Posted on 10/10/2014 5:28:29 AM PDT by wagglebee
It's hard to shake the feeling that eugenics can make a comeback. Or that it never really left us.
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a recent interview to Elle, she let slip a statement that almost sounded like something a 1920s-style eugenicist would say. Talking about the rise of state-level restrictions on abortion, the liberal justice said, "It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people."
And remember, a few years ago, Ginsburg had to deny that she believed eugenic thought influenced the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. She had noted a prevailing concern about population growth at the time of the decision, "particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of."
That Ginsburg had to disavow the plain meaning of her earlier words is a good sign that people are repulsed by eugenics of a certain type. We simply would not tolerate a modern Supreme Court justice with the cut of Wendell Holmes, who wrote in 1927's Buck v. Bell: "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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Southern states have recently compensated victims of their own Holmes-inspired sterilization laws. So much history, gladly forgotten. Right? Well, not necessarily.
Eugenics has hung around. In response to Ginsburg's quotes, people have rediscovered Ron Weddington, co-counsel in Roe and a man who advised Bill Clinton to make abortifacients universally available with these words: "You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country. It's what we all know is true, but we only whisper it."
The idea that it will be criminals and the unhealthy who are aborted or birth-controlled out of existence has persisted in less explicitly racial terms for some time. Economists Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner made a case in the wildly popular Freakonomics that the ever-lowering crime rate their big-city audience was experiencing was due to legalized abortion. It wasn't a eugenic argument for abortion, just a convenient eugenic side effect. Indeed, 41 percent of all pregnancies in New York City ended in abortion in 2010, although the rate was lower in Manhattan than in the Bronx, where certain "populations" are more concentrated. Somewhere in hell, Holmes smiles.
In the case of babies with Down syndrome, we are already eugenicists. In the late '90s in Europe, 92 percent of unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome were terminated by abortion. The number is lower in America, according to some local studies. In an article that explores this sympathetically, Alison Piepmeier writes:
Repeatedly women told me that they ended the pregnancy not because they wanted a "perfect child" (as one woman said, "I don't know what 'perfect child' even means") but because they recognized that the world is a difficult place for people with intellectual disabilities. [The New York Times]
If the numbers on abortion and Down syndrome are even remotely accurate, the birth of a Down baby is something already against the norm. As medical costs are more and more socialized, it is hard to see how the stigma attached to "choosing" to carry a Down syndrome child to term will not increase. Why choose to burden the health system this way? Instead of neighbors straightforwardly admiring parents for the burden they bear with a disabled child, society is made up of taxpayers who will roll their eyes at the irresponsible breeder, who is costing them a mint in "unnecessary" medical treatment and learning specialists at school. Why condemn a child to a "life like that," they will wonder.
Ultimately, Piepmeier says we should make it easier for women to bring children into the world. Bully for that. But the fact that "the world is a difficult place" for some people more than others is a problem unsolvable by social and political reform or medicine. How much poorer, how much more pre-disposed to a disease, how much more socially detested does one have to be to be beneath this eugenic hurdle for existence?
All the ingredients still exist for a more explicit return to eugenics in our culture and politics: inequality, fear, detestation of the other. But if it comes back, it is unlikely to come in the explicitly racialist terms of the biodiversity-obsessed right. Liberal societies have the antibodies against that.
Instead, it will come to us in terms of "quality of life," and "health and safety." We will be urged that every child deserves the best society can grant, and stigmatize those for whom "the world is a difficult place." And thereby we legitimize the destruction of those who would merely "live" in society rather than thrive in it.
Instead, it will come to us in terms of "quality of life," and "health and safety." We will be urged that every child deserves the best society can grant, and stigmatize those for whom "the world is a difficult place." And thereby we legitimize the destruction of those who would merely "live" in society rather than thrive in it.
Obamacare makes mandatory eugenics almost inevitable.
Freepmail wagglebee to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.
FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
Since we don’t teach history anymore few people realize now how powerful the eugenics movement was in the early 20th. century. Margaret Sanger, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford....lots of historical figures were onboard in a way most people have little clue about today.
Eugenic racism in 1925 was consensus science in the field of human evolution. By 1928 there were 376 university-level courses on eugenics, and there was widespread support from scientists and other academics at leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, to name a few -- as well as enthusiastic support from media and government. Eugenic science was funded lavishly by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harriman Railroad foundation, and the wealthy businessman J.H. Kellogg. Many national and international conferences on eugenics and human evolution were hosted at leading research institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, and eugenic science gained the imprimatur of leading scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. Wealthy donors created the Eugenic Records Office on Long Island, later to become the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. By the 1930s, thirty-one states in the U.S. would pass compulsory sterilization laws based on mainstream eugenic science and human evolution, and eugenics would receive the explicit endorsement of the Supreme Court in 1926. By the end of the first half of the 20th century, sixty thousand Americans had been sterilized involuntarily on the basis of consensus eugenic science.…Racism and eugenics were the hallmarks of the theory of human evolution in the early 20th century, representing a clear consensus of evolutionary biologists as well as other scientists and leaders in higher education and government. There were a few dissenters, but such skeptics were disdained in mainstream scientific circles.
- Michael Egnor
After World War II the eugenicists realized that they had to change their terminology, so they started using words like "choice" and "prenatal screening."
“Obamacare makes mandatory eugenics almost inevitable.”
I would take it a step further and state Obamacare is the implementation of eugenics.
As the current plan continues to fail, as it was designed to do, the intent is to replace it with “single payer”.
At that point the “death panels” will be there for all to see.
We’re already hearing the complaints that 80% of healthcare costs are incurred in the last 6 months of life, and this meme will be used to rationalize the withholding, not only of care and treatment, but even the testing to define the problem.
This is how Obama intends to “manage” Medicare costs.
If you don’t believe this is possible, look at the recent reports of the increase in “assisted suicide” in the Netherlands.
Wanna know the definition of “Mentally Ill”?
Have you forgotten where you put the car keys recently?
Give Liberals a choice, and they’d vote to have conservatives put down.
Eugenics sentiments never died and are stronger than ever. I hear comments to that effect every day.
Also, justification for sterilizing or making temporarily infertile ONLY WOMEN are spouted every day. (Long term contraception for teen women, poor women etc). You don’t routinely hear people spouting off about making men infertile, only women .... the true war against women.
This cannot have a good ending.
President Teddy Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, President Woodrow Wilson, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Graham Bell, George Bernard Shaw, Harry Laughlin, H.G. Wells, ... foundations connected to the Rockefellers, Harrimans, and Carnegies, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes .... many others
Adolph Hitler.
"Irresponsible breeder" is how people looked at my parents for having 10 children and all of us were healthy and grew into taxpaying adults.
Guttmacher Institute was named after Allen Gutmacher; one time President of Planned Parenthood and Vice President of the American Eugenics Society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Frank_Guttmacher
Lawrence Lader, he helped found NARAL, Natonal Abortion Rights Action League with Bernard Nathanson (who became a pro-lifer) and Betty Friedan. Laden sued the IRS to try to get them to revoke the tax exempt status of the Catholic Church.
http://www.catholicleague.org/anti-catholic-roots-of-roe-v-wade/
Lader was furthermore quoted 11 times in Roe v. Wade.
From its conception, the Progressive Party embraced eugenics.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the progeny of the Progressives (in BOTH parties) still adhere to the company line.
Just another reason why the GOPe wants to diminish the importance of “social issues” in political campaigns.
Ginsburg, Guttmacher, surprising that so many Jews support abortion.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.