after his physician, Dr. Harry Haiselden, refused to operate on him. The case became a national flashpoint, with prominent figures weighing in on both sides. Social reformer Jane Addams opposed the doctor’s decision, arguing that “defectives” had made great contributions to the world. She even included Keller herself on an “honor roll of the world’s great defectives,” alongside poet John Milton.
Keller sided with the doctor. Writing in the New Republic and the socialist New York Call, she defended Haiselden’s actions against what she called “cowardly sentimentalism.” She argued that the baby’s life was “not worth while” and that many similar “hopeless death-in-life” cases existed. She went further, proposing that a jury of physicians should have the authority to decide the fate of any “idiot malformed baby.” In a statement reprinted in the Pittsburgh Press on November 28, 1915, she wrote: “A human life is sacred only when it may be of some use to itself and the world. The world is already flooded with unhappy, unhealthy, mentally unsound people who should never have been born.”
She also framed the baby’s death as a catalyst for necessary public conversation, writing that the case “has brought us face to face with the many questions of eugenics and control of the birth rate, questions we have been side-stepping because we are afraid of them.”
How She Distinguished Her Own Disabilities
One of the most striking aspects of Keller’s position is the apparent contradiction: a woman who was both deaf and blind advocating that some disabled lives were not worth living. Keller resolved this tension by drawing a sharp line between physical disabilities like her own and what she termed “mental deficiency.” She described the Bollinger baby as a “poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature,” emphasizing the absence of “possibilities of happiness, intelligence, and power” as the qualities that give life its value. In her framing, a person who was blind or deaf but intellectually capable had a life worth living; a person she judged to be mentally impaired did not. She wrote bluntly that “a mental defective is almost sure to be a potential criminal.”
This distinction allowed her to advocate for the elimination of certain disabled lives while seeing her own as fundamentally different. Modern disability scholars view this as a reflection of the era’s hierarchy of disability, where physical impairments were considered more acceptable than intellectual or developmental ones.
The Political Context of Her Views
Keller’s eugenics stance was deeply intertwined with her radical politics. She joined the Socialist Party of America in 1909 and became an advocate for women’s suffrage, a defender of the Industrial Workers of the World, and a supporter of birth control. When she endorsed birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, she did so not in terms of bodily autonomy but as a tool for the poor to protect themselves: “Only by taking the responsibility of birth control into their own hands can they roll back the awful tide of misery that is sweeping over them and their children.”
This was not unusual for the time. Eugenics in the early 1900s was not a fringe ideology but a mainstream position held by people across the political spectrum. Progressives, socialists, and conservatives alike endorsed policies ranging from forced sterilization to restrictions on immigration, all under the banner of improving the human population. Keller’s views placed her squarely within this consensus rather than on its margins. As historian Kim Nielsen has documented, her position “accorded with the eugenic thought of both radicals and conservatives of her era.”
She Changed Her Position by the Late 1930s
Keller did not hold these views for her entire life. By 1938, she had publicly reversed course. When a case arose involving a blind baby, Keller argued for the child’s life, declaring that the baby still had a chance to have “vision more precious than sight.” She said the truly disabled were those who had “eyes of ignorance.” This shift came as the eugenics movement itself was losing credibility, particularly as Nazi Germany’s sterilization and extermination programs revealed the ideology’s most extreme consequences.
The evolution matters, but so does the original record. For roughly two decades, Keller actively promoted the idea that certain disabled lives could be ended at birth by medical authority. She did so in widely read publications, using her own fame and moral standing to lend weight to the argument. Disability scholars today point to the gap between how Keller is popularly remembered, as an inspirational figure who triumphed over disability, and the full complexity of her political life. The sanitized version of her story, focused almost entirely on childhood breakthroughs with her teacher Anne Sullivan, leaves out the adult Keller who held views that would directly threaten people with disabilities like herself.