Category Archives: Eugenics

The Volunteer State wants an appeals panel to reinstate two abortion restrictions, including a ban on the procedure when a woman is seeking it because of the gender or race of the child.

CINCINNATI (CN) The constitutionality of two Tennessee abortion regulations was debated before an appeals panel on Thursday, as the state seeks to reimpose a ban on selective abortions and those performed after the detection of a fetal heartbeat.

The restrictions, passed as part of House Bill 2263 in June 2020 and signed into law a month later, impose criminal penalties on doctors who perform abortions when the woman seeks the procedure based on the unborn childs gender or race, or when the fetus has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. Physicians also faced Class C felony charges for performing abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat under the statute.

The Memphis Center for Reproductive Health and Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, among others, sued Tennessee and won a preliminary injunction to prevent enforcement of the laws in July 2020.

U.S. District Judge William Campbell Jr., an appointee of Donald Trump, cited the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and the decisions of several appeals courts across the country in his opinion, ruling that states cannot ban pre-viability abortions.

Campbell struck down the portion of the law regarding abortions in cases where the womans decision is based one of several characteristics of the unborn child. He said the language regarding a physicians knowledge of the reasoning behind a womans choice is imprecise, and ruled that when a law threatens criminal sanctions, such vague provisions and potential varied interpretations cannot stand.

The district judge also referenced an Ohio law that banned abortions in cases where the woman knows her unborn child has Down syndrome. While a federal judge initially struck it down as unconstitutional, the full Sixth Circuit recently reinstated the ban in Preterm-Cleveland v. McCloud.

In its brief to the Cincinnati-based appeals court, Tennessee called the lower courts analysis deeply flawed, and claimed the provisions act to prevent abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.

By prohibiting physicians from knowingly participating in eugenic abortions, it said, the law directly furthers the states interests in protecting unborn life, promoting human dignity, safeguarding the integrity of the medical profession, and preventing discrimination.

The Volunteer State accused the lower court of concocting hypothetical scenarios to render the antidiscrimination portion of the law void for vagueness, arguing the speculative danger of arbitrary enforcement cannot be used to strike down a law as unconstitutional.

Conversely, the abortion providers commended the district judge on his decision, and claimed in their brief to the Sixth Circuit that H.B. 2263 is an attempt to criminalize nearly all abortions in Tennessee. They accused the state of using rhetorical gymnastics to defend the law, and reminded the appeals court that every ban on pre-viability abortions has been struck down as unconstitutional by various courts throughout the country.

Attorney Sarah Campbell argued on behalf of Tennessee on Thursday and told the three-judge panel the courts decision in Preterm-Cleveland forecloses plaintiffs argument.

Campbell said the district court egregiously misapplied the void-for-vagueness doctrine when it determined the terms knowledge and because of were not properly defined in the statute, and said the meaning of those words are well-settled in Tennessee law.

U.S. Circuit Judge Karen Moore, an appointee of Bill Clinton, asked why a ban on abortions after the detection of a heartbeat does not constitute a substantial burden on women seeking abortions.

The states attorney cited a growing consensus in the medical community that unborn children can begin to sense and experience pain at 15 weeks, and pointed out that over 90% of abortions performed in Tennessee are done before that point in a fetuss development.

Attorney Rabia Muqaddam argued on behalf of the abortion providers and told the panel decades of Supreme Court precedent requires it to uphold the lower courts decision. She called the Tennessee law unique because it fails to provide doctors with clearly defined parameters to avoid criminal prosecution.

Under the language of the statute, the attorney said, a physician could be prosecuted under a wide array of circumstances.

Muqaddam disputed her colleagues statement regarding fetal pain and told the judges her clients provided rebuttal testimony before the lower court. In her conclusion, she reiterated that no state interest can justify a ban on pre-viability abortions.

Moore was joined on the panel by Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Martha Daughtrey, also a Clinton appointee, and U.S. Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, a Trump appointee. No timetable has been set for the courts decision.

The Sixth Circuit has grappled with numerous abortion restrictions from various states over the past several years, and Thursdays case wont be the last time Tennessees abortion laws are debated before the court.

The court recently granted the states motion for an initial en banc hearing of Planned Parenthoods challenge to a law that requires a 48-hour waiting period before a woman can get an abortion, although those arguments have not yet been scheduled.

Although a federal judge temporarily halted enforcement of the law, a recent order from the appeals court stayed that injunction and expedited scheduling for the arguments.

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Tennessee Fights to Reimpose Ban on Selective Abortions - Courthouse News Service

Joe Donahue: The "Invention of Miracles" is a biography of Alexander Graham Bell, a revisionist biography, if you will. While best known for inventing the telephone, Bell's central work was in Deaf Education. In fact, he considered his true life's mission to be teaching the deaf to speak. However, by the end of his life, he had become the American Deaf community's most powerful enemy, as he positioned himself at the forefront of the oralist movement. They oralist movement's aim was to teach the deaf to speak and extinguish the use of American Sign Language in the face of growing evidence that focusing on speaking orally often came at the additional expense of all other education, causing serious harm to brain development. Katie Booth is the author of the new book, "The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness."

She teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and we welcome her to The Roundtable this morning. Katie, thank you very much for being with us.

Katie Booth: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Joe Donahue: As the the subtitle says: "language, power, and Alexander Graham Bell's quest to end deafness," what brought you to that?

Katie Booth: Well, I was raised in a mixed hearing deaf family, my my grandparents and great aunts and uncles and great grandparents were all deaf. And so, in the deaf world, Bell is widely known for his work in deaf education. So I sort of grew up knowing about Bell, and really very angry with him for his impact on that -- on deaf people.

Joe Donahue : Where does the anger come from? And give us a sense of, of where it began, in our history in our society and culture?

Katie Booth: Sure, yeah. So Alexander Graham Bell, in the mid 19th century, the mid 1800s, he promoted this method of Deaf Education called oralism. Before he came on the scene, deaf education was delivered through sign language, which was a language that all deaf children, for the most part, are in the right environment, it was an accessible language. And when Bell came o n the scene, he started promoting a competing form of education, which taught deaf children to speak and lip read. And ultimately, not just discouraged, but punished and shamed the use of sign language. So my grandparents my whole family was, they all communicated by sign, although they also all, almost all of them came up through the oralist education. And as you can imagine, that being told that your language is shameful and being punished for using it while at the same time. being forced to engage with an inaccessible language was really traumatizing. But also a lot of deaf kids didn't have access to sign language. And when they went to these oralist schools, where they were not allowed access to sign language, they often struggled so much to pick up English to learn to speak and lip read, that they went through their education with no language at all, which was incredibly damaging as you can imagine.

Joe Donahue: It is almost unimaginable because one of the things that this book brought to me which I had no idea about was was how hard that that movement and Bell was working to extinguish the use of American Sign Language, even though science and the education that had come said, this is really causing this oralist movement is causing issues. But the the work that they were doing against American Sign Language is really staggering.

Katie Booth: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was it he doubled down so hard on on discouraging the use of sign language in Deaf Education. It is astonishing. It's especially astonishing because the evidence was before him, not at the beginning. But, you know, within his lifetime within his efforts, he was confronted over and over and over again, with the experiences of deaf people with observations of deaf children. And then in his own school, where he had total control over methods. He was again seeing his methods fail, but he, he just didn't back down.

Joe Donahue: We are talking to Katie Booth. The name of the new book is "The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness." Let's talk about Alexander Graham Bell, of course, he's known as the telephone guy. So how did that fit into this and to that, yes, the quest to end deafness.

Katie Booth: He came into deaf education through both his mother and his father, who was an elocutionist - which is kind of like a speech pathologist, sort of. He sort of helped people speak better. And he, Bell, ended up sort of taking the influence of his mother, who was a deaf woman who sort of lived in the hearing world, and his father, who was promoting speech and started teaching deaf kids to speak. And the invention of the telephone actually came out of those efforts, it started by him, sort of trying to find a device that would make speech visible. Well, that would essentially take the vibrations of speech and turn them into something that a deaf child could potentially read. He was looking at things like the manometric capsule, and other inventions that you would speak into kind of like, they kind of had a receiver where you would speak and it would be attached to a diaphragm that would vibrate very subtly in reaction to speech, and would either through change the appearance of a flame, or would sort of be connected to a needle, which would crawl on smoked glass, so that you've got something almost that looked like a sound wave. And, and through those devices, he started thinking about the telegraph and then the telephone.

Joe Donahue: And in no defense of the man whatsoever, but but he did think he was helping the deaf, right.

Katie Booth: Yeah, yeah, he really did. And I, you know, he had the best intentions, I suppose. And early on, he was sort of - he was in more in communication with deaf people, and really trying to do what what he thought was best for the deaf child. However, as his work went on, he turned away from the deaf community more and more and more, he stopped listening to what they were observing and what their experiences were, and started to really, really cut them off. And that's where that's where he really that was his fatal flaw, I think.

Joe Donahue: So, with that comes his views on immigration, deaf education, which we talked about and eugenics which all overlap and intertwine, as you write.

Katie Booth: Yeah, Bell was right at -- he got into eugenics ... the same year as the word eugenics was coined - he started promoting eugenic ideas. His specific idea was that -- and it was tied to oralism -- it was the idea that deaf people shouldn't marry each other. Because if they married each other, he feared a quote unquote: deaf race of people. He thought that deaf people who married each other, especially deaf people, with other deaf people in their family, or even hearing people with deaf people in their family, that they would have deaf babies, and they would sort of continue a lineage of deafness, which he believed to be undesirable, even though within his time, there were people who were pushing back against that idea, very vocally in the deaf community. But then also, even outside of that community, I mean, eugenics is sometimes framed as just an idea of its time, but that is to erase many, many voices that spoke up against it.

Joe Donahue: Probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I'm curious because his work - his work, also was in concert with the work of his father too, right. I mean, he picked up a mantle in some way.

Katie Booth: Yeah, his grandfather and his father and uncles, his two. They were all elocutionists. They were all focused on teaching people how to speak very well. They worked with actors and politicians, immigrants of means -- and they were famous for it. In fact, in the in the play and movie, "My Fair Lady." The character of Henry Higgins is based on the Bell, the character who teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak.

Joe Donahue: That is, so they took this horrible thing and it became a musical? That's. I mean, not that that's uncommon, like that happened, but...

Katie Booth: Basically! Yeah.

Joe Donahue: Uh huh. ... To me the the other part major part of the story, though, is how the deaf community works against oralism - and overthrows it to adopt American Sign Language, which is also a fascinating element of the story.

Katie Booth: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to overstate the victory, there's still a real struggle to get sign language access to deaf children today. And the effort was, so I mean, the access to power and privilege and money was so imbalanced in that fight. But yeah, deaf people organized, they had a conflict, they created a sort of national organization that became the National Association of the Deaf. Ultimately, there was even a task force of sorts that was tasked with talking to Bell, like there was a whole committee just to like, deal with this man. Try to talk some sense into him. That's how big of a threat he was. And, yeah, they I mean, the the fight goes on it extended through the 20th century. You had the Deaf President Now protests. And then, but even today, even today that this fight continues to ensure sign language access, or just accessible language to deaf children.

Joe Donahue: So that access is it's a fight, but it's a different fight than then the then oralism. And, and that being a another way of communicating and learning.

Katie Booth: I mean, the fight I think this kind of gets muddled a lot. But the fight is not again, for the most part. I mean, there's many, many people in the deaf community, a whole range of views. I'm a hearing person, I'm speaking from my perspective. But the fight for a lot of people is not about like saying that deaf people shouldn't speak. Or the deaf people shouldn't learn English. I mean, even in sign language dominated schools, kids were learning English, they were just learning written English. The fight is to have language access available to these deaf children and that the most, the easiest way to assure that is to make sure they have access to sign language. If kids don't have language access, at a very young age, they become language deprived, it has neurological effects that we almost never see in the hearing world, but which abound in the deaf world. Just today on Twitter, I saw a woman who was posting about having seen two deaf children over the course of the week who were arriving at elementary school with no language at all. And it continues today, it is an epidemic in the deaf community and the best way to ensure that deaf kids pick up on language at an early age that they have that language foundation in their minds, is to just provide them access to sign language.

Joe Donahue: So you you talk about this to have the representation that we see of the Deaf, even a mainstream representation and television and film, which is not good. We also see it that the we look at the echoes of this legacy. And it as you say, it's playing out in the classroom, but it's also playing out in our media representation as well.

Katie Booth: Yeah, well, definitely. Yes. Yeah. I mean, you often have hearing people or playing deaf roles on film. You have hearing scientists working on language. Well, they're working on studies related to hearing, which often carry a lot of hearing biases. And I, myself am a hearing person who wrote a book on deafness. I'm trying to examine my own role, and my own in between role because I inherited a lot of deaf cultural stories from my family. But I am also living in the hearing world I have, I have to confront my own hearing this, which is also something that I try to do in this book.

Joe Donahue: Where do you think this, this idea of the invention of miracles do you think? Is that possible?

Katie Booth: Well, I mean, the way, the title of the book, I, what I've tried to essentially do is to sort of break the idea of the miracle. Deaf children, who learn to speak has been seen as miraculous, since the very first record of teaching a deaf child to speak in America. It's framed as a miracle. Even you see this in the story about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller titled "The Miracle Worker," you see it in the framing of cochlear implant activation videos, which are often talked about as being miraculous, even though that's those videos are really problematic. I think what I well what I wanted to do was sort of challenge that idea of the miracle, and show that a miracle, the things we frame as miracles are often framed that way, because the labor involved to get in getting to that point has been erased. The deaf child who can speak has done years and years and years and years of labor to make that happen. And to call it a miracle is to erase all of that. And to frame it in a way that is deceptive. And so I wanted to take that word, miracle and question and talk that sort of help people think of it as something that is created something that is made quite deliberately, something that is essentially invented.

Joe Donahue: Katie Booth's book is "The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power in Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness" it is published by Simon and Schuster.

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"The Invention Of Miracles" By Katie Booth - WAMC

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The year 1924 was a watershed in American immigration. A victory for the eugenics movement, the Johnson-Reed Act established race-based quotas that succeeded in limiting the entry of Jews and Catholics from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as strengthening restrictions already in place barring the entry of Asians and Africans. It would take an extraordinary political window following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to overhaul the quota system through the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. By giving preference to family reunification and skilled workers, the legislation changed the demographics of the country, making it less European and less white. At the same time, it imposed the first numerical cap on Western Hemisphere immigration, making the U.S. less accessible for people coming from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

What lessons can we draw from these two historic shifts in American immigration? Has the United States ever been the nation of immigrants that it purports to be? And in our polarized times, can we fashion a new national identity that embraces immigrants and their families?

New York Timesnational editorJia Lynn Yang,winner of the 11th annual Zcalo Public Square Book Prize for her debut book,One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, visits Zcalo to discuss how immigration laws have changed the American population, our communities, and the countrys sense of itself.

Yang will be interviewed by Stanford University sociologist Toms Jimnez.

Photo credit: Lorin Klaris

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Does America Really Want to Be a Nation of Immigrants? - KCRW

The president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Alexis McGill Johnson, has used The New York Times as a confessional to fess up to the racist history of Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger.

"We must reckon with Margaret Sanger's association with white supremacist groups and eugenics," she writes.

Sanger's involvement with the notoriously racist eugenics movement in the 1920s, and her population-control motivations to limit the procreation of "undesirables," is something pro-lifers, particularly black pro-lifers, have been writing about for years.

But Planned Parenthood has always been in denial about these very ugly truths.

Now, apparently, the power and pressure of "wokeness" is even getting the leadership of the nation's largest abortion provider to step forward and unburden themselves from their sins.

But coming to terms with sin means knowing what sin is. And here, unfortunately, Planned Parenthood's president totally misses the point.

The problem today is not what was but what is. The "sin" of Planned Parenthood is its horrible work in leading the nation in the destruction of human life.

Per its annual report, in fiscal year 2019-2020, Planned Parenthood performed 354,871 abortions. This is roughly one-third of all abortions performed in the country.

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The recognition we need from Planned Parenthood is the recognition of the sanctity of life, not public confession of the racist history of its founder.

Regarding racism, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 34% of abortions performed in the U.S. in 2018 were on Black women. Given that Black women constitute 13% of the female population, the incidence of abortion among Black women is out of proportion by almost a factor of three.

It is reasonable to assume that this is representative of the disproportionate number of Black women on whom Planned Parenthood performs abortions.

As part of Planned Parenthood's great cleansing, Johnson notes that "Planned Parenthood of Greater New York renamed its Manhattan health center in 2020," which apparently bore Sanger's name.

The Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley wrote in 2018, "In New York City, thousands more Black babies are aborted than born alive each year, and the abortion rate among Black mothers is more than three times higher than it is for white mothers."

The problem is the wholesale termination of Black unborn babies, not the name of the center in Manhattan where Planned Parenthood performs these abortions. New York City is one of the abortion capitals of the nation, and Planned Parenthood wants to take the edge off by renaming its abortion center.

Does Planned Parenthood target Black women for abortions? Why is the incidence of abortion so high among Black women?

A 2012 study by Protecting Black Life found that 79% of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities were within walking distance of minority neighborhoods.

Abortion rates tend to be higher among unmarried women because of a higher likelihood of unwanted pregnancy. The culture of abortion, aggressively promoted by Planned Parenthood, has disproportionately affected black marriage rates.

In 1970, three years before the Roe v. Wade decision, 76% of white adults age 25 and older were married, compared with 60% of blacks. By 2014, the rate dropped to 60% for whites, but it dropped to 35% for blacks.

Johnson takes one step further into the moral abyss, noting that Planned Parenthood is remiss for having "excluded trans and nonbinary people" from its programs.

She writes that Planned Parenthood pledges "to fight the many types of dehumanization we are seeing right now."

Dehumanization has one cause, of which Planned Parenthood is among the guiltiest in the nation: lack of respect for the sanctity of life.

Confessing what we all know -- that Margaret Sanger was a racist -- does not solve this problem.

Reverence for the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of life in the womb solves it.

This is what we are looking for from Planned Parenthood. Nothing less.

Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.

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Sin of Planned Parenthood is abortion, not Margaret Sanger - Southeast Missourian

Photo: Statue of Alfred Russel Wallace, by George Beccaloni / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0).

In my previous post I noted that Jeffrey OConnell and Michael Ruses new book, Social Darwinism, has many references to Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) 35 in all! The thrust of their comments is to diminish Wallaces importance in the history of evolutionary theory specifically and science generally. Showing their own adherence to the secular religion of Darwinism, OConnell and Ruse make frequent references to Wallaces apostasy for straying from Darwins hidebound materialism in suggesting a spiritual dimension to humankind and an overt teleology in the cosmological and biological worlds. They emphasize that Wallace was something of a neer-do-well whom they caricature as a wacky spiritualist who received for his efforts only the horror and scorn of his fellow scientists (32).

This cartoon version of Wallace hardly comports with the facts of his life. Not surprisingly, it is derived from their sole source on this famed naturalist, Michael Shermers In Darwins Shadow (2002), perhaps the worst biography ever written on Wallace. The fact is, in his lifetime Wallace was well known and respected.Citation analysis shows that Wallaces writings have been more frequently referenced than those of Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), or Richard Owen (1804-1892) (Smith, 30). In addition, Wallaces lecture tour in America from October 23, 1886, through August 8, 1887, was immensely successful. The eminent American philosophers William James (1842-1910) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) rejected the reductionist scientific naturalism common with Darwinists and praised Wallaces evolutionary teleology. It is fair to say that the eclipse of Wallace occurred after his death, surely not during his lifetime. But that eclipse has never been complete and I have outlined numerous scientific figures (some quite eminent like the Nobel laureate neuroscientist John C. Eccles [1903-1997] and famed astronomer/cosmologist Fred Hoyle [1915-2001]) from the 20th and 21st centuries who have suggested that Wallaces views on teleology still have considerable merit (Natures Prophet, 140-156). In general, OConnell and Ruses handling is extremely superficial and infused with their naturalistic biases.

More importantly, however, their treatment is subject to false equivalency and presumption. For example, they state, Even if Darwin had never existed, by 1941 the science would have been around for the Nazis to use. After all, Alfred Russel Wallace discovered the ideas in 1858 and Herbert Spencer nearly ten years before that. It would be ludicrous to finger Wallace for Auschwitz (52-53). Here a number of missteps are made. First the science (presumably natural selection) would not, at least in the case of Wallace, have been around for the Nazis to use because Wallaces understanding and presentation of natural selection was different in many important respects from Darwins. For one thing, Wallace always rejected Darwins artificial selection examples of domestic breeding as applicable to natural selection, and eventually he completely rejected Darwins insistence that animals and humans were different in degree but not kind. Additionally, it was Darwin, not Wallace, who saw human history locked in a competitive struggle of racial hierarchies. Without these three key elements the conflating of artificial and natural selection, the explicit abandonment of human exceptionalism, and the adherence to racial and ethnic struggle its hard to see how the Nazis could have translated their racial hygiene into any kind of systematic eugenics program modeled around a Wallacean natural selection. In contrast, Richard Weikart has convincingly demonstrated how Hitler was able to turn his pernicious ethic into an official Nazi policy committed to social Darwinism based upon Darwinian concepts of selection (see his Hitlers Ethic).

It certainly would be ludicrous to finger Wallace for Auschwitz because he openly and ferociously opposed any and every kind of eugenic proposal. Wallace, who knew all too well that the dark and dismal science of eugenics was gaining ground in England late in his life, was quite clear: Segregation of the unfit is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have enough of this kind of tyranny already. the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft.

This, of course, is not to suggest that Darwin was in any sense a Nazi or even sympathetic with those ideas. But his cousin, Francis Galton, himself a devoted Darwinist, laid the foundation in his biometrics for the eugenic perspectives that would form an appreciable link with the German infatuation with racial hygiene and their terror of so-called mental defectives and the unfit. Was Darwin a Nazi? Of course not. But did his ideas form a causal nexus via Galton to ideas that would be integrated into Nazi policy? Yes. Such a link is entirely absent even vehemently opposed with Wallace.

And this reveals the dramatically different Wallace factor. A factor that shows how two men intimately associated with the same idea natural selection could come to very different conclusions and have very different consequences (for exactly how different, see Intelligent Evolution). Ideas do indeed have consequences, but not all ideas play out the same way or weave their way in the history of ideas toward the same destination. Its an enduring lesson that OConnell and Ruse seem to have forgotten.

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Social Darwinism: The Wallace Factor - Discovery Institute

Florida could ban abortions based on a diagnosis of a disability. The proposal recently cleared the House following emotional testimony. But its fate is unclear in the Senate.

Suppose a physician knows or should know their patient is ending a pregnancy on the sole basis of a disability, and the physician goes through with the abortion. In that case, the physician could face a third-degree felony under the bill. Rep. Nicholas Duran (D-Miami) says the measure will create a divide between patient and doctor.

"They now have to cover their behinds. They have to make sure that they're not going to get thrown into court or get their license thrown into some sort of issue because they should have known and what that means. And then that really what I think does is pit that physician with their patient. It pits them against each other in some ways," Duran says.

Duran is concerned doctors may start asking patients questions about their abortion, which he says could possibly violate someone's right to privacy. But Republicans have a counterpoint.

"Members, it's a common practice for this legislature to place a variety of requirements on medical practitioners." Rep. Tyler Sirois (R-Merritt Island) says.

He voiced his support of the bill during a recent debate on the House floor.

"The concept of ending a pregnancy on the basis of a disability is modern-day eugenics," Sirois says.

Democrats like Rep. Allison Tant (D-Tallahassee) say there are many reasons why people choose to end pregnancies. Tant has a son with a cognitive disability and told her story to lawmakers on the floor.

"When I was pregnant with him, my doctor threw up his handsI don't know what's wrong, there's something wrong with this fetus I can't tell what it isI can't figure it outyou're going to have to go see a specialist and you may need to consider termination. The termination I considered was the termination of my doctor," Tant says.

Tant says complications with her pregnancy caused her to be on bed rest, and she lost 12 weeks' worth of work, which she says a lot of women can't afford to do. Her baby also had to have open-heart surgery at 23-months old.

"And costwe got a bill for $106,000 for that 20 years ago," Tant says.

Tant says she continues to pay out-of-pocket expenses to help her son and notes not every family can do that.

"Everybody knows what their other children can manage. Everybody knows what their marriage can survive. Every family knows what they can do. We're not there. We're not in that doctor's office. We're not at that family kitchen table when they're thinking about their other children. When they're thinking about how they're going to manage, I just can't vote for this bill because I think that every family must have the right to make their own decisions," Tant says.

In her close, bill sponsor Rep. Erin Grall (R-Vero Beach) dismissed Democratic concerns about the costs of caring for and raising kids with disabilities.

"I think the message that we're sending to our children, that someone may be too expensive and inconvenient, and therefore we can terminate them is the wrong message," Grall says.

Grall's bill would still allow physicians to perform an abortion to save the mother's life or if a fetus has a condition that would lead to its death or within a month of birth. That condition could not be a disability under Grall's bill. The Senate companion has not passed through any of its committees this session. Meanwhile, the House bill has been sent to a Senate Rules Committee. But no Senate committees have been scheduled for the last week of session.

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Fate Of "Disability Abortions" Proposal Unclear As Legislative Session Winds Down - WUWF

In January 1936, San Francisco heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt shocked the nation when she claimed that, in order to deprive her of her inheritance, her mother, Maryon, had her declared "feebleminded" and then sterilized without her knowledge. Ann explained that her father, legendary inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt, had bequeathed two-thirds of his $4 million dollar estate to her and one-third to her mother, but his will provided that her share went to Maryon if she died childless. Knowing this, and presuming she would outlive her daughter, who had bronchial trouble, Maryon had taken steps to see that Ann never became a mother. A mere months before Ann's 21stbirthday, she conspired with two doctors to have Ann's fallopian tubes removed during a scheduled appendectomy.

In addition to suing her mother for half a million dollars, Ann demanded a full accounting of her mother's spending. She claimed Maryon had squandered much of her trust fund at gambling resorts across the world.

It wasn't long before San Francisco prosecutors learned of the case, filing criminal mayhem charges against Maryon and the physicians. But before authorities could get to Maryon's penthouse, she'd fled for the East Coast. She left behind an affidavit explaining herself: She was merely protecting society from the effects of Ann becoming pregnant. Ann had been deemed a "moron." (Indeed, prior to surgery, a psychologist had peppered the heiress with civics questions that she refused to answer.) Ann also had "erotic tendencies." She had been addicted to masturbation as a child, the affidavit claimed, and was now attracted to "men in uniform," including "Negroes." She'd once tried to elope with the chauffeur, to whom she'd written long letters containing her pubic hairs.

For the next six months, the two women riveted the public with their claims against each other. It wasn't merely the salacious nature of the feud that raised eyebrows, but also the unusualness of Ann's case. The heiress hardly resembled the typical victim of eugenics; she was educated, wealthyand white. This raised the question: Could any woman deemed"sexually deviant" be plucked off the street and operated upon?

She could, for the simple reason that she threatened to amalgamate the races. As Ann's mother and the doctors' attorneys managed to persuade the public, "adrift" women constituted a grave danger to white society, which only surgery could ameliorate.

Long after Ann's death and the eventual repeal of sterilization laws, the heiress's story and that of eugenics, more broadly, remain instructive. Together, they reveal how narrowly whiteness is conceived and how readily the very institution that confers a person's privilege can become her undoing. They reveal a truth that scholars and activists are only now beginning to make mainstream: White peoplecan be collateral victims of white supremacy.

* * *

Eugenics was a movement to protect the purity of the white race. It took hold in America precisely at a moment when the nation's racial makeup was transforming. In the early 20th century, Eastern Europeans were emigrating in record numbers, andAfrican Americans were migrating from the rural South to the industrial North. In order to protect the white race from "undesirables," eugenicists weredetermined, among other measures, to eliminate the "waste humanity" from their own ranks. Conflating mental, moraland physical defects, they targeted poor, disabled, substance-dependentand sexually transgressive white peopleperceived to threaten the vitality of the gene pool, either by virtue of their heritable traits or their seeming likelihood to cross the color line.

Ann's mother exploited these realities, making much of Ann's flirting with an African American train porter. In telling of Ann's preference for "the help," she also stoked fears of low-class men bringing out women's baser instincts. According to psychologists at the time, it was household workers who tended to introduce perversion into respectable homes, corrupting wellborn individuals like Ann.

Intuiting the racial dynamics at play, Ann re-asserted her whiteness and cast her mother as the real threat. She had experts attest to her fluency in French and Italian, as well as her high-brow literary tastes. One physician noted that she read books on Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Marie Antoinette, in addition to Charles Dickens' works. If Ann had any defects, her defense claimed, they were due to her having been neglected by a mother who led a riotous life; it was Maryon who drank herself stupid and threw herself at workingmen.

Ann's advocates never questioned the ethics of sterilization, either in the civil case or the criminal one, in which the two doctors stood trial in August, while Maryon remained on the East Coast convalescing from a suicide attempt. Focused on establishing the unlawfulness of Ann's surgery, these witnesses simply tried to prove her undeserving of sterilization.

It was no use. The judge dismissed the case against the doctors, finding that they and Ann's mother had acted lawfully. The public seemed to accept this outcome. There were no protests or riots; and for the rest of her life, the heiress was lambasted by the press.

The case faded into obscurity, but not before helping eugenicists to rebrand their movement in ways that would enable involuntary sterilization practices to endure well into the 20th century. As Wendy Kline first recounted in her book, "Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom," the case abetted eugenicists to shift focus from heredity to environment exactly at a moment when scientists were exposing the flaws of eugenicists' claims about inheritance. It also authorized the use of sterilization in private practice. These changes paved the way for thousands of individuals the majorityof color to be operated upon without consent. In California, the heiress' tragedy would reverberate in the many instances of Mexican Americans sterilized on the grounds that they were "hyper-breeders" whose children would inevitably drain public resources.

Yet, for all its impact on people of color, the case also reminds us of the great tragedies endured by white peoplethought to imperil the racial hierarchy. Still today, poor, disabled, transgenderand norm-breaking whites face an increasedrisk of state violence, including police brutality and forced sterilization. Many in white evangelical circles report trauma from the rituals of "purity culture," whose racial animus is documented in a slew of recent books.

Scholar-activists like Jonathan M. Metzl and Heather McGhee have also called attention to the harms whites experience as a result of the dismantling of public programs, brought on by a "politics of racial resentment." Their respective bestsellers, "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland" and "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together," contend that whitesgreatly suffer from a culture that casts government dependents as menaces to society. As in the early 20th century, when eugenics first flourished, the pervasive contempt for such dependents cannot be disentangled from fears of non-whites gaining dominance. Yet, far from rooting out racism, many marginalized whites fall for the myth that dark-skinned people are to blame for their woes, supporting the very austerity measures responsible for growing poverty.

Before her death from cancer at 41, Ann fell into similar patterns of thinking. She often appealed to her wealth and lineage to disparage other women, including one whose husband she stole. She never seemed to realize how such classism had contributed to her tragedy.

But she did show great compassion to at least one outcast woman: her mother. When Maryon died in 1939, never having fully recovered from suicide attempt, Ann travelled east to mourn her. Perhaps, having been excoriated for her the same crime (maternal unfitness), she recognized her parent for the hurting woman she'd become. At Maryon's graveside, she may have fleetingly realized what Metzl, McGhee, and others have: Our well-being is intimately bound up with others' and no one will be truly free until all are.

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Eugenics, racism and the forced sterilization of heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt - Salon

Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson called out the organization's founder in a New York Times op-ed, saying she had ties to "white supremacist groups and eugenics."

Margaret Sanger, founder of the reproductive healthcare nonprofit organization, is known for having devoted her entire life to expanding access to birth control. Since her death, some historians and biographers have been characterizing her as a proponent of the eugenics movement, meant to control populations for "desirable" characteristics while weeding out so-called undesirable ones.

"Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder's actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate 'product of her time,'" Johnson wrote in the op-ed.

"Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated," she continued.

Sanger once spoke to the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey to hype up birth control , noted Johnson while pointing out examples of her shamed history. She also "endorsed" a Supreme Court decision that led to state-controlled sterilization attempts, Johnson said. This decision allowed the government to sterilize people it deemed "unfit" to have kids, usually without their consent or knowledge.

Germany also established a forced sterilization program in the 1930s, which Sanger supported.

"I admire the courage of a government that takes a stand on sterilization of the unfit and second, my admiration is subject to the interpretation of the word 'unfit,'" Sanger said in praise of the program. "If by 'unfit' is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an admirable gesture, but if 'unfit' refers to races or religions, then that is another matter, which I frankly deplore."

Johnson's comments mark the latest in a broad push to distance Planned Parenthood from Sanger's legacy.

Last year, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, located in Manhattan, announced it would drop Sanger's name from its building "as a public commitment to reckon with its founder's harmful connections to the eugenics movement."

Have a news tip? Reach this reporter at ydzhanova@insider.com

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Planned Parenthood CEO calls out founder for her 'association with white supremacist groups and eugenics' - Business Insider

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of AmericaBy Daniel Okrent | Scribner528 pages $30Langans Book Mark: 4/4 stars

Until recently, the US has had a Republican administration anxious to keep certain peoples that it deems undesirable from immigrating into the country. If you thought this was a new impulse, Dan Okrents The Guarded Gate shows that it is a repulsive American policy with a recurring history.

Okrent is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and first public editor of The New York Times, former editor at Large at Time, and managing editor of Life Magazine.

Part of the story of The Guarded Gate is one of scientists, who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing an intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers many of them progressives who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenics arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.

Readers may find it hard to believe, but this policy is, relatively speaking, very old. Okrent, who took five years to write this important book documents the history of this plan that began in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. (Slightly earlier, 1891, Lodge wrote a piece for the North American entitled The Restriction of Immigration.) By 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that biological laws had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans and the restrictive law was enacted three years later.

This proof is something that fair-minded people find repugnant: a combination of the rise of eugenics, Nazism, and a repeat of Know Nothing political party beliefs that began in the 1850s, that were xenophobic and hostile to immigration.

Beliefs werent very different in the United Kingdom, where it was thought that the falling birthrate would soon lead to a national deterioration while the country fell to the Irish and the Jews and this was after Parliaments adoption of the Aliens Act of 1905, which had already cut the numbers of Jewish immigration into the UK by two thirds. About this alleged deterioration The Times of London asked in 1912: whether any of us are really wise enough to know how a human society ought to be constituted.

Okrent begins the story with Ellis Island, 1925. There youll remember, on the base of the nearby Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazaruss famous poem invited the world to Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The author tells us that at that time, many Americans still found a certain nobility, a confirmation of the nations promise, in Lazaruss word and image they evoked.

However, even then he warns, It was likely that even more citizens perceived evidence of menace, and threat, and an inevitable national decline.

Why so, we ask?

Henry Curran, commissioner of immigration for the Port of New York at the time, signaled the change. He was a former republican who lost a run for New York mayor in 1921. Curran told his visitors to Ellis Island in 1925, The immigrants of today are of a better kind than those of two decades earlier. They are better by reason of our new immigration law; the cause and effect are direct.

Currans reasoning was specious but widely held. Some examples of it: a major national figure had written four years earlier Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The editors of the nations most popular magazine had said continued immigration from southern and Eastern Europe would compel America to join the lowly ranks of mongrel races.

This was an idea, Okrent says, that had been gaining traction for years. Some of the nations leading scientific institutions, amplified by political activists, political exigencies and long-standing hatreds, had assured that a version of the Immigration Act of 1924 would pass. Sound familiar?

Who started this resurgence?

Credit Charles Benedict Davenport, a scientist beset with a nervous temperament, as our author describes it. Margaret Sanger recalled Davenport expostulating, And with his hands upraised as thought in supplication, quivered emotionally as he breathed, Protoplasm. We want more protoplasm.

In reality Davenport was a slim, van dyke bearded biologist at Harvard in the 1890s. He was a pure geneticist who published 439 scientific papers, sat on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals and maintained memberships in sixty-four scientific and social organizations. His work eventually changed the face of the nation to its detriment. Eventually, Okrent notes, Davenports ambitions distorted his work, leading him dangerously past the edge of reason. Perhaps over the edge at the time, he expostulated, I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.

Couple the efforts of Davenport with Sir Francis Galtons (1862 1911), an English Victorian statistician and eugenicist known for stressing psychological differences between people, the inheritability of talent, rather than their common traits, and you get an influential set of scientists who favored retrogressive social policies that eliminated Italians (gross little aliens and Eastern European Jews furtive, reeking, snarling Yacoob(s).

Other major figures in Americana pitched in to make the case for exclusion. They included Henry Cabot Lodges friend, Theodore Roosevelt, Darwins relative Francis Galton, Madison Grant, who founded the Bronx Zoo, and his pal, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, as well as Max Perkins, the editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Perhaps a disappointment, but not a surprise, that all came to the same regrettable conclusion of exclusion being protective of a country built upon open access.

On an April Sunday in the spring of 1924 the New York Times announced the profound change in an eight column headline. It read, atop an article that stretched across a full page: AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO AN END.

All a great shame, documented fairly and carefully by scholar-writer Okrent.

(An important aside: discredit both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, DC for not finding an equitable immigration policy for the past twenty years.)

President Biden offers more than nominal hope for a change to a better immigration program.

Michael D. Langan is the NBC-2.com Culture Critic. Dr. Langan has written for the BBC, The Dublin Review of Books, Boston Globe, Buffalo News and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, among other publications. This is a slightly revised review of a book that should be required reading in an America that continues to exclude so many from its shores.

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Review: The Guarded Gate - NBC2 News

The House took up a bill Thursday that would ban disability abortions in Florida, readying the measure for debate and a floor vote.

Sponsored by Republican Rep. Erin Grall, the bill (HB 1221)would prohibit a physician from performing an abortion if they know or should know that a womans decision to abort is based on a test result that suggests a disability.

The bill makes exceptions for abortions deemed necessary to save a womans life. It also extends immunity to a woman if they violate or conspire to violate the provision.

I believe that the state does have a compelling interest in making sure that abortions are not used as a form of modern-day eugenics, Grall told lawmakers on the House floor.

Throughout the committee process, Democratic lawmakers have expressed staunch opposition to the measure.

On Thursday, they questioned the bills intricacies including privacy concerns and possible impacts on minority and low-income women.

They also questioned how the bill would be exercised if signed into law.

In previous committees, Grall explained that a family member or medical worker could report an instance in which they believe an abortion violates the proposal.

A complaint would be filed with law enforcement and law enforcement would be able to undergo an investigation and obtain evidence in the way that they would normally, Grall added Thursday.

Democrats filed four amendments including one to make an exception for pregnancies related to rape and human trafficking.

Republicans rejected all amendments.

If passed, Florida would become the 10th state to ban disability abortions.

Notably, legal challenges are ongoing in seven of the nine states with similar laws in place.

According to a staff analysis, data on disability abortions is limited and not tracked by most states.

However, retrospective analysis of abortions from 1995-2011 estimated that 67%-85% of women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome in the United States elect to abort the fetus, the staff analysis adds.

If passed and signed into law, the bill would take effect on July 1.

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Disability abortion bill teed up in House Rep. Erin Grall. - Florida Politics