Thread by me.
When I was a teenager I was extremely lucky, landing in the middle of a cultural and social revolution. Driving into assembly on the back of a motorbike, having a fling with an unsuspecting English teacher and being desperate to get myself laid at 15 gave me immediate membership to the only club worth joining - the club that was 'the 60s'. Apart from occasional doses of teenage angst, I was what you might call very, ‘alive and kicking’; anything I could kick against, I did. And therein lays the problem - the one about being alive. Consider the figures reported below to be accurate statistics:
In Scotland 69 per cent are in favour of assisted suicide for people suffering from cancer or chronic diseases, while 76 per cent believe that relatives should not be prosecuted for helping.
Well of course they do, because they don’t know either the whole story or the consequences of adopting such a foolhardy policy. Because in the main when you’re young, fit, or thinking you’ll live forever, like I did, you simply want 'it' - that’s death - to go away. If you’ve seen a relative die slowly or lost someone suddenly, then you will know that most palliative care is wanting and that in general people don’t handle death very well in this country.
So where’s ‘the rub’ for someone who thought she’d live forever? Well it came to me late one February night when I sneezed without stopping for several hours. I was in my 30s, working freelance as a dramatherapist and still, I’d like to think, kicking a bit. I’d captured myself a young husband and had a one year old son. By the evening of that very same day I was completely paralysed. Not just a bit - completely.
I couldn’t breathe, speak, shit or scream, only my autonomic organs worked. I was in agony everyday, fully conscious and facing my death. It took me over five months to breathe on my own, six to begin to talk and nearly two years to feed myself without sticking things down my ears.
As I lay there I thought only about being alive. You see that’s the dichotomy about life - when you’re dying you think about living and when you’re living, well, you’re going to die.
That doesn’t mean planning it for the sake of convenience or because there are those in society who find age and disability abhorrent and want to escape it at any cost. Rather like the Royal College of Physicians who planned to get rid of 6,000 ‘minimally conscious’ people but were halted in their tracks by Judge Baker during the ’M’ case. I will not pay that cost with my life.
I claim the right to live as I am, imperfect. I claim the right for others like me to live, despite it all and because of it all. I know what it’s like to be truly alone on a sea of pain and to have someone discuss your future, your place in society.
I know what it would be like if you knew that euthanasia was possible and that was your fate. Death is the undiscovered country; some, for bent love, good intentions or money would have you take the trip. Don’t take it.
So, to Margo MacDonald and to her followers who once chose to leave rather than stay and listen to us I say, "If it was down to you I wouldn’t be here."
So Margo, for you: I’m still kicking.
Threads by ProgressingAmerica and me.
In an article titled "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda" in the Birth Control Review, Margaret Sanger wrote the following:(Page 43)
The eugenic and civilizational value of Birth Control is becoming apparent to the enlightened and the intelligent. In the limited space of the present paper, I have time only to touch upon some of the fundamental convictions that form the basis of our Birth Control propaganda, and which, as I think you must agree, indicate that the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics.
I have made it a point to immerse myself in the history of progressivism so that I could demonstrate and display it for others, but eugenics is one of those things that's so profoundly evil that it leaves me absent for words. Nearly the entirety of the second half of this short article is quotable:
The almost universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is one of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves today possess the divine spark of regeneration. It remains for the courageous and the enlightened to answer this demand, to kindle the spark, to direct a thorough education in Eugenics based upon this intense interest.Birth Control propaganda is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator. In answering the needs of these thousands upon thousands of submerged mothers, it is possible to use this interest as the foundation for education in prophylaxis, sexual hygiene, and infant welfare. The potential mother is to be shown that maternity need not be slavery but the most effective avenue toward self-development and self-realization. Upon this basis only may we improve the quality of the race.
As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the "unfit" and the "fit", admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.
Birth Control is not advanced as a panacea by which past and present evils of dysgenic breeding can be magically eliminated. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.
But to prevent the repetition, to effect the salvation of the generations of the future–nay of the generations of today–our greatest need is first of all the ability to face the situation without flinching, and to cooperate in the formation of a code of sexual ethics based upon a thorough biological and psychological understanding of human nature; and then to answer the questions and the needs of the people with all the intelligence and honesty at our command. If we can summon the bravery to do this, we shall best be serving the true interests of Eugenics, because our work will then have a practical and pragmatic value.
Birth control is the sacrament of eugenics.
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WASHINGTON, February 17, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - What do Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, “father of the sexual revolution” Alfred Kinsey, Lenin, and Hitler have in common?
All these pioneers of what some call the culture of death rooted their beliefs and actions in Darwinism - a little-known fact that one conservative leader says shouldn’t be ignored.
Hugh Owen of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation told an audience on Capitol Hill before the March for Life last month that the philosophical consequences of Darwinism has “totally destroyed many parts of our society.”
Owen pointed to Dr. Josef Mengele, who infamously experimented on Jews during the Holocaust, Hitler himself, and other Nazi leaders as devotees of Darwinism who saw Nazism and the extermination of peoples as nothing more than a way “to advance evolution.” Darwinism was also the “foundation” of Communist ideology in Russia through Vladimir Lenin, said Owen, who showed a photograph of the only decorative item found on Lenin’s desk: an ape sitting on a pile of books, including Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” and looking at a skull.
“Lenin sat at this desk and looked at this sculpture as he authorized the murder of millions of his fellow countrymen, because they stood in the way of evolutionary progress,” Owen said. He also said accounts from communist China report that the first lesson used by the new regime to indoctrinate religious Chinese citizens was “always the same: Darwin.”
In America, the fruit of Darwinism simply took the form of eugenics, the belief that the human race could be improved by controlling the breeding of a population.
Owen said that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a prominent eugenicist, promoted contraception on the principles of evolution. “She saw contraception as the sacrament of evolution, because with contraception we get rid of the less fit and we allow only the fit to breed,” he said. Sanger is well-known to have supported the spread of “birth control,” a term she coined, as “the process of weeding out the unfit.”
Alfred Kinsey, whose “experiments” in pedophilia, sadomasochism, and homosexuality opened wide the doors to sexual anarchy in the 20th century, also concluded from Darwinist principles that sexual deviations in humans were no more inappropriate than those found in the animal kingdom. Before beginning his sexual experiments, Kinsey, also a eugenicist, was a zoologist and author of a prominent biology textboook that promoted evolution.
Owen, a Roman Catholic, strongly rejected the notion that Christianity and the Biblical creation account could be reconciled with Darwinism. He recounted the story of his own father, who he said was brought up a devout Christian before losing his faith when exposed to Darwinism in college. He was to become the first ever Secretary General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
“The trajectory that led from Leeds and Manchester University to becoming Secretary General of one of the most evil organizations that’s ever existed on the face of the earth started with evolution,” said Owen.