Tom Blackwell - Mar 14, 2012

Canadians suffer from a “collective national amnesia” regarding Tommy Douglas’s support for eugenics, likely because they are reluctant to taint the medicare pioneer’s glowing image with unsavoury ideas, suggests a prominent McGill University physician in a new analysis.

Biographies and other accounts of Mr. Douglas’s life have either ignored or down-played his striking embrace in the mid-1930s of forced sterilization and segregation for people of “sub-normal” intelligence and morality, says Dr. Michael Shevell in a newly published academic paper.

He argues that people should instead make a point of remembering the CCF/NDP leader’s early advocacy of eugenics as a cautionary tale about simplistic medical solutions to social problems — even as they admire his many other, positive accomplishments.

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Scott Sexton - September 25, 2011

When first proposed, they seemed like such simple and relatively inexpensive things to do for the survivors of North Carolina’s heinous eugenic-sterilization program.

Build a traveling exhibit detailing its history. Erect a monument to the survivors. Incorporate it into the teaching of state history in public school curriculum. And put up a highway marker in a prominent place.

The state of North Carolina actively pushed sterilization on some 7,600 of its poorest and weakest residents. Local boards slipped into God’s shoes, making recommendations on who was fit to reproduce and who wasn’t.

As the years passed — North Carolina carried on with its eugenics into the 1970s, long after most states recoiled in horror from theirs — the program increasingly targeted poor black women and girls, hundreds of whom are still living.

How hard could it be to do a few small things to honor survivors? Judging by recent events, the answer, sadly, is too hard.

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Mecklenburg’s impoverished had few, if any, rights in the ’50s and ’60s as he oversaw one of the most aggressive efforts to sterilize certain populations

Ann Doss Helms and Tommy Tomlinson - Sep. 26, 2011

Compassionate. Visionary. A champion of women and the poor.

That’s the reputation that Wallace Kuralt built as Mecklenburg County’s welfare director from 1945 to 1972. Today, the building where Charlotte’s poor come for help bears his name - a name made even more prominent when his newscaster son, Charles Kuralt, rose to fame.

But as architect of Mecklenburg’s program of eugenic sterilization - state-ordered surgery to stop the poor and disabled from bearing children - Kuralt helped write one of the most shameful chapters of North Carolina history.

The Charlotte Observer has obtained records sealed by the state that tell the stories of 403 Mecklenburg residents ordered sterilized by the N.C. Eugenics Board at the behest of Kuralt’s welfare department.

It’s a number that dwarfs the total from any other county, in a state that ran one of the nation’s most active efforts to sterilize the mentally ill, mentally retarded and epileptic.

The records crunch people’s lives into a few terse paragraphs.

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Edwin Black - July 15, 2011

America’s pseudo-scientific crusade (during roughly the first half of the century) to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, biologically superior “master race” was a misguided 20th-century quest called eugenics. More than 27 states joined the shameful, decades-long utopian campaign to medically engineer racial supremacy.

But only one state, North Carolina, is now readying a massive plan of financial reparations to its surviving victims. Just how much North Carolina should pay is the subject of a historically wrenching debate, even as the state grapples with its budget deficit.

Eugenics was a fraudulent theory claiming that a better society could be created by eliminating “undesirable” human bloodlines, while promoting the “desirable” types. This dark crusade was waged by blinded progressives and do-gooders seeking utopia. In Greek, the word utopia means “nowhere.”

Race science sprang to life in the convulsive first decade of the 20th century, during which Asians, Eastern and Southern Europeans, Mexicans, Native Americans, blacks, and other ethnic groups flowed into U.S. cities, creating overcrowding. The intellectual, academic, scientific, and financial elite – many of them wealthy livestock breeders – believed better humans could be cultivated using the same techniques as a farmer would to create a better herd of cattle or field of wheat: eliminate the bad stock and proliferate the good.

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North Carolina’s compensation to victims of forced sterilisation is a chance to illuminate a gruesome US tradition of racial ’science’

Edwin Black - 28 June 2011

Twenty-seven American states joined a decades-long pseudo-scientific crusade to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, biologically superior “master race”. Their misguided utopian quest was called eugenics. But only one state, North Carolina, is now readying a massive plan of financial reparations to its surviving victims. Just how much North Carolina should pay is now the subject of a historically wrenching debate.

Eugenics was a fraudulent social theory that a better society could be created by eliminating “undesirable” human blood lines and promoting the desirable types. Race science sprang to life in the socioeconomically convulsive first decade of the 20th century, during which Asians, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Native Americans, blacks and other ethnic groups and racial mixtures flowed into US cities, creating overcrowding and class conflict. The intellectual, academic, scientific and financial elite believed better men and women could be cultivated using the same techniques a farmer would employ to create a better herd of cattle or field of wheat – eliminate the bad stock and proliferate the good. They planned to eliminate all those who did not resemble themselves, 10% at a time – that is, as many as 14 million people, at a slice. Their eventual goal was to eliminate as much as 90% of the population from the reproductive future of the United States.

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Regina Wang - 2011/06/06

For more than four decades, North Carolina sterilized people as young as 10 to eliminate traits it considered inferior and hereditary: poor, undereducated, epileptic, mentally unstable and sexually promiscuous.

Later this month, victims of the state’s eugenics law will be asked to share their stories with a governor’s task force and to suggest ways of compensation.

Former Gov. Mike Easley apologized to the 7,600 victims in 2002, but none of them has been compensated in any way.

“I hope the victims feel free to share their stories and thoughts on what the state can do to compensate them for the injustice that was done to them,” task force member Phoebe Zerwick said.

“I think it’s important for us not to decide on a package or a figure on behalf of a group of people,” said Zerwick, a former reporter and editor at the Winston-Salem Journal and now a lecturer at Wake Forest University.

After listening to the victims, the task force will submit a report to state legislators, who will then decide whether and how to compensate them.

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In a 1926 article in American Anthropologist, E.A. Hooten reviews the brand new journal Annals of Eugenics, a publication devoted to “racial problems” that “every anthropologist will welcome.”

Martin Robbins - 23 February 2011

Eugenics is, for good reason, a neglected part of the history of science. It is often associated with genocidal dictatorships such as the Nazi regime, but it’s easy to forget the uncomfortable truth that this was a well-established field in America and Britain too, only a few generations ago.

The following is a look at a PDF I stumbled across a few years ago; anthropologist E.A. Hooten’s 1926 review (pdf) of the first issue of a new journal called “Annals of Eugenics: A Journal for the Scientific Study of Racial Problems.”

The journal was issued by the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, University of London, and this was no fringe publication - the Institute for Scientific Information listed it as one of the “262 journals published between 1900-1944 … identified as providing the most relevant significant and useful information of that era to today’s researcher”. Hooten was a “U.S. physical anthropologist known for his work on racial classification”, so what did he make of this new journal?

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Abortionists perform a 104 year old tradition of Sterilization on Women of Color

Contact: Catherine Davis, 678-894-0445

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2, 2011 /Christian Newswire/ — Leaders of the National Black Pro-Life Coalition are outraged and horrified that women could be treated by Kermit Gosnell for over a decade without government oversight and accountability in Pennsylvania. A recent grand jury investigation shows that state health care officials did not act on reports of botched abortions, involuntary sterilizations and deplorable facilities run by Gosnell for low-income women, mostly minorities.

Gosnell, an African-American, was recently arrested for killing a woman in a botched abortion and for seven counts of murder related to the infanticide deaths of babies, allegedly purposefully birthing then killing them with medical scissors. Gosnell was allowed to continue performing late-term abortions even after being denied admittance to the National Abortion Federation (NAF). NAF rendered their decision after a site visit showed deplorable conditions at his facility yet the NAF did not report the conditions.

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Robin Phillips - September 12, 2010

Professor David Marsland (pictured right) made news last month when he suggested that the mentally and morally “unfit” should be sterilized. The sociologist and health expert made the remarks on the BBC radio program Iconoclasts and urged that “permanent sterilization” was the answer to many of society’s problems.

Though Professor Marsland’s remarks produced outrage, his basic ideas are nothing new. I have had occasion to mention before on this blog that during the 1920’s and 30’s, permanent sterilization and social engineering were commonly accepted practices among the liberal intelligencia.

This was the dark secret behind Fernald school in Waltham Massachusetts. On the outside it looked like any other educational institution. Few passers-by would have guessed the dark secret lurking behind the brick walls – a secret penetrating to the heart of American liberalism.

Fernald was no ordinary school. Set up in 1848 with funds from the Massachusetts State Legislature, the institution was designed for the incarceration of “feeble-minded” children. Throughout the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of low-intelligence (though not necessarily retarded) children were warehoused at Fernald in unspeakable conditions. Treated like animals and denied any affection, these “human weeds” were considered genetically inferior from the rest of society.

In his book The State Boys Rebellion, Michael D’Antonio shows that one of the purposes behind the Fernald school was to prevent these “idiots” from reproducing and diluting the gene pool. Margaret Sanger, icon of the American left and founder of Planned Parenthood, put it even more succinctly: “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.”

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Steven Mosher - September 3, 2010

On Wednesday at the Discovery Channel offices in Maryland, environmental activist James Jay Lee took company employees hostage, threatening to kill them unless the media outlet agreed to turn itself into a propaganda channel for population control. The standoff ended when the gun-toting and bomb-laden eco-terrorist was shot dead by a SWAT team.

Lee had earlier outlined his demands on his website, savetheplanetprotest.com, where he posted a 1,100 word manifesto aimed at the Discovery Channel. In it, he demanded that Discovery change its programming and focus on getting rid of people who are “polluting” the planet.

“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants…” Lee wrote, “…programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. … That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”

It is because there are too many people, he exclaims elsewhere on the site, that “Global Warming is a reality. The massive extinction of animals is happening all over the world.”

Where did he get such wacko ideas?

From the mainstream environmental movement, that’s where, which early embraced the idea that the best kind of environmental protection was population control.

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ACLU blog

The House Human Services Committee heard powerful testimony Tuesday concerning a resolution seeking acknowledgment and an apology for the state’s sterilization of “idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded, or insane persons” in the 1930s.

The testimony came largely from Abenaki, who said Native peoples were targeted for the mistreatment. Judy Dow of the Vermont Commission for Native American Affairs said Italians and Irish may also have been targets.

The ACLU supports people’s right to make reproductive choices. The Vermont Eugenics Survey — when the state took away this right through supposed “voluntary” sterilization — was one of the grossest violations of individual freedom in Vermont’s history.

If committee members had misgivings about the resolution, the misgivings concerned whether it went far enough.

Sterilization was only one piece of a concerted effort by the state to break up families, Dow said.

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William N. Grigg on the population control (reduction) establishment.

Choice excerpt:

These malignant proposals are not just flatulent thought-bubbles blown in languid speculation by fringe eccentrics in the academic realm: With the exception — as far as we know — of mass involuntary sterilization through covert chemical or biological warfare, every method of coercive population control described above has been implemented somewhere with the material aid of the United Nations and its affiliates, and the practical support of organizations such as Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International.

Every argument on behalf of state-imposed population control rejects the concept of individual self-ownership and assumes that human lives – individually and in the aggregate – are a resource to be managed by society’s supervisors on behalf of the “common good.” And, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg correctly intuited in 1973, the Roe vs. Wade decision was a triumph, albeit an incomplete one, for the cause of eugenicist population control.

Book he authored in 1977 advocates for extreme totalitarian measures to control the population

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens.

The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — informally known as the United States’ Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

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Andrea Pitzer - June 24, 2009

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Paul Lombardo hadn’t planned on a three-decade detour when he stopped at a greasy-spoon restaurant for breakfast in February 1980. Lombardo, then a graduate student at the University of Virginia, picked up a newspaper to read as he ate his bacon and eggs.

And the rest is history, literally and figuratively. For almost 30 years, Lombardo has tried to uncover the full story of the wrongs he read about that day.

The article he had stumbled across was about two sisters sterilized in the 1920s by the state of Virginia for being “feeble-minded.” The younger sister hadn’t even known she’d had a tubal ligation. She didn’t learn until she was in her late 60s that the surgery hadn’t been for appendicitis. The older, more famous sister — Carrie Buck — was the subject of the now infamous lawsuit over the legality of the operation, Buck v. Bell, that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Fr. John Flynn, LC - 2009-06-09

China’s human rights record was once more the focus of attention as June 4 marked the 20th anniversary of the bloody suppression of pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The mainstream media focused on civil and political rights, but the denial of the right of families to choose how many children they want continues to oppress many Chinese.

On May 7, LifeNews.com published a report detailing the findings of an undercover investigation by Colin Mason in China.

The fines for having an illegal child are now three to five times the family’s income, LifeNews reported. Not surprisingly, when couples are faced with the prospect of such a fine, many consent to either abortion or sterilization.

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