Eugenics Still Present in the U.S. Today

Left to right: Dr. Josef Mengele, Rudolf Höss, Josef Kramer, and an unidentified officer. Photo from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum #34755

Health Impact News Editor Comments

While this will be seen as a very controversial article, since emotions run high on both sides of the abortion debate, we need to look at the broader picture here of how a philosophy of eugenics has been used in modern history to control population, beginning with Nazi Germany and continuing until today. Nazi Germany gave the term “eugenics” a bad connotation, so the term is seldom used today. Yet, the concepts and results of eugenics are still n place today, and very well documented.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, for example, has publicly stated that one goal of their vaccination agenda is population control. Much of their work is happening today in poorer African countries, where there is much resistance to government mandated vaccines. The New American published a story this week, for example, documenting opposition in African countries for a new contraception vaccine being distributed by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. (See: Gates Foundation Pushing Dangerous Contraceptives on Black Populations.) We have documented many stories here at Health Impact News of the Gates Foundation’s actions around the world.

So no matter which side of the abortion debate you happen to be on, everyone should be equally concerned about the effects of eugenics in the hands of government forcing people to comply to medical procedures for the sake of “population control.” Haven’t we learned our lesson from Nazi Germany?

“It Did Happen Here,” And It’s Still Happening

by Michael Egnor
Evolution News and Views

“The American public is taxed, heavily taxed, to maintain an increasing race of morons…”

That’s a quote from Margaret Sanger, eugenicist, architect of the birth control movement in the United States, and founder of Planned Parenthood.

Eugenics was a keystone of the progressive movement in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, and was closely linked to the birth control movement and to Planned Parenthood (the organization was originally named the Birth Control League).

Eugenics is a scientific program first broached by Charles Darwin in the Descent of Man, named and pioneered by his cousin Francis Galton, and promulgated by Darwinists now for a century and a half. It is a clear corollary derived from the theory of natural selection. If man arose by a violent struggle for existence, man’s kindness to the weak undermined natural selection and endangered the biological health of our race. The “scientific” solution to the crisis was the culling of the unfit, mostly through involuntary sterilization.

Eugenics, touted as “consensus” progressive science, was the global warming of the early 20th century. Global warming is only the latest crisis for which the “scientific solution” is the culling of mankind.

Daniel Flynn at Human Events has a superb essay about one state coming to grips with its progressive-Darwinian eugenic past, with my commentary:

It Did Happen Here

Before Nazi Germany embraced eugenics, most U.S. states did.

One state is in the midst of a debate over the proper atonement for its past sins. A second North Carolina governor has apologized to victims of its nearly half-century sterilization campaign. Governor Bev Perdue created a task force earlier this year charged with recommending compensation for those sterilized by the state’s program that began in 1929 and effectively ended in 1974. A final report is expected by February 1, 2012. But thus far, just 48 surviving victims have been identified.

North Carolina was neither the first nor the most enthusiastic pursuer of genetic purity. Indiana sterilized first and California sterilized more. But one county within the Tar Heel state has drawn belated media interest as perhaps the most zealous practitioner of eugenics in the United States.

“I suppose,” Mecklenburg County welfare director Wallace Kuralt once explained, “no comparable population in the world has ever received more eugenic sterilizations.” It was no idle boast. Of the 430 Mecklenburg County sterilization cases examined by the Charlotte Observer, the state eugenics board rejected just six. Tellingly, African Americans, who made up just a quarter of the county’s population, constituted four-fifths of Kuralt’s sterilization cases.

The birth control/abortion movement’s emphasis on preventing the birth of African American children continues apace. Black children are aborted at a rate about three times that of white children. In the United States, since 1973, roughly 13 million black children have been aborted. Seventy-eight percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are in minority communities.

The newspaper recounted that Kuralt, now famous for being the father of the late CBS newsman Charles Kuralt, was famous among contemporaries as being “compassionate” a “visionary,” and a “champion of women and the poor.” But the people who today regard themselves as compassionate, visionaries, and champions of women and the poor just can’t imagine their intellectual antecedents performing such injustices.

“He was a hero with women’s reproductive rights,” Dr. John Johnston, a respected North Carolina pediatrician, told the Charlotte Observer. “I would just be shocked if Wallace Kuralt were playing the game of ‘improve the stock.'”

“Reproductive rights” has long been a euphemism for suppressing reproduction of people deemed not “right.” It has a long eugenic history.

If it’s shocking now that an advocate of so-called reproductive rights also practiced reproductive restrictions, it was anything but in the heyday of American eugenics. In fact, legalizing abortion was seen by its advocates as an integral part of a larger eugenics crusade, which sterilized more than 60,000 Americans.

Abortions today are even more eugenic than they were in the past: people deemed “undesirable” — minority and handicapped children — are aborted at very high rates compared with healthy white children. Of course this is all ostensibly voluntary on the part of the mother. In fact, eugenicists such as those at Planned Parenthood have used Fredrick Osborn’s strategy of “voluntary unconscious selection” for many years. Note the term “selection” — Darwinism has always been key to the eugenic philosophy.

Fredrick Osborn was a leading eugenicist of the 1950s who coined the term “Every Child a Wanted Child.” He understood that Nazi eugenics had stained the reputation of eugenicists everywhere, and he proposed a public relations campaign to make people want to improve their eugenic stock. “Every Child a Wanted Child” was adopted by Planned Parenthood, and is prominently featured by other eugenic organizations such as the United Nations Population Fund.

“The American public is taxed, heavily taxed, to maintain an increasing race of morons, which threatens the very foundations of our civilization,” Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger told Vassar College’s Institute of Euthenics in 1926. The birth-control crusader proposed a government pension to entice genetically inferior stock to undergo sterilization. “There is only one reply to a request for a higher birth rate among the intelligent, and that is to ask the government to first take off the burdens of the insane and feebleminded from your backs. Sterilization for these is the remedy.”

Sanger was hardly alone among progressives in advocating genetic cleansing. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Bernard Shaw, Emma Goldman, and other leftist icons of the past century vigorously supported eugenics. Edward Bellamy dreamed of it in Looking Backward and John Humphrey Noyes’s Bible Communists practiced it at Oneida.

Eugenics was a central theme in 20th-century Progressivism.

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives,” the Supreme Court’s great liberal Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously ruled in 1927’s Buck v. Bell. “It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

So unflinching was the age’s faith in the state that it not only believed that it should decide who procreates, but that it could predict who among the unborn would not contribute to society.

Like Wallace Kuralt, Holmes, Du Bois, Goldman, and company were regarded as champions of women and the poor, too. Those unfortunate moms and paupers strapped down to hospital gurneys might disagree.

Eugenics, like prohibition, was a paternalistic progressive-era reform in which post-progressive-era progressives deny their forbears’ paternity. Eugenics pitted advanced science versus the reactionary church, interventionism versus laissez faire, and faith in the state versus skepticism of concentrated power. Where God had erred man would fix. Never do humans act so inhumanely as when they attempt to perfect humanity.

“He was very, very, very smart,” recalls one North Carolina social worker of Wallace Kuralt. “He was a forward-thinking person for that time.” But Kuralt appears very backward to our time. It makes one wonder the ways in which today’s progressives will appear regressive to posterity.

The dynamics of the fight over eugenics in the early 20th century is fascinating. The primary opposition to eugenics came from the Catholic Church, conservative Protestants and Jews, and some on the anti-hereditarian Left, who viewed it as an affront to human dignity and a violation of basic human rights. They were of course ridiculed for being “anti-science” and for outmoded religious views.

But the eugenicists have won, to an extent even they could not have dreamed. The state no longer needs to use its resources to cull the unfit. We now breed ourselves — “Every Child a Wanted Child”– aborting our handicapped children at genocidal rates and aborting our black and Hispanic children at rates of which Sanger and her fellow eugenicists could only have dreamed.

The Darwinian view of the human race as domesticated animals in need of breeding is well entrenched in the halls of science and government, and in the hearts and minds of too many ordinary Americans. “Voluntary unconscious selection” has been a brilliant marketing strategy by ideologues enamored of the Darwinian view of man.

The fight against eugenic abortion and birth control continues, led by those who insist emphatically that these practices are a horrendous affront to human dignity and are attacks on innocent human life.

Defenders of human exceptionalism and human dignity were right a century ago, and they’re right today.

Read the Full Article Here: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/10/it_did_happen_h078231.html