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Homework answers / question archive / One reflection will be based on the film "The Sterilization of Leilani Muir" Each journal must be at least 500 words (not including title page and references) and follow APA formatting guidelines
One reflection will be based on the film "The Sterilization of Leilani Muir"
Each journal must be at least 500 words (not including title page and references) and follow APA formatting guidelines.
For each reflection, you will first introduce the topic of the reflection in a short paragraph. The rest of your writing will focus on your own personal thoughts and feelings regarding what you watched or read. You must do this in a way that demonstrates your understanding of the topic.
Please note that reflections are not summaries, so please do not re-tell the whole story!
What is Reflective Writing?
Reflective writing is a form of personal response. Reflective writing can be rather superficial and largely descriptive, but it can also be much more profound, involving a deeper level of questioning. Your goal is to move beyond mere descriptive writing in the journals for this course.
In the context of this course your reflective journals have a purpose, since you will be reflecting on a film and your learning in the course, both of which deal with ideas that may challenge your moral and political views. As you come to grips with potentially new ideas, I am asking you to work through and reexamine your existing knowledge base, your feelings, and how you might be responding to the content.
The questions below are not required, but may provide you with some ideas for your writing.
Useful questions for prompting reflective writing:
First, we start with pure description and that may help set the context for the more profound thoughts to follow.
Now for the more profound thoughts!
Outline
Title: The Sterilization of Leilani Muir Reflection
The Sterilization of Leilani Muir Reflection
The Sterilization of Leilani Muir features the life story of Leilani, who had been a victim of Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act. Despite being mentally capable of independently running her life, Leilani was sterilized after the Alberta Eugenics Board concluded that she was a moron and incapable of producing genes that would benefit society. Leilani was compensated CAD 750,000 in 1995 after winning a case for unlawful sterilization against the Alberta Government (Whiting, 1996). While there are solid arguments supporting eugenics and practices like sterilization, the film brings to light the tragedy of shortsightedness among intellectuals and decision-makers.
As I was watching the film, I could not help but think of my readings on eugenics. Most importantly, I would relate some of the concepts in eugenics to Darwin’s survival for the fittest theory. Often, I would ask who would not want to make the human species stronger and healthier? However, I would then question the viability of this concept, given that there seem to be newer issues that regularly outsmart humans, and we end up losing millions before finding a solution. COVID-19 is an example whereby scientists still had a hard time developing a vaccine despite extensive studies on the coronavirus. As a result, at least 4.5 million people have died from the virus across the world. Further, the novel coronavirus has been mutating into stronger variants like the Delta, forcing scientists to go back to the drawing board. Although the virus primarily affected the elderly and those with underlying health issues, there is no doubt that each of the victims had some attributes that might have been stronger than the survivors.
Back to the film, I could not help but question the judgment of the doctors and scientists in the Alberta Eugenics Board when they were sterilizing Leilani. From the film’s account, Leilani had a troubled childhood where her mother regularly tortured her before being sent to the Michener Center. One thing that came to mind was that perhaps her perceived mental illness resulted from these childhood experiences. Unlike normal households, she might not have been empowered enough to think like other normal children. This thought is vindicated because Leilani managed to find a job by the age of 21 after spending a decade at the Michener Center, a facility dedicated to assisting individuals with mental defectives. Thus, the Alberta Eugenics Board scientists had overlooked science and instead made personal judgments that prevented Leilani from having children.
Accordingly, one lesson I took from the film was critically reviewing the feasibility of eugenics. While there is a need to make humanity stronger and healthier, I believe human beings are too complex to measure the strength of a gene based on physical or mental capabilities. We have seen physically or mentally disabled people making tremendous contributions to humanity. For instance, Stephen Hawkins was physically weak but paralyzed by a motor neuron disease. However, Hawkins made tremendous contributions to cosmology and physics. If individuals like Hawkins were to be sterilized, we would lose genes from a mentally strong yet physically weak individual. As seen from Leilani’s case, one could be sterilized even before understanding their true potential. Perhaps an even more recent case is Richard Branson, who says he had dyslexia from a young age yet built a multi-billion business empire (Ruh, 2016). Thus, the film was an eye-opener on some of the weaknesses of those we perceive as intellectuals, and hopefully, more people can watch it.
