Posted on 02/23/2008 2:15:38 PM PST by wagglebee
And now Planned Barrenhood is trying to put one on every street corner.
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Are they going to have a Margaret Sanger display? She used the phrase “human weeds” to describe undesirables.
The past tense of “lead” is “led.”
I know, but what are you talking about?
She also spoke of the “need” to not let Blacks know that she wanted to exterminate them.
I fervently pray that people who visit this museum will see the direct correlation between eugenics and the current pro-”choice” movement. Just because we now exterminate earlier does not make it less wrong.
Beep!
Eugenics is terribly misunderstood, almost as much as it has been misused in the past. It should be broken up into parts, each of which stands or falls on its own merits.
1) Genetic selection.
At its best, this can prevent terrible tragedies from taking place. One example is advising two people not to get married, or if they do, to adopt, not have their own children. Because if they do have children, the odds are high that their children will be hideously deformed and have short and agonized lives. This form of Eugenics is just fair warning.
However, this can be twisted into confronting expectant parents with a great or small problem with their fetus child, to encourage them to kill it before it is born. The flip side of the coin.
2) Selective breeding.
Used extensively for animals, Eugenics might someday result in actually suggesting pairings, for people who really want their children to have the best genes possible. Imagine being given a list of people of the opposite sex, and told that if you were to have a child or children with one of them, that child will have a lot of natural advantages with genetic health.
Ironically, while this is extraordinarily difficult to arrange based on what we know of genetics, it was done very successfully just by guessing alone, by the leader of an idealistic commune in the 19th Century. While they believed in marriage, the leader selected who would make children with who, and who would then raise them. In just three generations, that commune produced children, dozens of whom became national leaders in many fields.
However, this can easily be turned on its ear by forcing people to have children based on prejudice and faulty science.
3) Preventing the propagation of genetic defects.
The best that can be hoped for here is that people with severe genetic defects should be advised early on that it would be kind of them not to make children, but to adopt. The one considered use is by parents of a mentally incapable and institutionalized daughter, to preclude her being impregnated by rape, an all too frequent event.
This is by far the most widely spread part of abusive Eugenics. Forced sterilization is instantly corrupted in its practice, and used against the helpless and oppressed. Performed at some point in most western nations, it is a hideous remnant of the collapse of medical ethics.
It’s not your fault, but I think the headline writer meant “led,” not “lead.”
The title of the article. I know it isn’t YOUR title, but it’s awful that a mainstream paper can’t do better than that.
See Robert Heinlein's BEYOND THIS HORIZON for a society that practices that kind of eugenics. Ironically, in the novel those who failed to practice it were subsidized and kept as "control normals."
In 1865 he began to study heredity, partly brought on by reading his cousin, Charles Darwin's publication Origin of Species. Galton soon discovered that his true passion was studying the variations in human ability. In particularly, he was convinced that success was due to superior qualities passed down to offspring through heredity. His book, Hereditary Genius (1869), outlined this hypothesis and utilized supporting data he had collected by analyzing the obituaries of the Times newspaper, where he traced the lineage of eminent men in Europe. His quest for data and accountability would lead to a series of studies and books on the heredity of mental faculties specifying that "human mental abilities and personality traits, no less than the plant and animal traits described by Darwin, were essentially inherited".Ultimately, these findings sparked the formative years of the eugenics movement, which called for methods of improving the biological make-up of the human species through selective parenthood. Galton would even go so far as to advocate human breeding restrictions to curtail the breeding of 'feeble-minded'.
Source: http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/galton.shtml
The truth is that genetics is a very odd conglomeration of things. For example, one of the most desired traits for offspring is “intelligence”, a vague descriptor at best.
The truth is that what we call intelligence today is most likely a mutation, and one that comes with a lot of baggage. What we think of as intelligence might be a defect.
That is, in blackberries, the same gene that makes the berries delicious is also responsible for the plants thorns, oddly enough. In the case of intelligence, it may be associated with a weakened chromosome, the extreme version of which causes “fragile X syndrome”, one of the major causes of retardation.
So if you tamper with your children so that they might be intelligent, you place them at risk for being prone to other genetic problems.
Other genes are equally fickle. But most surveys stop with the simple question of if you could modify your child, what would you want them to be like? Only one followed it up with greater detail, and made a startling discovery.
Many parents want offspring with noticeably canine and feline features. This is because they think that people relate better to dogs and cats than they do each other; so if their children look more like dogs and cats, they will be popular.
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And soon, we will have it again. Only it will be much worse today than it was in the early part of the 1900’s.
Thanks for the ping.
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