Susan Stefan, J.D. - June 2009

Paul A. Lombardo’s new book, Three Generations, No Imbeciles, is both a fascinating history and a thoroughly modern cautionary tale about the problems that society has always had imagining people with disabilities both having sex and having families. It is the in-depth story of the deceptions, pressures, and paradoxes behind the sterilization of Carrie Buck and the path to the infamous Supreme Court decision of Buck v. Bell. In 1927 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the sterilization of Carrie Buck and others like her with the infamous sentence, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” (1).

Lawyers are supposed to protect citizens from this kind of overreaching by the government. Carrie Buck was assigned a lawyer and an expert witness, and she had hearings all the way to the Supreme Court, but, as Lombardo shows, the outcome of her case was never in question. Her lawyer was a prominent sterilization advocate with ties to the institution petitioning for her sterilization. The expert witness had a eugenics agenda. Neither Carrie Buck nor her child, Vivian, was an “imbecile” at all, but evidence supporting her, and known at the time, was suppressed. Buck v. Bell gave the imprimatur of authority to the sterilization of thousands of people with disabilities, many of whom were in mental institutions. Sterilization for social purposes continued well into the mid-1970s, when, as Lombardo discusses, between 100,000 and 150,000 welfare recipients with low incomes, belonging to racial or ethnic minority groups, and often having disabilities, were coerced unknowingly into sterilization.

Full story

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Fixed To Fail: Buck vs. Bell

While Virginia and other states have recently apologized for their role in the involuntary sterilization of those labeled as “feebleminded” , the Supreme Court ruling that sanctioned those sterilizations has never been overruled - so the precedent still stands.

But the case of Carrie Buck also established a precedent in deception: Carrie Buck’s lawyer conspired with the opposing lawyer to guarantee that her challenge would fail, so that the sterilization law would be upheld by the highest court.

This is a presentation revealing the strategy of deception that masquerades as justice in the US.

Michael Hiltzik - June 4, 2009

One of the great things about Senate confirmations of Supreme Court justices is that they help us develop a long-term perspective on the workings of the highest tribunal in the land.

For instance, when the political fight broke out over Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that a judge’s ethnic and socioeconomic background might actually influence how he or she interprets the law, I cracked the history books to find support for that fairly obvious point.

The best illustration turns out to be a 1927 case known as Buck vs. Bell. Or as it might otherwise be known, the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the imbeciles.

Holmes, perhaps the most revered of all Supreme Court justices, was always proud of his opinion in Buck vs. Bell, which upheld a Virginia law allowing the forced sterilization of “mental defectives.” Yet the terse ruling proclaims, in each of its four chilling paragraphs, the narrow elitism of his personal life experience. And its consequence was tens of thousands of ruined lives over the next half-century.

Full story

Steven Ertelt - May 8, 2009

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Billionaire broadcast magnate Ted Turner is causing guffaws from observers with his latest comment on family planning in China. He lauded the Asian nation for its population control program and said it was a good example even though it is rife with forced abortions and sterilizations.

During an interview with the Diane Rehm Show gave China as a model for how to handle growing populations.

“We do have the example of China, and they’ve done it without, uh, draconian, as far as I can see, draconian steps,” he said.

Observers of the quote are surprised that Rehm let it go unchallenged and without any mention of the human rights abuses that accompany the Chinese family planning program.

The policy has resulted in epidemics of forced abortions and sterilizations and human rights abuses ranging from job loss and imprisonment to house arrest and threatening family members.

In fact, new reports show the forced abortions have resulted in high infertility rates forced abortions. A new report indicates that has sparked infertility and given rise to an underground network of surrogate mothers.

Full story

Beijing, China (LifeNews.com) — The population control campaign put in place by family planning officials in China to enforce its one-child policy has always involved forced abortions. A new report indicates that has sparked infertility and given rise to an underground network of surrogate mothers.

Now, family planning authorities are cracking down on the surrogacy and more forced abortions are occurring as a result.

Infertility has long been a one of the panoply of negative consequences for women resulting from abortions and the incidence of infertility is higher in China. As couples find themselves unable to have children, a new Reuters report indicates they are increasingly relying on surrogate mothers to carry children.

The news service indicates the underground surrogacy network is beginning to crumble as local officials in places like the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou are making them have abortions.

“I was crying ‘I don’t want to do this’,” a young woman named Xiao Hong, who was pregnant with four-month-old twins, told Reuters about her abortion in February. “But they still dragged me in and injected my belly with a needle.”

Full story

Jon C. Reidel - 03-04-2009

When Bryan Petrow signed up for the Honors College course “Disability as Deviance” he wasn’t expecting to become immersed in one of the darker, lesser-known chapters in U.S. history, much less build the definitive website documenting the history of American eugenics. Studying the practice of compulsory sterilization of individuals deemed “disabled” was emotionally taxing, but according to the senior biology major, well worth the time and effort it took to finally give them a voice.

“It was a difficult subject to spend a semester on, but it was one that had been buried and needed to be told,” said Petrow, who worked with fellow Champlain Valley Union High graduate Charles Carpenter on the Vermont write-up. “I felt like we did something that needed to be done 50 years ago. It seems like it belongs in a science fiction novel rather than part of national policy.”

For many of the students in the course, the idea was inconceivable that states passed laws in the first decades of the 20th Century that led to the sterilization of more than 60,000 Americans who were mentally disabled or ill, who belonged to a socially disadvantaged group or were considered morally corrupt. That was the kind of thing that happened in Germany (the National Socialist sterilization program in Germany was considered a stepping stone to the Holocaust), not the United States. Even harder to digest was the revelation that 253 sterilizations occurred in Vermont (25th most nationally) beginning in 1931 and continuing as late as 1957 under the guidance of a state-sponsored program run by Henry F. Perkins, a professor of zoology at UVM from 1902-1945.

Full story

Nellie McClung (1873-1951)

WhoWeAre.ca - December 30th, 2008

As Canada’s immigration population exploded in the 20th century, a reaction to it by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants was brewing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Specifically, this reaction manifested itself into a pseudo-science puff program known as eugenics.

More ideological than scientific, the eugenics movement sought to improve (or at least maintain) the human race (well, certain races anyway) by manipulating reproduction. Notions of “feeble mindedness” and immigrants with “weak genes diluting the strong Canadian racial stock” were the bedrock of the movement in Canada. It found many supporters particularly among women, most of whom worked for women’s suffrage and temperance groups.

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Here’s a link to the Collins brothers’ latest: The Seduction of Sarah Palin: Eugenics, CNP, and the Pioneer Fund.

Through the incredible work of the Collins brothers I have finally gotten a grasp on the entire fascist nexus of the elite in America. This latest one literally wraps it all up: from the current vetting of Palin by the CNP to the Pioneer Fund to the Nazis and the Eugenic establishment (then and now).

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MaxBro

Kansas State Free Fair, Topeka, Fitter Families Contest examining staff and "sweepstakes" winning family

What do the SAT, the Kellogg Company, Woodrow Wilson and Adolf Hitler all have in common? They are all connected by the practice of eugenics in the first half of the 20th century.

From 1904 until shortly after the close of WWII, the United States aggressively engaged in a scientific quest to create a master race. This radical new science, dubbed “eugenics” by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, called for selective breeding between those deemed “fit” for existence (i.e. generally those of Nordic descent), with sterilization, marriage prohibition and even euthanasia aimed at those deemed “unfit.”

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