Category Archives: Eugenics

Emmy Award-winning director/producer, Erika Cohn, joins Tom Needham for a shocking conversation about BELLY OF THE BEAST, a film about the mass sterilization of women of color in California's prison system on this Thursday's SOUNDS OF FILM.

When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal involuntary sterilizations in California's women's prison system, they take to the courtroom to wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. With a growing team of investigators inside prison working with colleagues on the outside, they uncover a series of statewide crimes - from dangerously inadequate health care to sexual assault to coercive sterilizations - primarily targeting women of color. But no one believes them. This shocking legal drama captured over seven years features extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated women, demanding our attention to a shameful and ongoing legacy of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States.

Tom Needham's SOUNDS OF FILM is the nation's longest running film and music themed radio show. For the past 30 years, the program has delivered a popular mix of interviews and music to listeners all over Long Island, parts of Connecticut and streaming live worldwide on the internet. Past people interviewed for the show include Kenneth Lonergan, Mike Leigh, Wallace Shawn, William H. Macy, Peter Yarrow, Melanie, Dionne Warwick, and Don McLean.

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BELLY OF THE BEAST Director, Erika Cohn, Talks Eugenics & The Sterilization of Women Prisoners on Tom Needham's SOUNDS OF FILM - Broadway World

By Layal Liverpool

Christopher Dilts/SIPA USA/PA Images

Thousands of scientists participated in a strike against racism in science and academia on 10 June, with prominent academic institutions and scientific journals pledging their support. While these statements have been welcomed, many are keen for institutions to go further. People are tired of seeing organisations that have released statements, but with no action plan in place, says Jasmine Roberts at The Ohio State University.

Black scientists who spoke to NewScientist had a number of suggestions for further action by scientific journals that supported thestrike, such as inviting more Black academics to write review articles, peer review scientific papers and serve on editorial boards.

There are currently no Black editors on the Nature journal, says Natures editor-in-chief Magdalena Skipper. The implications of the lackof Black representation in our editorial staff are not lost on us. Cell, another scientific journal, published astatement acknowledging that none of its editors are Black.

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Journals cant solve this problem alone, however. Several universities have released statements condemning racism, but many were criticised for their failure to explicitly mention Black people or to lay out plans for addressing inequalities.

There is mounting pressure for universities to acknowledge their racist histories and incorporate this into their curricula. An inquiry into thehistory of eugenics at University College London (UCL), for example, was criticised earlier this year for failing to investigate the issue in sufficient depth.

On 11 June, UCL announced it would immediately start reviewing the names of spaces and buildings that were named after two prominent eugenicists, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.

But UCL is just one of many institutions worldwide that have buildings, lecture theatres or statues dedicated to scientists or other historical figures who held racist views or participated in racist acts. Universities should stop celebrating individuals that are known to be racist, says Cassandre Coles at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

To tackle racial bias and discrimination, academic institutions should penalise academics who make racist comments or exhibit racist behaviour, says Amber Lenon at Syracuse University in New York.

Universities should also be more deliberate about increasing their representation of Black people. Fewer than 1 per cent of university professors in the UK are Black, according to recent figures from theUKs Higher Education Statistics Agency. In the US, less than 5 per cent of full professors are Black.

Allocating more funding towards equality, diversity and inclusion work is an important starting point, says Madina Wane at Imperial College London. Currently, much of this work is performed, with little recognition, by underrepresented groups in addition to their actual contracted work, she says.

Overall, many Black scientists see the 10 June strike as the start of a process. No one group has a monopoly on intelligence, creativity and ideas, says Nira Chamberlain, president of the UKs Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. As a scientific community, we must work much harder to create a more diverse workforce from the top to the bottom.

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#ShutDownSTEM strike was a start, but real action on racism is needed - New Scientist News

IAMA Theatre Company is partnering with Celebration Theatre, DOMA Theatre Company, Echo Theater Company, Highways, The Inkwell Theater, Lower Depth Theatre, Skylight Theatre Company and the L.A. Stage Alliance to present a free, live Zoom reading of Vincent Terrell Durham's bold and timely new play Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids. To view the Juneteenth reading on Friday, June 19 at 6 p.m. PT, register at zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_K3JA0ksmTuODKuU3bL4tsQ.

The collaboration is part of the Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project, a nationwide movement by American theater companies striving to "change the world, one play at a time" in response to the current civil uprising in reaction to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others before them.

In Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids, a liberal white couple opens the doors of their renovated Harlem brownstone to host a cocktail party for a Black Lives Matter activist, his gay white lover and the mother of a slain 12-year-old Black boy. A night of cocktails and conversation sparks emotional debates on topics ranging from underweight polar bears and Lana Turner to saving the planet, gentrification, racial identity and protecting the lives of Black boys.

The reading will be directed by Andi Chapman and feature IAMA company members Brandon Scott and Christine Woods, alongside Tesiana Elie, Todd Grinnell, Garrett Mercer, Kacie Rogers and Sheldon White.

According to Aldo Billingslea, who launched the Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project to center Black theater artists and new voices and address systemic racism in the theater industry, this joint effort between theaters is exactly what theater is meant to do: unite for change, respond to the current moment, raise awareness and resources to support marginalized communities, and amplify the voices of artists of color. "With a perfect blend of wit, pathos and humor, [Polar Bears] speaks to some of the most pressing subjects of our time - gentrification, white fragility, the sustainability of the planet, the Black Lives Matter movement and police violence against Black bodies," he said in a press release.

The play was co-commissioned and developed by PlayGround and Planet Earth Arts and was a finalist for the 2019 NNPN National Showcase of New Plays.

Durham is a Los Angeles-based scriptwriter, author and poet and the author of ten plays, including The Fertile River, about the tragic history and legacy of eugenics in North Carolina, and A Post Racial America.

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L.A. Theaters Team Up For Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project Reading - Broadway World

With its soaring arches, international flags and globe-topped tower, the Von KleinSmid Center for International and Public Affairs is one of the most prominent buildings at USC. Its namesake, the late Rufus B. von KleinSmid, has held a place of distinction as the universitys fifth president.

But on Thursday, USC announced it had stripped Von KleinSmids name from the building as the university at last reconciled with his disturbing leadership role in Californias eugenics movement.

The scholar, who is credited with expanding the universitys academic programs and international relations curriculum as president from 1921 to 1947, believed that people with defects had no ethical right to parenthood and should be sterilized. His Human Betterment Foundation was instrumental in supporting the 1909 California legislation that authorized the forced sterilization of those deemed unfit essentially anyone non-white, said Alexandra Minna Stern, a University of Michigan history professor and expert on eugenics.

His active support of eugenics is at direct odds with USCs multicultural community and our mission of diversity and inclusion, President Carol L. Folt announced.

This moment is our Call to Action, a call to confront anti-Blackness and systemic racism, and unite as a diverse, equal, and inclusive university, Folt wrote. You have asked for actions, not rhetoric, and actions, now.

The university also removed Von KleinSmids bust from the building after a unanimous vote by the Board of Trustees executive committee.

Tweets with the hashtag #VKCIsOverParty celebrating the change circulated Thursday among USC students after photos of the building without Von KleinSmids name were posted on the platform.

Everything he believed in is a threat to the Black community and any marginalized community, so I do think its a step in the right direction, said junior Jaya Hinton, co-director of USCs Black Student Assembly. But anti-Blackness is more than just names on buildings. USC is an institution and systemic, institutional racism is a real thing.

USC had failed to respond to years of demands from within and outside the university to remove Von KleinSmids name from the building.

They include Japanese Americans, who say Von KleinSmid prevented more than 150 second-generation Nisei students from returning to USC after World War II, when tens of thousands were wrongly incarcerated following Japans 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Von KleinSmid was the only West Coast university president who refused to send their transcripts to colleges in other states, where Japanese Americans released from incarceration camps were trying to finish their education, said Jon Kaji, past president of the USC Asian Pacific Alumni Assn. He began pressing USC in 2012 to remove Von KleinSmids name from the building but officials did not respond, he said.

But mass protests calling for racial justice, triggered by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, finally pushed USC to action. Folt said her office has been deluged with input from students, staff, faculty leadership, deans, alumni and neighbors.

Earlier this week, students began circulating an online petition, similar to one in 2018, calling for the renaming of the building. Last September, just an hour before Folt was sworn in as USC president, the bust of Von KleinSmid was found with a rag over its face with the words rename VKC on it and a piece of cardboard inscribed with NAZI hung around its neck.

Last year, then-Provost Michael Quick announced the formation of a Nomenclature Task Force to address concerns regarding building names, symbols and monuments. The committees formation came after members of the Undergraduate Student Government had called for it a year before.

Folt also announced five other actions USC would immediately take to confront systemic racism.

Folts announcement drew cautious support from students who have been pressing for action on the issue.

Shes using the right words for sure, Im just hoping theres action behind them, said USC rising senior Michael Mikail, who is majoring in political science. I think its one step in the right direction, but we have a lot of steps to go.

In a Daily Trojan letter to the editor last week, Mikail had included the name change on a list of actions he wanted Folt to take to better support Black students.

I, and other Black students advocating for change, did not come to USC to be activists or agitators, said Mikail, who also serves as executive director of USCs Pan-African Student Assembly. We came for an education, and USCs institutional failings have forced us into these roles.

Hinton, who is studying business administration, commended Folts other actions, such as instituting implicit bias training. But she said she hoped not just students, but also faculty members, administration and Department of Public Safety members would be required to take it.

George Sanchez, a professor of American studies and ethnicity and history at the school, who has documented Von KleinSmids history, said the former USC president was a key figure in pushing California to the forefront of the eugenics movement. The German Nazis were reading writings by California scientists leading the movement, which was couched as a scientific way to improve public health and welfare by regulating the makeup of Americas racial stock.

They were seen as reformers, Sanchez said. At the time, these ideas were seen as what the social sciences and science should work together to make a better society.

Californias sterilization law did not call out race explicitly, instead targeting those with mental deficiencies and feeblemindedness. But the labels were disproportionately applied to racial and ethnic minorities, people with actual and perceived disabilities, poor people and women, Stern said, and the eugenics literature of the time specifically mentioned Mexicans, Filipinos and, later, Japanese and Japanese Americans.

Overall, about 20,000 people in a dozen California state institutions were sterilized throughout the 20th century under the law, which was repealed in 1979, Stern said. Her research lab has found that Latinos were sterilized at significantly higher rates than others in the institutions, the majority of whom were white. Latinas were 59% more likely to be sterilized than non-Latinas, the lab found.

Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles) has introduced legislation to compensate survivors of sterilization.

To me, this is Californias version of Confederate monuments, Sanchez said. This history of eugenics and sterilization is central to Californias racial history. In a sense, USC understands that it has a long history that is implicated in this, but I think they waited until a moment like this to act.

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USC removes eugenics supporter's name from notable building - Los Angeles Times

National Geographic magazine, September 2016, had this picture of a massive pecan tree in San Antonio. The picture was taken in 1915. Can you find out any more information about the tree - where it was located? Any other history?

Donna Weidemann

The photograph of this magnificent specimen is credited to Paul Popenoe, a jack-of-all-trades avocational scientist, who at that time worked with his younger brother Wilson Popenoe.

Both were supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as agricultural explorers to observe methods of fruit cultivation in Central and South America, toward the development of new or improved crops in the United States.

The photo of the giant pecan may have been taken as early as 1913, when the younger Popenoe was in Texas to study conditions in preparation for a trip to Brazil, where he would be determining what plants, shrubs and trees would be suitable for reproduction in this country, according to the San Antonio Light, July 7, 1913.

Popenoe, of USDAs foreign seed and plant introduction bureau, told the Chamber of Commerce that he no mention of brother Paul, whose government connection was less formal would be in the area for several days. Once in Brazil, Popenoe would be looking at fruit and fibrous plants with an eye to bringing some back to try here.

National Geographic says the photo was submitted along with 25 other pictures for a contest to find the nations largest hardwood tree. Rebecca Dupont, image archivist at the magazine, checked their files and found only the original caption from 1915: Two men pose at the base of a pecan tree over five feet in diameter and another person on a branch. The people arent named, and the location is given as San Antonio, Texas, USA.

This striking photo turns up uncredited in at least two other publications.

It appears in Greater San Antonio, City of Destiny and Your Destination, published in 1918 by the Higher Publicity League. On a page headed Typical San Antonio Trees and Vines, its captioned: The 15-bushel Richter pecan tree, south of San Antonio.

The photo also is used to illustrate a story published in the San Antonio Express on Oct. 29, 1929, about the pecan-growing industry, headed Pecan crop worth millions, where its identified only as Giant native pecan along Medina River near San Antonio.

To put the prodigious tree in perspective, 1 to 4 bushels was average at the time. Its diameter can be estimated at 60-70 inches, said Gretchen Riley, partnership coordinator at the Texas A&M University Forest Service. The lower end of that range is the usual upper limit for pecan trees.

Using a formula of growth factor (a moderate rate of 4-4 inches per year) times diameter, this tree could be 250 to 300 years old the upper limit of pecan tree life expectancy.

A type of hickory, pecans grow best alongside rivers, in rich bottomlands.

With the three captions on the same photo giving different locations, the tree could have been located along the banks of any of a dozen South Texas rivers and streams, said horticulturist Neil Sperry, author of Neil Sperrys Lone Star Gardening and columnist whose weekly gardening tips appear in Saturdays Express-News.

The giant pecan is not on the A&M Forest Services Big Tree Registry, which is for living trees only. That might indicate that its no longer with us. Sperry, who lives in a pecan forest, said that lightning strikes are the most common cause of big tree loss. Decay is another.

Branches break all the time, and unless they are pruned cleanly, decay sets in and moves into the trunk, eventually causing trunks to become hollow, he said. Then they break and fall in a windstorm. Thats part of the aging pattern of any species of tree, pecans included.

Theres nothing on file about the National Geographic-featured tree at the Texas Pecan Growers Association in Bryan, a trade group founded in 1921 that publishes Pecan South magazine.

The associations Executive Director Blair Krebs couldnt find anything about this tree in their records. She also reached out to a longtime A&M AgriLife Extension pecan representative in the area, who was unfamiliar with it. There are no similar photos of this tree in the UTSA Special Collections library of Texas photos.

There have been some suggestions that the picture of this magnificent specimen more symmetrical and less gnarly than a lot of big, old pecans had something to do with the Texas Legislatures adoption of the pecan as the official state tree of Texas in 1919, but it doesnt appear in any of the news coverage or almanacs of the time.

That the pecan was designated the state tree is usually ascribed to a last wish of former Texas Gov. James Hogg, who held the office from 1891 to 1895. He was a complicated figure who successfully urged the state legislature to pass an anti-lynching law but had earlier signed a measure segregating railroad cars. He was a founder of the Pecan Growers Association and believed in the nuts future as a cash crop.

On the eve of his death, March 3, 1906, Texas lore has it that he told his daughter Ima and former law partner Frank Jones that instead of a stone monument, he wanted to have at the head of my grave a pecan tree and at my feet a walnut tree. And when these trees shall bear, let the pecans and the walnuts be given out among the plain people so that they may plant them and make Texas a land of trees.

When Hogg was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Austin, the president of the State Horticultural Society carried out his wishes, planting two pecan trees at his head and a native black walnut at his feet.

As for the photographer of the uncommonly long-lived tree, Paul Popenoe was a college dropout who went from botany and horticulture publishing and presenting on topics such as bananas and figs to eugenics and marriage counseling.

From 1929, when he received an honorary doctorate from Occidental College, one of the institutions he dropped out of as a young man, he styled himself Dr. Paul Popenoe. He was the author of a textbook, Applied Eugenics, which recommended that society encourage the reproduction of superior persons and discourage that of inferiors.

As self-appointed director of the American Institute of Family Relations, Popenoe advocated for the United States to develop a eugenic conscience, promoting births among affluent, college-educated Anglo-Saxon people he deemed of sound mind and enforcing sterilization on less well-regarded groups.

It is hard for America to get away from its tradition of equalitarianism, which is biologically unsound, he said in a column published in the Light, Nov. 13, 1938.

After World War II, when news of Nazi experiments with eugenics brought the discipline into disfavor, he segued into marriage counseling .

His syndicated column, Your Family and You, ran in this paper from the 1950s until the mid-1970s.

Occidental College rescinded his honorary doctorate in 2019, in light of his racist and authoritarian views.

Anyone who knows the location and fate of the prize-specimen pecan tree may contact this column.

historycolumn@yahoo.com | Twitter: @sahistorycolumn | Facebook: SanAntoniohistorycolumn

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Hunt is on for massive San Antonio pecan tree photographed in early 1900s by controversial eugenics promoter - San Antonio Express-News

Contraception

It represents only a weak practice for lack of means, and not for want of attempts to find it. The contraceptive spirit reigns and has led to various attitudes such as late marriages, celibacy, incitement to unnatural lifestyles. Dion Cassius reports the harangue that Augustus addressed to the Senate which was then only an assembly of celibates: you are committing murder in not begetting in the first place those who ought to be your descendants (Roman History, Bk. LVI).

It has been variously practiced in ancient civilizations.

In Assyro-Babylonia

It is punished by the Code of Hammurabi, even if involuntary or accidental. Assyrian laws provide for various and harsh penalties: the woman convicted of having practiced abortive procedures on herself is cursed, condemned to the torture by impalement, and deprived of burial were she to die before the intervention of justice.

In Greece

The laws opposed it: Lycurgus (legislator of Sparta) and Solon (legislator of Athens), disciples of the gods, have, in their laws, clearly pronounced sentences against the perpetrator of abortion. Among the Greeks of Asia, it was regarded as a capital crime. In addition, the Hippocratic Oath contained a commitment never to perform an abortion.

It was, however, frequent. A doctor named Atius gives a list of abortive means. And the philosophers regarded it as licit, with a eugenic goal. Plato says: When the men and women get past the age for procreation,well release them and allow them the freedom to have sex with anyone they wantBut before we release them, well impress upon them the importance of trying their best to abort absolutely every pregnancy that occurs, and of ensuring that any baby born despite their efforts is not brought up (Republic, 461c). It is therefore both to avoid overcrowding and to maintain the quality of children. Aristotle adds a nuance: where there are too many (for in our state population has a limit), when couples have children in excess, and the state of feeling is averse to the exposure of offspring, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun ; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation (Politics, Bk. VII, 1335b 15).

In Rome

Voluntary abortion was not considered a crime during the Republic, but it did constitute an immoral act, potentially punished by the authority of the father. When corruption had invaded the Roman city, this criminal practice increased in frightening proportions. The plebeians at least accept the dangers of childbirth and all the fatigue of breastfeeding: their poverty forces them to do so. But on a golden bed we hardly see women in childbirth, so effective are the practices and drugs that make women sterile and kill, for a fee, the children in their mother's womb (Juvenal, Satires, VI, 592-593).

It was not until about A.D. 200 that the state decided to legislate against this abomination. But long before that time, Roman law had taken steps to look after the interests of conceived children. But the legal advantages of motherhood did not apply to the woman who gave birth prematurely or to a monster, a measure seen to be eugenic.

This term refers to the practice of abandoning the newly born child, thereby dooming him to certain death, unless he were taken in, which sometimes was the goal of abandonment. This is why we must distinguish this practice from infanticide or direct murder of the child, exposure being only an indirect murder. However, the difference is quite small.

In Greece

This right has constantly been put into practice. The old custom was universal (...): wherever one could observe Greek customs and as long as Greek life had its own manifestations, documents chronicled this deadly use. In Athens the subject frequently entered the framework of theatrical plays. This large number of exposures can be explained by different causes.

It could be the fact of the young girl who was not allowed to give birth: she could be kicked out of the fathers house and legally sold. And even if she had wanted to face dishonor, that would not have spared the child.

But most often the exposure was commissioned by the father of the family. Was it frequent? One reason is the doubt about the legitimacy of the child, who, judging by history and literature, appeared quite often. In addition, many Greeks, put off by educational concerns, dispensed with raising several children. No, there is no one as unhappy as a father, if not another father who has more children.

Parents selfishness often took another form: children are expensive; girls needed a dowry, and boys long studies. You could bleed yourself white to raise a son; so if a second came, he was doomed.

But the principal reason alleged by the Greeks, was the sharing of inheritances. It was mainly girls that they tried to get rid of, an almost systematic tendency, at all times in human history and in all latitudes. This serious pitfall of eugenics always risks tipping the balance of births towards a serious and fatal imbalance. Posidippus, Athenian, gives us the rule generally followed: one always raises a son, even if one is poor; a girl, one exposes her, even if one is rich.

What did the laws say about this custom?

In most Greek cities, you would never have seen the state intervening, because the father had an absolute right over his children, a right that would be only partially and belatedly begun. In Sparta the law even provided for the child who must be keptthe others, the father could expose them himselfmust first be examined by the Elders in order to judge its conformity with the wishes of the city. A father had not the right of bringing up his offspring, but had to carry it to a certain place called Lesch, where the elders of the tribe sat in judgment upon the child. If they thought it well-built and strong, they ordered the father to bring it up, and assigned one of the nine thousand plots of land to it; but if it was mean-looking or misshapen, they sent it away to the place called the Exposure, a glen upon the side of Mount Tygetus; for they considered that if a child did not start in possession of health and strength, it was better both for itself and for the state that he should not live at all (Plutarchs Lives, Life of Lykurgus XV).

It was a concern about eugenics that presided over this review board of newborns carried out as soon as their first days, and which would therefore decide on their life or death. This council did not decide exposure but direct infanticide.

The only Greek city where childrens exposure had been effectively banned was Thebes. But it was probably at a late date, after a long history of this odious practice. Philosophers do not expiate Greek thought on this point.

Democritus of Abdera (440-400 BC) said coldly: Raising children is an uncertain affair. Success is reached only after a life of struggle and worry; failure is paid for by suffering that remains after all other.

The cynical Aristippus (born around 430 BC, founder of the Cyrenaic school) said it too, but with messy coarseness; as his wife begged him to accept his son, telling him that the child was his, he spat on the ground saying, Here is something that comes from me, and yet I don't need it.

Plato advocates a rigorous eugenics. He defends that his Republic contains more than five thousand and forty citizens and he wants the flock to be as chosen as possible. () For the children of inferior men and those of others who would have come into the world with some deformity, they will hide them, as is suitable, in some secret and secluded spot (op.cit.,460c). It is infanticide that he prescribes thus with covered words. The same is true if the parents are over the legal age for procreation.

Finally Aristotle is less favorable to exposure than to the quantitative limitation of births, because he says, if it were imposed by the state, it would be refused by the citizens (probably as an infringement of their own right to expose); but he prescribed it for the qualitative limitation: Let us pass to the problem of children who, at birth, must be either exposed or brought up: that a law forbids the raising of any deformed child.

In Rome

The abandonment of newborn children or their exposure was considered lawful from the earliest times. It was a simple consequence of the law of paternal power, but was soon subject to certain restrictions. The father, before abandoning a child, had to show it to five neighbors, who looked into whether it should be allowed to perish, because of its deformity or the weakness of its constitution. Epictetus protests against those who abandon their children: Sheep and wolves don't do as much.

This authority was also enshrined in the law of the Twelve-Tables which allowed a father to put his son to death regardless of his rank in the city. And this law not only allowed him, but ordered him to immediately kill a deformed or monstrous child. Titus Livius attests that it was considered a duty to kill the monsters, whose conservation seemed dangerous for the State.

In classical literature, examples of the exposure of children abound. I am not talking about the supposed children, who are often collected from filthy dung to deceive a husbands happy wishesThere Fortune shamelessly takes her stand by night, smiling on the naked babes; she fondles them all and folds them in her bosom, and then, to provide herself with a secret comedy, she sends them forth to the houses of the great. (Juvenal, Satire 6). It is even practiced in the imperial palace: He (Augustus) refused to recognize and raise the child whom his granddaughter Julia had given birth to after his conviction. This right of the father of the family did not disappear until the second century AD.

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Eugenics Yesterday and Today: (3) Negative Eugenics in Antiquity - FSSPX.News

The petition surpassed 600 signatures in under a day

An online petition on website change.org demanding the removal of a stained-glass window in Gonville & Caius College commemorating biologist, statistician, and Eugenicist Ronald Fisher surpassed its original target of 200 signatures within a matter of hours.

The petitions description states that the panel, located in the college hall, is pointed out to school tour groups, prospective applicants and visitors as markers and emblems of Caius glorious academic history and yet makes no mention of Fishers significant contributions to the Eugenist movement nor is it accompanied by a college programme to educate students about Fishers racism.

The description goes on to state that, by having the panel in hall, Caius students and Fellows eat, converse and celebrate in space that also acts as a commemoration of our racist history.

Fisher was a member of the Eugenics Society (UK) at the University of Cambridge from 1910, and the petition goes into some detail on Fishers works, including The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection which devotes three chapters to his endorsements of colonialism, white supremacy and eugenics. It also notes his academic contributions to statistics, but remarks: Teach evolution and statistics. But dont teach them in a vacuum. Not publicly acknowledging the racism of Fisher is ahistorical. Honouring him is immoral.

In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in Britain following the death of George Floyd, many monuments up and down the country which commemorate those involved in the historical oppression of black people and systemic racism in Britain have sparked renewed outrage, with calls for them to be removed. Protestors took matters into their own hands in the case of Bristols statue of slave-trader Edward Colston, which was pulled down on Sunday.

One of the Caius students involved in the petition told The Tab Cambridge that the college has been aware of the controversy surrounding the panel for some time and that numerous committees internal to GUSU (the colleges JCR) have brought up the panel with college as part of wider discussions in the past. But, despite these agitations, no action has been taken yet.

It is as of yet uncertain as to whether this petition will bring about the change that the Caius students who have set it up are hoping for, but meetings between the college and those involved have been organised in the wake of the petition.

The petition can be found here.

Gonville & Caius College has been contacted for comment.

Feature Image Credit: Marathon, User:Schutz (Creative Commons Licence)

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Students petition for window commemorating eugenicist to be removed from college hall - The Tab

Eugenicist Margaret Sanger stands on the steps of a courthouse in Brooklyn, New York, in 1917.

Is eugenics wrong only when its forced, or is it wrong because its intrinsically wrong?

Abortion and Social Justice was the title of a book edited almost 50 years ago by Thomas Hilgers and Dennis Horan. The title is instructive, because the editors wanted to situate discussion of abortion not as part of sexual ethics or even bioethics but as a social justice question. Nine years ago, ex-priest Thomas Williams returned to the same question, writing about Abortion as a Social Justice Issue and detailing the baneful consequences flowing from the fact that de facto abortion is excluded presently from the realm of Catholic social teaching.

Fifty years ago, abortion was increasingly recognized as a social justice issue, both in terms of the treatment of the unborn and of the conditions and situations that made women believe they needed to resort to abortion. One should remember that back then social liberals including liberal Democrats not only voted against abortion but co-sponsored a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe. William Proxmire, Thomas Eagleton, Harold Hughes and Mark Hatfield were card-carrying liberals. Eagleton was George McGoverns first running mate. (His replacement, Sargent Shriver, was equally pro-life.) Harold Hughes opposed the death penalty in the early 1960s, when opposition to capital punishment was a minority view. Mark Hatfield was half of the Hatfield-McGovern Amendment, an appropriations rider that tried in 1970 to end funding for the Vietnam War. Only Eagleton and Shriver were Catholics. They opposed abortion as a social justice issue.

I underscore the social justice nature of the abortion issue for two reasons. One is that pro-abortionists have sought to capture it for themselves. While the primary defense of abortion rights illustrates what Mary Ann Glendon calls rights talk the rechristening of a policy preference as a right, thereby immunizing its discussion as a normal policy choice and instead elevating it to quasi-sacral status (and demonizing its opponents) some abortionists (Loretta Ross, Kimberly Mutcherson, Laura Salamanca) want to recast abortion as a matter of reproductive justice, with a whole panoply of rights (state subsidy of abortion, no state indications of disapproval of abortion, etc.) following.

My purpose today in recalling abortion as a social justice issue is bound up with an interesting phenomenon: liberal eugenics.

Although the mainstream use of liberal eugenics (as coined by bioethicist Nicholas Agar and promoted by Julian Savulescu et al.) is positive, I want to explore its pejorative understanding. Catalina Devandas-Aguilar has recently noted (no. 21):

Contrary to the eugenics movement, liberal eugenics aims to expand reproductive choices for individuals, including the possibility of genetic enhancement. While there may be no State-sponsored coercive eugenics programmes, in a context of widespread prejudice and discrimination against persons with disabilities, the aggregate effect of many individual choices are likely to produce eugenic outcomes. Indeed, ableist social norms and market pressures make it imperative to have the best possible child with the best possible chances at life. Some utilitarian bioethicists have further argued that genetic enhancement is a moral obligation and that it is ethical to give parents the option to euthanize their newborns with disabilities.

Eugenics writ large tries to use tools to achieved desired biological outcomes. Eugenics got a bad name from Germany because of its coercive nature, e.g., killing the disabled, kidnapping blue-eyed blond Slavic kids for Aryanization, etc. The ill-repute that the Nazis gave eugenics even temporarily put into eclipse its Anglo-American antecedents (vigorously promoted by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger who, compared to other racists, curiously is still celebrated. We forgot that, in 1935, 28 states had sterilization laws on the books and legislation was introduced in another seven.

Legislation of abortion and, especially, advances in reproductive technologies since the 1970s have led to a eugenic renaissance. Our society is generally too polite to discuss such things openly, but procedures such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization (especially when involving donor gametes) and genetic surrogacy can and often do clearly entail eugenic and socio-economic considerations. How else does one explain that, when looking for egg donors, top dollar goes to Ivy League college co-eds, but when seeking gestational surrogates, poorer, even foreign women or Army wives, looking to supplement family incomes, will do?

One of the fundamental shifts in modern ethics is what can be called proceduralism. Because utilitarian and Kantian ethics eschew normative moral judgments (X is wrong because its wrong), preferring moral relativism (X is wrong for me), they instead focus on procedure or format. Have the relevant factors been disclosed? Has informed consent been obtained? If yes, then its OK. If you dont think proceduralism is the driving force in the ethics of medicine, just think of the number of forms you had to initial the last time you visited a doctor, affirming you were told what your treatment involved, you agree to it, you know your privacy rights, your medical information cannot be disclosed but under these conditions, etc. The point is: there is no content here, just procedure. Check the procedural checklist, and youre good to go. Consent validates everything.

That obviously has implications for bioethics.

Is eugenics wrong because its wrong, or is it wrong because it is forced? Was Hitlers crime killing, euthanizing, or sterilizing people or killings, euthanizing, or sterilizing them without their consent? And if in some bizarre world he had gotten their approval, would it have made it right?

This is not a theoretical question. It is very much at the heart of liberal eugenics.

Consider the question of states that try to restrict abortion for eugenic reasons. Indiana was in the U.S. Supreme Court last year over a state law that banned abortion when sought because of the fetus sex or disability. Modern prenatal techniques allow early identification of what sex a baby is and whether the child suffers from any genetic diseases. Note my word: I said identification, not diagnosis.

Why do I make this point? Well, there is no such thing as the wrong sex. (Most politically correct people would not admit it publicly, even if they thought it). So we dont diagnose the babys sex. But it is a motive a substantial motive in some son-centric cultures (India, China, especially under state-enforced child limits) to obtain abortions. And the primary victims of gender-specific abortion are girls because, tidal waves of feminism notwithstanding, residual I want a son biases still exist. Sex-specific abortion cause most pro-abortionists to tie themselves in intellectual knots: how does one defend a procedure that primarily eliminates female unborn children in the name of feminine empowerment?

I also made a point out of identification versus diagnosis, because rarely does an identification of genetic abnormality in an unborn child result in therapeutic intervention, even where possible. The default position in our reification of reproduction has become: defective product, lets eliminate it. Down syndrome, for example, is declining not because it is rarer, but because we abort unborn children identified with it. Some countries will soon be Behindertfrei, disability free because of such abortions.

Liberal thinkers (i.e., those who advocate a permissive procedural ethic) have to face a conundrum: are they abetting eugenics? They manage to evade the question by hewing to laws unscientific position that an unborn child is not a person possessing rights. But it does not relieve the question of the motives of persons seeking such abortions. I want this abortion because the fetus is a girl inherently involves a sexist assumption that, somehow, girls are less valuable than boys. To claim that choice sanitizes the bias is false: in no other case would we say that a preference of a boy over a girl or vice versa is justified exclusively because I prefer it. Why here?

The same problems arise about abortions because of disability. U.S. law prohibits discrimination against persons because they are disabled. Abortionists evade the issue by denying the personhood of the unborn, but they cannot evade the problem of the underlying motivation: that a disabled person is less worthy of life. That is lethal discrimination. That is what Indiana sought to stop.

In Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana the Supreme Court was faced with a case that would have stricken at the central theology of Roe that abortion can entail more than a mothers choice and the Court punted. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Indianas ban, Indiana appealed, and the Supreme Court refused to take the appeal, leaving the appeals court ruling intact without comment.

Except for Justice Clarence Thomas. He filed a 21-page opinion, in which he sketched out the lurid history of eugenics in America (including the Supreme Courts infamous and yet unreversed 1927 precedent in Buck v. Bell, upholding Virginias mandatory sterilization law). He closed by insisting that although the Court declines to wade into these issues today, we cannot avoid them forever.

Thomas opinion (which is worth reading) cited Adam Cohens book, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. Most scholars would be tickled to have their work used by the Supreme Court but, within days, Cohen churned out an article claiming Thomas had misrepresented his work, precisely for the procedural question raised above. Virginias offense was in compulsorily sterilizing Carrie Buck against her familys will; Indianas offense was in not giving parents of a disabled unborn child the choice to abort that child. Note the point: neither eugenically-driven abortion nor sterilization in itself is morally wrong. What is wrong is whether you have a choice about it.

And thats the liberal eugenics Devandas-Aguilar criticizes. The eugenic motives are the same. The eugenic outcomes (elimination of the undesired) are the same. The only difference is whether a choice was involved.

Is it permissible to make eugenic, even discriminatorily motivated choices as long as you can legally pretend their impact is upon a non-person? Does that non-personhood immunize those eugenic, even discriminatorily motivated choices from moral scrutiny? Is eugenics only bad when not a choice?

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Abortion and Social Justice: The Case of 'Liberal Eugenics' - National Catholic Register

Since it started over 30 years ago, the Human Rights Watch Festival has long sought to close the gap both geographically and experientially across the globe by presenting films that address culturally specific hardships that could be addressed with common humanity, so when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the flagship festival in New York to shift the festival online, it made more sense than most when the program is being available for anyone in the world, starting today and streaming through June 20th.

Still, the program, which will continue its unique brand of live filmmaker Q & As that will be moderated by human rights advocates sprinkled throughout the week, will hit particularly close to home for Americans for reasons beyond the ability to watch the films in your living room. It speaks volumes that programmers have picked Belly of the Beast, Erika Cohns follow-up to The Judge, her 2017 profile of Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first female to preside over a Sharia family court, to open the festival.

Moving from Palestine to California, the filmmaker follows the case of Kelli Dillon, a recent African-American parolee who has returned to court with the Oakland-based prison advocates Justice Now to raise awareness around a systemic embrace of eugenics as she learned firsthand from receiving a hysterectomy after undergoing treatment for cancer that she was later told she didnt have. Dillon experienced injustice long before she was sent to the Central California Womens Facility to serve time for killing the abusive father of her two children in self-defense, but even on the outside, Cohn finds her living with an unfathomable life sentence when she is no longer afforded the opportunity to have more children and the two boys she already has are distant as a result of the 14 years she spent away from them. Even if Cohn didnt connect the dots between Nazi Germany and California prison system as it turns out, German doctors flew across the Atlantic to adopt certain techniques from American doctors when it came to eugenics Belly of the Beast is a startling reminder that anyone who says it could never happen here is unaware that it already has for American societys most vulnerable.

If the virtual world held the promise of freeing us from prejudice based on physical appearances, Coded Bias, which premiered earlier this year at Sundance, will also have some unfortunate surprises in store as Shalini Kantayya looks at how facial recognition software used by law enforcement is being built with the bugs passed along from its all-too-human programmers, finding a 21st century hero in self-described poet in code Joy Buolamwini, an MIT Media Lab researcher who leads the Algorithmic Justice League. Other women not to be reckoned with include Carmen Aristegui, the indefatigable star of Juliana Fanjuls Radio Silence whose crusade to pursue independent journalism in Mexico where she is regularly threatened for exposing corruption is energetically captured, and Mxima Acua, the refreshingly no-nonsense farmer at the center of Claudia Sparrows docudrama Mxima, concerning her David-vs-Goliath battle against an American mining company aiming to dislodge her from her home in the Andes Mountains that is thought to sit upon gold, unfolding over the course of seven years in which she learns of the failure at all levels of the government to protect her rights as a landholder against the deep pockets of foreign interests.

Christina Antonakos-Wallace also uses time to expose unfortunate truths that couldnt be sussed out from a snapshot in From Here, which tracks four people who never feel they belong to the country they reside in from 2007 to 2019. Based out of New York and Berlin, the film wouldnt be all that eventful if it zeroed in on a particular moment when its subjects movement is limited by the constant fear that everything could be taken away from them at a moments notice since they arent recognized as citizens either by the government in the case of Tania, a 27-year-old political science grad whos been living in the U.S. without citizenship since her family fled Bolivia when she was four, or Akim, a street artist who uses a pseudonym in part to protect his undocumented status, or culturally for Miman, a German of Roma descent, or Sonny, a Sikh living in New York where his turban makes him a target for harassment. However, Antonakos-Wallaces patience pays off with a compelling look at all the ways in which the arbitrary nature of status shapes and defines the lives of those who are seen as different, from the places that are available for them to live to the types of relationships they feel allowed to engage in.

The Human Rights Watch Festival is also offering a home to two rousing festival hits, David Frances Berlinale Audience Award winner Welcome to Chechnya (our review), detailing the development of a life-saving underground operation to smuggle gays and lesbians out of the Republic when their sexuality marks them for death under the barbaric rule of virulent homophobe Ramzan Kadyrov, and the recent Hot Docs smash The 8th (our review) Aideen Kane, Lucy Kennedy and Maeve OBoyles invigorating look at the transformative campaign to give women the right to choose in Ireland. At a time when one can feel helpless, these films are a testament to what strength of will and a little ingenuity can accomplish, which could describe as well the festivals closing night selection Gather, Sanjay Rawals hopeful portrait of Native Americans across the land who have looked to the past to create future sustainability in their food supply, contributing to their self-sufficiency as a whole. In this most unconventional of years where the barriers to access to the Human Rights Watch Fest have been greatly reduced, the organizations presentation of films that show people taking back their power feels even more within reach.

Human Rights Watch Fest runs from June 11th through 20th with a full digital pass available for $70 and individual online tickets available for $9. A complete guide on how to watch the festival online is here.

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Human Rights Watch Festival 2020 Puts Power Back in the Hands of the People - The Moveable Fest

As the founder of the American Birth Control League which later became Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger was no doubt a controversial figure with disturbing views on eugenics, race, and population control.

Some argue she wanted to exterminate the black race, while others are trying to erase that part of her past.

"In the eyes of some, Margaret Sanger has been a heroine," news anchor Mike Wallace said in a 1969 interview with Sanger. "In the eyes of others, she's been a destructive force."

In her own words, Sanger strived for a society that limited births to those she deemed fit to have children.

"I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practical; delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things, just marked when they're born," Sanger told Wallace.

In 1916 Sanger opened the country's first birth-control clinic. And as a member of the American Eugenics Society, she advocated improving the 'genetic composition of humans through controlled reproduction of different races and classes.'

She often wrote about the issue in the journal she founded called The Birth Control Review.

Margaret Sanger's Beliefs About Race and Eugenics Exposed

In 1919 in an article called "Birth Control and Racial Betterment," she wrote, "I personally believe in the sterilization of the feeble-minded, the insane, and the syphilitic."

And in 1921 in a piece called, "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda," she said, "The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."

Many point to a 1923 New York Times interview as proof of Sanger's racist and eugenic motives, in which she referred to some groups of people as "human weeds."

"Birth Control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced," she said in the article. "It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extirpation [destruction]of defective stocks - those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization."

Hayden Ludwig, an investigative researcher for the Capital Research Center, has extensively studied Sanger's life and writings.

"She talked about the need for race betterment through controlling these weeds, basically undesirable people," Ludwig told CBN News.

Singing Sanger's Praise While Ignoring Her History

In 1939, after opening another clinic in Harlem, the birth control activist launched the Negro Project, an initiative supported by black leaders such as civil rights activist W.E.B Dubois.

Critics claim the program used the pretense of better health and family planning for poor blacks in the South as an attempt to limit the black race.

Ludwig says some on the left grapple with Sanger's past and how to interpret her legacy.

"They know when she writes about weeds, they know it's repulsive," explained Ludwig. "They know it's disgusting. "The left will never abandon Margaret Sanger because she's the foundation of so many of their views," he continued.

Sanger once shared her vision for a preferred race at a women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan, writing in page 366 of her autobiography, "Always, to me, any aroused group was a good group."

Despite those views, liberals praise Sanger's work while ignoring her history.

Hillary Clinton: "I Am Really in Awe of Her"

In 2009, Hillary Clinton received Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger award. During an acceptance speech, she praised the group's founder.

"I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision," said Clinton. "I am really in awe of her," she continued.

Ryan Bomberger, the founder of the pro-life group Radiance Foundation, says abortion proponents are working to clean up Sanger's past and what she stood for.

"They have to reinvent her every time they talk about her in order to justify their celebration of her," explained Bomberger.

Abortion Industry Insiders "Trained" to Overlook Sanger's Racist Views

Former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson said those inside the abortion industry are trained to overlook Sanger's racist views.

"They gave you an answer like, 'Well, I mean yes Margaret Sanger was a racist but everybody was a racist back then.' "You accept it because she is your hero and she has to be your hero and you cannot question Planned Parenthood," said Johnson.

In 1997 Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute wrote about the push to repackage Margaret Sanger in an article in the Wall Street Journal.

"The reason I call it the repackaging of Margaret Sanger is because after the Nazi regime destroyed the legitimacy of eugenics forever, they then went back and said, 'Oh she was just an early feminist. She was just an early supporter of family planning,'" said Mosher.

He went on to say, "No, she wasn't. No, she was a supporter of giving IQ tests to people. She was in favor of using those IQ tests to determine who should be sterilized and who should have children."

In a response, titled "The Demonization of Margaret Sanger," Alexander Sanger, her grandson and president of Planned Parenthood at the time, called Mosher's editorial unfair. In the same piece, Esther Katz, director of NYU's Margaret Sanger Papers Project, claimed evidence revealing, "...Sanger did not rationalize her support for birth control on racist grounds, that she never advocated genocidal policies aimed at racial, ethnic or religious groups, and that she, in fact, believed access to birth control would benefit, not eliminate minority populations."

Dr. Katz turned down our request for an interview, writing, "Our goal hasalways been to offer complete, accurate, and accessible access to the full body of her writings I believe her words and deeds, accurately represented, speak for themselves."

In 1942, Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, which has moved to fulfill its founder's goals, helped greatly by the US Supreme Court decision in Roe versus Wade.

"Under the veil of deceit and deception, 60 plus million babies have not been born because they were aborted legally since '73," said Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "One-third of that population belonged to the African American community."

It is a frightening and telling number given that blacks make up only 13 percent of the US population.

Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center says that Sanger's true mission remains alive and well throughout today's abortion industry.

"Just look at the maps, see where the abortion facilities are, they are near places where people are marginalized, people are poor, people are a minority and that's their target market," said Gainor.

Because of allies in the media and academia, Gainor also points out how speech from conservatives and others about Sanger's past, Planned Parenthood practices, and abortion is often classified as hate speech.

He said, "There is nothing as close to a sacrament in the media as abortion. It is a holy writ that abortion is protected. And anybody who comes out against it, any organization, any business, anybody, the media swarm."

And so does social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

"Facebook's new oversight board and this is really concerning, has four co-chairs," explained Gainor. "They're going to be the appeals board for content. One of the four oversight boards is on the board of a pro-abortion group. There are no pro-lifers."

Conservatives say it's also a problem that exists on college campuses across the country.

"I remember at Harvard, they laughed when I was talking about the history of eugenics and they said that doesn't matter," said Bomberger. "Planned Parenthood is not like it was in Margaret Sanger days."

Those who oppose her views say that is not true and are committed to exposing her past for future generations.

"Unfortunately, they've been very effective in recasting who Margaret Sanger is. But we keep on speaking the truth. That's why we're a thorn in their side," said Bomberger.

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'They Have to Reinvent Her': Margaret Sanger's Fans Work to Clean Up Her Racist Past - CBN News