Category Archives: Eugenics

Eugenics (; from Greek eugenes "well-born" from eu, "good, well" and genos, "race, stock, kin")[2][3] is a set of beliefs and practices that aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population.[4][5] It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher rates of sexual reproduction for people with desired traits (positive eugenics), or reduced rates of sexual reproduction and sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics), or both.[6] Alternatively, gene selection rather than "people selection" has recently been made possible through advances in gene editing (e.g. CRISPR).[7] The exact definition of eugenics has been a matter of debate since the term was coined. The definition of it as a "social philosophy"that is, a philosophy with implications for social orderis not universally accepted, and was taken from Frederick Osborn's 1937 journal article "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy".[6]

While eugenic principles have been practiced as far back in world history as Ancient Greece, the modern history of eugenics began in the early 20th century when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom[8] and spread to many countries, including the United States and most European countries. In this period, eugenic ideas were espoused across the political spectrum. Consequently, many countries adopted eugenic policies meant to improve the genetic stock of their countries. Such programs often included both "positive" measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly "fit" to reproduce, and "negative" measures such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction. People deemed unfit to reproduce often included people with mental or physical disabilities, people who scored in the low ranges of different IQ tests, criminals and deviants, and members of disfavored minority groups. The eugenics movement became negatively associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust when many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials attempted to justify their human rights abuses by claiming there was little difference between the Nazi eugenics programs and the US eugenics programs.[9] In the decades following World War II, with the institution of human rights, many countries gradually abandoned eugenics policies, although some Western countries, among them the United States, continued to carry out forced sterilizations.

Since the 1980s and 1990s when new assisted reproductive technology procedures became available, such as gestational surrogacy (available since 1985), preimplantation genetic diagnosis (available since 1989) and cytoplasmic transfer (first performed in 1996), fear about a possible future revival of eugenics and a widening of the gap between the rich and the poor has emerged.

A major criticism of eugenics policies is that, regardless of whether "negative" or "positive" policies are used, they are vulnerable to abuse because the criteria of selection are determined by whichever group is in political power. Furthermore, negative eugenics in particular is considered by many to be a violation of basic human rights, which include the right to reproduction. Another criticism is that eugenic policies eventually lead to a loss of genetic diversity, resulting in inbreeding depression instead due to a low genetic variation.

The idea of eugenics to produce better human beings has existed at least since Plato suggested selective mating to produce a guardian class.[11] The idea of eugenics to decrease the birth of inferior human beings has existed at least since William Goodell (1829-1894) advocated the castration and spaying of the insane.[12][13]

However, the term "eugenics" to describe the modern concept of improving the quality of human beings born into the world was originally developed by Francis Galton. Galton had read his half-cousin Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which sought to explain the development of plant and animal species, and desired to apply it to humans. Galton believed that desirable traits were hereditary based on biographical studies; Darwin strongly disagreed with his interpretation of the book.[14] In 1883, one year after Darwin's death, Galton gave his research a name: eugenics.[15] Throughout its recent history, eugenics has remained a controversial concept.

Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities and received funding from many sources.[17] Organisations formed to win public support, and modify opinion towards responsible eugenic values in parenthood, included the British Eugenics Education Society of 1907, and the American Eugenics Society of 1921. Both sought support from leading clergymen, and modified their message to meet religious ideals.[18] Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York City. Eugenic policies were first implemented in the early 1900s in the United States.[19] It has roots in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.[20] Later, in the 1920s and 30s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in other countries, including Belgium,[21]Brazil,[22]Canada,[23]Japan and Sweden.

The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany. In addition to being practised in a number of countries, eugenics was internationally organized through the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. Its scientific aspects were carried on through research bodies such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the Cold Spring Harbour Carnegie Institution for Experimental Evolution, and the Eugenics Record Office. Its political aspects involved advocating laws allowing the pursuit of eugenic objectives, such as sterilization laws. Its moral aspects included rejection of the doctrine that all human beings are born equal, and redefining morality purely in terms of genetic fitness. Its racist elements included pursuit of a pure "Nordic race" or "Aryan" genetic pool and the eventual elimination of "less fit" races.

As a social movement, eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century. At this point in time, eugenics was practiced around the world and was promoted by governments and influential individuals and institutions. Many countries enacted[32] various eugenics policies and programmes, including: genetic screening, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and segregation of the mentally ill from the rest of the population), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies, and genocide. Most of these policies were later regarded as coercive or restrictive, and now few jurisdictions implement policies that are explicitly labelled as eugenic or unequivocally eugenic in substance. The methods of implementing eugenics varied by country; however, some early 20th century methods involved identifying and classifying individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, promiscuous women, homosexuals, and racial groups (such as the Roma and Jews in Nazi Germany) as "degenerate" or "unfit", the segregation or institutionalization of such individuals and groups, their sterilization, euthanasia, and their mass murder. The practice of euthanasia was carried out on hospital patients in the Aktion T4 centers such as Hartheim Castle.

By the end of World War II, many of the discriminatory eugenics laws were largely abandoned, having become associated with Nazi Germany.[34] After World War II, the practice of "imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a population] group" fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[35] The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also proclaims "the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at selection of persons".[36] In spite of the decline in discriminatory eugenics laws, government practices of compulsive sterilization continued into the 21st century. During the ten years President Alberto Fujimori led Peru from 1990 to 2000, allegedly 2,000 persons were involuntarily sterilized.[37] China maintained its coercive one-child policy until 2015 as well as a suite of other eugenics based legislation in order to reduce population size and manage fertility rates of different populations.[38][39][40] In 2007 the United Nations reported coercive sterilisations and hysterectomies in Uzbekistan.[41] During the years 200506 to 201213, nearly one-third of the 144 California prison inmates who were sterilized did not give lawful consent to the operation.[42]

Developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century are raising numerous questions regarding the ethical status of eugenics, effectively creating a resurgence of interest in the subject. Some, such as UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster, claim that modern genetics is a back door to eugenics.[43] This view is shared by White House Assistant Director for Forensic Sciences, Tania Simoncelli, who stated in a 2003 publication by the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College that advances in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are moving society to a "new era of eugenics", and that, unlike the Nazi eugenics, modern eugenics is consumer driven and market based, "where children are increasingly regarded as made-to-order consumer products".[44] In a 2006 newspaper article, Richard Dawkins said that discussion regarding eugenics was inhibited by the shadow of Nazi misuse, to the extent that some scientists would not admit that breeding humans for certain abilities is at all possible. He believes that it is not physically different from breeding domestic animals for traits such as speed or herding skill. Dawkins felt that enough time had elapsed to at least ask just what the ethical differences were between breeding for ability versus training athletes or forcing children to take music lessons, though he could think of persuasive reasons to draw the distinction.[45]

Some, such as Nathaniel C. Comfort from Johns Hopkins University, claim that the change from state-led reproductive-genetic decision-making to individual choice has moderated the worst abuses of eugenics by transferring the decision-making from the state to the patient and their family.[46] Comfort suggests that "the eugenic impulse drives us to eliminate disease, live longer and healthier, with greater intelligence, and a better adjustment to the conditions of society; and the health benefits, the intellectual thrill and the profits of genetic bio-medicine are too great for us to do otherwise."[47] Others, such as bioethicist Stephen Wilkinson of Keele University and Honorary Research Fellow Eve Garrard at the University of Manchester, claim that some aspects of modern genetics can be classified as eugenics, but that this classification does not inherently make modern genetics immoral. In a co-authored publication by Keele University, they stated that "[e]ugenics doesn't seem always to be immoral, and so the fact that PGD, and other forms of selective reproduction, might sometimes technically be eugenic, isn't sufficient to show that they're wrong."[48]

In October 2015, the United Nations' International Bioethics Committee wrote that the ethical problems of human genetic engineering should not be confused with the ethical problems of the 20th century eugenics movements; however, it is still problematic because it challenges the idea of human equality and opens up new forms of discrimination and stigmatization for those who do not want or cannot afford the enhancements.[49]

The term eugenics and its modern field of study were first formulated by Francis Galton in 1883,[50] drawing on the recent work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin.[51][52] Galton published his observations and conclusions in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

The origins of the concept began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance, and the theories of August Weismann. The word eugenics is derived from the Greek word eu ("good" or "well") and the suffix -gens ("born"), and was coined by Galton in 1883 to replace the word "stirpiculture", which he had used previously but which had come to be mocked due to its perceived sexual overtones.[54] Galton defined eugenics as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations".[55] Galton did not understand the mechanism of inheritance.[56]

Historically, the term has referred to everything from prenatal care for mothers to forced sterilization and euthanasia.[citation needed] To population geneticists, the term has included the avoidance of inbreeding without altering allele frequencies; for example, J. B. S. Haldane wrote that "the motor bus, by breaking up inbred village communities, was a powerful eugenic agent."[57] Debate as to what exactly counts as eugenics has continued to the present day.[58]

Edwin Black, journalist and author of War Against the Weak, claims eugenics is often deemed a pseudoscience because what is defined as a genetic improvement of a desired trait is often deemed a cultural choice rather than a matter that can be determined through objective scientific inquiry.[59] The most disputed aspect of eugenics has been the definition of "improvement" of the human gene pool, such as what is a beneficial characteristic and what is a defect. This aspect of eugenics has historically been tainted with scientific racism.

Early eugenists were mostly concerned with perceived intelligence factors that often correlated strongly with social class. Some of these early eugenists include Karl Pearson and Walter Weldon, who worked on this at the University College London.[14]

Eugenics also had a place in medicine. In his lecture "Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics", Karl Pearson said that everything concerning eugenics fell into the field of medicine. He basically placed the two words as equivalents. He was supported in part by the fact that Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, also had medical training.[60]

Eugenic policies have been conceptually divided into two categories. Positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged; for example, the reproduction of the intelligent, the healthy, and the successful.[61] Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning.[62] The movie Gattaca provides a fictional example of positive eugenics done voluntarily. Negative eugenics aimed to eliminate, through sterilization or segregation, those deemed physically, mentally, or morally "undesirable".[61] This includes abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning.[62] Both positive and negative eugenics can be coercive; abortion for fit women, for example, was illegal in Nazi Germany.[63]

Jon Entine claims that eugenics simply means "good genes" and using it as synonym for genocide is an "all-too-common distortion of the social history of genetics policy in the United States." According to Entine, eugenics developed out of the Progressive Era and not "Hitler's twisted Final Solution".[64]

According to Richard Lynn, eugenics may be divided into two main categories based on the ways in which the methods of eugenics can be applied.[65]

The first major challenge to conventional eugenics based upon genetic inheritance was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan, who demonstrated the event of genetic mutation occurring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the hatching of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) with white eyes from a family of red-eyes. Morgan claimed that this demonstrated that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance and that the concept of eugenics based upon genetic inheritance was not completely scientifically accurate. Additionally, Morgan criticized the view that subjective traits, such as intelligence and criminality, were caused by heredity because he believed that the definitions of these traits varied and that accurate work in genetics could only be done when the traits being studied were accurately defined.[101] In spite of Morgan's public rejection of eugenics, much of his genetic research was absorbed by eugenics.[102][103]

A common criticism of eugenics is that "it inevitably leads to measures that are unethical".[104] Historically, this statement is evidenced by the obvious control of one group imposing its agenda on minority groups. This includes programs in England, Germany, and America targeting various groups, including Jews, homosexuals, Muslims, Romani, the homeless, and those with intellectual disabilities.[105]

Original position, a hypothetical situation developed by American philosopher John Rawls, has been used as an argument for negative eugenics.[106][107]

Many of the ethical concerns from eugenics arise from the controversial past, prompting a discussion on what place, if any, it should have in the future. Advances in science have changed eugenics. In the past, eugenics has had more to do with sterilization and enforced reproduction laws (i.e. no inter-racial marriage and marriage restrictions based on land ownership).[108] Now, in the age of a progressively mapped genome, embryos can be tested for susceptibility to disease, gender, and genetic defects, and alternative methods of reproduction such as in vitro fertilization are becoming more common.[109] In short, eugenics is no longer ex post facto regulation of the living but instead preemptive action on the unborn.[110]

With this change, however, there are ethical concerns which lack adequate attention, and which must be addressed before eugenic policies can be properly implemented in the future. Sterilized individuals, for example, could volunteer for the procedure, albeit under incentive or duress, or at least voice their opinion. The unborn fetus on which these new eugenic procedures are performed cannot speak out, as the fetus lacks the voice to consent or to express his or her opinion.[111] The ability to manipulate a fetus and determine who the child will be is something questioned by many of the opponents of, and even proponents for, eugenic policies.

Societal and political consequences of eugenics call for a place in the discussion on the ethics behind the eugenics movement.[112] Public policy often focuses on issues related to race and gender, both of which could be controlled by manipulation of embryonic genes; eugenics and political issues are interconnected and the political aspect of eugenics must be addressed. Laws controlling the subjects, the methods, and the extent of eugenics will need to be considered in order to prevent the repetition of the unethical events of the past.

Most of the ethical concerns about eugenics involve issues of morality and power. Decisions about the morality and the control of this new science (and the subsequent results of the science) will need to be made as eugenics continue to influence the development of the science and medical fields.

Eugenic policies could also lead to loss of genetic diversity, in which case a culturally accepted "improvement" of the gene pool could very likelyas evidenced in numerous instances in isolated island populations (e.g., the dodo, Raphus cucullatus, of Mauritius)result in extinction due to increased vulnerability to disease, reduced ability to adapt to environmental change, and other factors both known and unknown. A long-term species-wide eugenics plan might lead to a scenario similar to this because the elimination of traits deemed undesirable would reduce genetic diversity by definition.[113]

Edward M. Miller claims that, in any one generation, any realistic program should make only minor changes in a fraction of the gene pool, giving plenty of time to reverse direction if unintended consequences emerge, reducing the likelihood of the elimination of desirable genes.[114] Miller also argues that any appreciable reduction in diversity is so far in the future that little concern is needed for now.[114]

While the science of genetics has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology there is at this point no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Some diseases such as sickle-cell disease and cystic fibrosis respectively confer immunity to malaria and resistance to cholera when a single copy of the recessive allele is contained within the genotype of the individual. Reducing the instance of sickle-cell disease genes in Africa where malaria is a common and deadly disease could indeed have extremely negative net consequences.

However, some genetic diseases such as haemochromatosis can increase susceptibility to illness, cause physical deformities, and other dysfunctions, which provides some incentive for people to re-consider some elements of eugenics.

Autistic people have advocated a shift in perception of autism spectrum disorders as complex syndromes rather than diseases that must be cured. Proponents of this view reject the notion that there is an "ideal" brain configuration and that any deviation from the norm is pathological; they promote tolerance for what they call neurodiversity.[115] Baron-Cohen argues that the genes for Asperger's combination of abilities have operated throughout recent human evolution and have made remarkable contributions to human history.[116] The possible reduction of autism rates through selection against the genetic predisposition to autism is a significant political issue in the autism rights movement, which claims that autism is a part of neurodiversity.

Many culturally Deaf people oppose attempts to cure deafness, believing instead deafness should be considered a defining cultural characteristic not a disease.[117][118][119] Some people have started advocating the idea that deafness brings about certain advantages, often termed "Deaf Gain."[120][121]

The heterozygote test is used for the early detection of recessive hereditary diseases, allowing for couples to determine if they are at risk of passing genetic defects to a future child.[122] The goal of the test is to estimate the likelihood of passing the hereditary disease to future descendants.[122]

Recessive traits can be severely reduced, but never eliminated unless the complete genetic makeup of all members of the pool was known, as aforementioned. As only very few undesirable traits, such as Huntington's disease, are dominant, it could be argued[by whom?] from certain perspectives that the practicality of "eliminating" traits is quite low.[citation needed]

There are examples of eugenic acts that managed to lower the prevalence of recessive diseases, although not influencing the prevalence of heterozygote carriers of those diseases. The elevated prevalence of certain genetically transmitted diseases among the Ashkenazi Jewish population (TaySachs, cystic fibrosis, Canavan's disease, and Gaucher's disease), has been decreased in current populations by the application of genetic screening.[123]

Pleiotropy occurs when one gene influences multiple, seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits, an example being phenylketonuria, which is a human disease that affects multiple systems but is caused by one gene defect.[124] Andrzej Pkalski, from the University of Wrocaw, argues that eugenics can cause harmful loss of genetic diversity if a eugenics program selects for a pleiotropic gene that is also associated with a positive trait. Pekalski uses the example of a coercive government eugenics program that prohibits people with myopia from breeding but has the unintended consequence of also selecting against high intelligence since the two go together.[125]

At its peak of popularity, eugenics was supported by a wide variety of prominent people, including Winston Churchill,[126]Margaret Sanger,[127][128]Marie Stopes,[129][130]H. G. Wells,[131]Norman Haire, Havelock Ellis, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Robert Andrews Millikan,[132]Linus Pauling,[133]Sidney Webb,[134][135][136] and W. E. B. Du Bois.[137]

In 1909 the Anglican clergymen William Inge and James Peile both wrote for the British Eugenics Education Society. Inge was an invited speaker at the 1921 International Eugenics Conference, which was also endorsed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York Patrick Joseph Hayes.[18] In 1925 Adolf Hitler praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf and emulated eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States.

Early critics of the philosophy of eugenics included the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward,[139] the English writer G. K. Chesterton, the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas,[140] and Scottish tuberculosis pioneer and author Halliday Sutherland. Ward's 1913 article "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics", Chesterton's 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils, and Boas' 1916 article "Eugenics" (published in The Scientific Monthly) were all harshly critical of the rapidly growing movement. Sutherland identified eugenists as a major obstacle to the eradication and cure of tuberculosis in his 1917 address "Consumption: Its Cause and Cure",[141] and criticism of eugenists and Neo-Malthusians in his 1921 book Birth Control led to a writ for libel from the eugenist Marie Stopes. Several biologists were also antagonistic to the eugenics movement, including Lancelot Hogben.[142] Other biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher expressed skepticism that sterilization of "defectives" would lead to the disappearance of undesirable genetic traits.[143]

Some supporters of eugenics later reversed their positions on it. For example, H. G. Wells, who had called for "the sterilization of failures" in 1904,[131] stated in his 1940 book The Rights of Man: Or What are we fighting for? that among the human rights he believed should be available to all people was "a prohibition on mutilation, sterilization, torture, and any bodily punishment".[144]

Among institutions, the Catholic Church was an opponent of state-enforced sterilizations.[145] Attempts by the Eugenics Education Society to persuade the British government to legalise voluntary sterilisation were opposed by Catholics and by the Labour Party.[pageneeded] The American Eugenics Society initially gained some Catholic supporters, but Catholic support declined following the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii.[18] In this, Pope Pius XI explicitly condemned sterilization laws: "Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason."[146]

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Based on a task force recommendation, the North Carolina legislature is considering paying $50,000 to living individuals sterilized by the state against their will or without their knowledge. North Carolina reportedly sterilized 7,600 individuals between 1929 and 1974. However, other American states also passed laws legalizing sterilization; the first was passed in Indiana in 1907

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Examine the Chronicle of how society dealt with mental illness and other "dysgenic" traits in the final section of our website DNA Interactive. Meet four individuals who became objects of the eugenic movement's zeal to cleanse society of "bad" genes during the first half of the 20th century. Then meet a modern-day heroine for an account of mental illness and the lesson it holds for living in the gene age.

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Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement

Introduction to Eugenics

Eugenics is a movement that is aimed at improving the genetic composition of the human race. Historically, eugenicists advocated selective breeding to achieve these goals. Today we have technologies that make it possible to more directly alter the genetic composition of an individual. However, people differ in their views on how to best (and ethically) use this technology.

History of Eugenics

Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In 1883, Sir Francis Galton, a respected British scholar and cousin of Charles Darwin,first used the term eugenics, meaning well-born. Galton believed that the human race could help direct its future by selectively breeding individuals who have desired traits. This idea was based on Galtons study of upper class Britain. Following these studies, Galton concluded that an elite position in society was due to a good genetic makeup. While Galtons plans to improve the human race through selective breeding never came to fruition in Britain, they eventually took sinister turns in other countries.

The eugenics movement began in the U.S. in the late 19th century. However, unlike in Britain, eugenicists in the U.S. focused on efforts to stop the transmission of negative or undesirable traits from generation to generation. In response to these ideas, some US leaders, private citizens, and corporations started funding eugenical studies. This lead to the 1911 establishment of The Eugenics Records Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The ERO spent time tracking family histories and concluded that people deemed to be unfit more often came from families that were poor, low in social standing, immigrant, and/or minority. Further, ERO researchers demonstrated that the undesirable traits in these families, such as pauperism, were due to genetics, and not lack of resources.

Committees were convened to offer solutions to the problem of the growing number of undesirables in the U.S. population. Stricter immigration rules were enacted, but the most ominous resolution was a plan to sterilize unfit individuals to prevent them from passing on their negative traits. During the 20th century, a total of 33 states had sterilization programs in place. While at first sterilization efforts targeted mentally ill people exclusively, later the traits deemed serious enough to warrant sterilization included alcoholism, criminality chronic poverty, blindness, deafness, feeble-mindedness, and promiscuity. It was also not uncommon for African American women to be sterilized during other medical procedures without consent. Most people subjected to these sterilizations had no choice, and because the program was run by the government, they had little chance of escaping the procedure. It is thought that around 65,000 Americans were sterilized during this time period.

The eugenics movement in the U.S. slowly lost favor over time and was waning by the start of World War II. When the horrors of Nazi Germany became apparent, as well as Hitlers use of eugenic principles to justify the atrocities, eugenics lost all credibility as a field of study or even an ideal that should be pursued.

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Introduction to Eugenics - Genetics Generation

Envision every human as equal at birth; in beauty, health, mental health, social strength and intelligence. A designed evolutionary system with goals and planning would provide all of these for every human. Only then can a truly egalitarian society be obtained.

It is natural (ethical, moral, expected) behavior for the human species to modify natural processes to its advantage. As the human species learns more and more about the genetic structure of the human, and its implications in form and culture, it will apply that knowledge (make use of it). To do so is in the nature of the human. Mistakes will be made. That, also, is human. Some will use that knowledge to take unfair advantage of others. That, also, is human. The human will then learn from and overcome from those mistakes and take steps to continuously perfect the application. That, also, is human.

The first requirement for any application of genetic knowledge to the welfare and survival of the species is that each such application be technically justified beforehand. This requires that the application be pretested for validity and tested for adverse side effects. It must then be shown to have a provable net positive effect, with adequate safety margins.

The second requirement for any application of genetic knowledge to the welfare and survival of the species is that each such application be morally and ethically justified beforehand. This requires that the application be pretested for its inherent morality and all social side effects to be evaluated. It must then be shown to have a provable net positive morality, with adequate safety margins. Only then may it be applied.

BACKGROUND HISTORY OF EUGENICS A NEW EUGENICS EUGENICS IN THE FUTURE INVESTING IN THE FUTURE

It was learned from A Basis for Morality Conclusion 2 and Conclusion 4 as directed to the human species:

Since the product of life is survival, normal (expected, natural, moral, ethical) behavior within the human species is that which provides the optimum opportunity for the species survival. Individual or group behavior which supplies less than optimum opportunity for species survival, is perverted (not natural, not normal, not expected, unethical, immoral).

It was also learned from Conclusion 3 that:

The end result of life is the survival of the species (community) as opposed to the survival of the individual. In the natural process of life, the behavior and survival of the individual are subservient to the species welfare.

Considering those two conclusions as provable fact, the following text begins:

Eugenics - It's a dirty eight letter word in most circles, and it's been out of circulation for quite a while, but better start getting use to it. It's coming back. In fact many modern social engineering processes fit directly in even now. It may be given a new name, that's the way things are done now, like pornography is now mature or adult, homosexual becomes gay, the masculinizing of the female is called feminism, a degenerating social culture calls itself liberal, progressive, modern, politically correct, or democratic, dropping bombs is now called humanitarian, and abortion, with an incredible macabre twist, is now family planning.

This is a positive definition. It defines eugenics. It says what eugenics is: a science. It says what eugenics is for: the improvement of the human genetic specification. It says how this improvement can come about: through control of the genetic configuration. Read it carefully. The entire future of man depends on this definition.

This definition does not say that eugenics is a philosophy. It does not say that eugenics is a political tool for shaping human culture. It does not say that its functions are determined by imagination, conjecture, philosophy, spirituality, or ideology. It says, instead, that eugenics is a science. It produces real knowledge. It can be measured. It can be verified. It must have a desirable net effect. And, if a particular eugenics procedure does not meet these tests then it must not be used.

Unfortunately, in the past, it has not been a rigorous science, nor has it been used as a positive influence on the welfare and survival of the human species. Most of this has been due to ignorance about genetics, being based primarily on human experience, which is and was quite extensive, with animal husbandry. It works, the theory goes, on selecting and breeding a fine herd of cattle, so therefore, it should work with people. Not so!

The fact that this practice has been misused in prior (ignorant) times does not preclude its possible use today. This past experience does, however, raise warning flags about its use. The human was too eager then to use genetic control processes before they were proven to be beneficial and those processes were applied without sufficient concern about unexpected negative effects on human culture.

The primary concern in the use of eugenics is in the science. Science is based on measurable and provable fact. Scientific knowledge stands on its own proof. Science must not consider dogma (imagination, hearsay, conjecture, opinion, ideology, spirituality, political dogma, etc.) in the applied processes it produces. This concept is diametrically opposed to the modern academic elitist ideology (PC), a secular religion based on emotion. Modern social 'knowledge' is based on the conjecturing of the latest pop social author. Most, if not all, modern social 'knowledge' is dogma.

A secondary concern, one which is secondary in importance only because it should not be an issue unless the first concern is satisfied, is a matter of ethics and morality related directly to the proposed eugenics process.

Genetics engineering overlaps with social engineering to the extent that most social engineering processes have an effect on the gene pool. Some social engineering procedures have profound and long term genetic effects. Since the genetic effects of these processes were never considered, most are probably quite damaging, no one knows. The birth control pill provides a change in the ratio of births between the productive and non-productive classes, in favor of the non-productive class. Abortion provides another shift in birth rates between classes, especially between productive and third world countries. Rewarding unwed young, many are juvenile, mothers is a sure way to bias genetic structure toward those who are irresponsible.

When viewing the poverty and criminal classes, the social liberal claims cultural malfunction as the cause, rather than genetic differences, and feels that it is the duty of the working successful to provide for those who have been their unfortunate victims. The social conservative points out that schools are available throughout the US, that there are copious help wanted ads in every newspaper, and that no one is tied to a particular geographic location, so it is as much a matter of personal choice as cultural error. Therefore, don't feed the lazy bums so they will be forced to go to work. "Why should we work two jobs and have our wives work also just to make ends meet while a large portion of our money is confiscated and handed over to people who spend their days shooting pool, drinking beer and making babies?" they ask.

The social liberal then plays the other tune. "These are unfortunate incompetents who need our help to stay alive," they then claim. The liberal conservative returns that if that is the case, we should see to it that there are fewer babies in that bunch so at least the problem won't grow, a proposal that has to do with species allocation of resources and absolutely nothing to do with genetics.

"Heavens! You sound just like Hitler. What are you? Some kind of eugenics nut?" the liberal then exclaims as he then shifts back to the first condition: that there is no genetic difference between the haves and have nots, so any reproductive restriction would only be cruel.

The facts are that evolution is primarily an individual process. It is the individual and its progeny who experience the mutation. Farmers learned long ago that if a trait in an animal is desired, it must not be allowed to run in the herd. It must be isolated and carefully bred to other like animals. Put a half dozen purebred dogs in a pen for a few generations and there will be only one kind of dog. In a like manner, the human runs free. Any trait in one human will show up in others all over the world and in every class or tribe. Any attempt to adjust genetics through group control would require unbearable restrictions on personal freedoms and severely restrict the intellectual growth of the species.

This is why it so important in our society not to segregate, and favor, certain groups among the able in our social structure. Every able human should be required to work, under the same terms. This requires every able human to prepare itself for work, under equal opportunity. And every social rule should apply equally to every able human. Multiculturalism is the exact opposite in philosophy. It preaches the very social segregation causing our social problems.

Those handicapped in body, mind or criminal inclination, those who are not able to care for themselves within normal society and require public assistance, must be taken care of in the most humane and economical way possible - through institutions. To allow these groups to have more children is stupid, not from a genetics standpoint, but from the standpoint of the welfare of the child and its burden on the producing portion of the society.

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It all started with the domestication of animals by the human, perhaps two million years ago. The first was probably the dog, used for hunting, defense, a warning system against predators and other marauding humans, and as a loyal companion. It was obvious from the beginning that if a large dog was needed, it did not come from a small bitch and sire. It didn't take long to discover that the best dogs came from the best parents.

Then came animal husbandry, perhaps some 10,000 years or so ago. It was discovered that properly selected and cared for animals could provide a consistent source of food and other living materials. Cattle could be tamed and herded and produce milk, meat and hides. Some strains of cattle were better producers than others, some were easier to herd than others. Desirable strains became prized and were carefully segregated from undesirable strains in order to maintain that desirability. It was not long after that, the human found that domestic animals could be cared for without a nomadic life-style, provided food was grown for them. In addition to the animals they could also grow fruit and vegetables for themselves. They quickly selected the best plants available, then carefully selected the seeds from only the best of those. This was a very long time before Mendel.

Then, a long time ago, the human noticed the same characteristics in his fellows. The big strong man with the big strong mate had big strong sons and daughters. Not probably understanding the social implications, they also noticed that the sons and daughters of tribal leaders also tended to become tribal leaders. Royal families came into being. An understanding of heredity, perhaps limited but still a recognition, is not new to the human. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs even practiced incest to keep their blood lines clean. Greek mythology shows some of these same beliefs.

Eugenics, as it is perceived today, began in the last half of the nineteenth century primarily due to the efforts of Thomas Malthus, a preacher and Herbert Spencer, a sociologist. Their primary effort was directed toward the criminal, mentally ill and lower classes, especially those on welfare. They believed that unfettered reproduction by these groups would, in time, degrade the general population. They tended to ignore social conditions and pressures and attributed the failure of these groups to inferior genetics. They were, of course, only partly right. Whereas genetic error can cause these conditions, a large number of these conditions were caused by social pressures. At that time, however, genetic mechanisms were unknown. The DNA was not described until 1954 and the human genome is still being mapped (1999).

Sir Francis Galton, a known scientist, wrote Hereditary Genius in 1869. He described his study of upper class families in which he observed the qualities of intellect. leadership and artistic ability. His work was far more a description of how upper class families furnish superior environments for their children than any study of genetic variation. He professed to show genetic differences between the lower and upper class. He coined the term "eugenics" and called for more children from the upper class and fewer from the lower classes.

Eugenics in the US reached its peak in the pre-WWII period. Many had become convinced that the most efficient way to deal with a number of social problems such as mental illness, poverty and crime was to curtail reproduction in these classes. Involuntary sterilization laws were enacted in many states, mostly aimed at the mentally ill or retarded.

It is with Hitler and the Nazi movement that eugenics became a cursed process. Nazi Germany enacted strong racial hygiene laws in 1933. The Nazi Hereditary Health Courts was formed to review eugenics proposals and approved very many of them. As time progressed they became more and more perverse in their decisions. Euthanasia of the insane and mentally deficient, as well as others judged to be undesirable began. Aryan women were encouraged as a patriotic duty to bear more children and to select Aryan fathers.

Herman J Muller, scientist and Nobel Laurette, spoke out against eugenics as it was then practiced in his Out of the Night in 1935, saying: "with its present methods and outlook, powerless to work any positive change for the good", "doing incalculable harm by lending a false appearance of scientific basis to advocates of race and class prejudice, defenders of vested interests of church and state, Fascists, Hitlerites, and reactionaries generally," and "the more unequal the opportunities and the conditions of living are, in the society of which an individual is a member, the more largely will his success or failure, his knowledge or ignorance, his mental activity or inactivity, as compared with other men's be determined by these circumstances of his social and material environment."

Following on from Muller's line of reasoning: It has become a great fear of many that the most pressing concern raised by advances in genetic testing is that it could cause society to devalue certain individuals because of their genetic heritage. The history of eugenics in the 20th century suggests this is a legitimate fear.

The study of genetics began to emerge after WWII. The nature-nurture argument began. In their widely read book, Heredity, Race and Society, two Columbia University scientists, L. C. Dunn and Theodosius Dobzhansky asserted that, "We come into the world as a bundle of possibilities bequeathed to us by our parents and other ancestors. Our nurture comes from the world about us. What happens to the nurture that comes in depends, however, on the nature that receives it." It was even then becoming obvious to those knowledgeable in genetics, that even the application of the nurture (experience, education, training) depended on the nature (genetically specified mechanisms) of the individual.

Civil rights movements began growing in the 1960s amid growing concerns about racism in society. Those who recognized the importance of genetics in human behavior were forced by public opinion to be cautious. They still are to this day. In a display of uncommon scientific stupidity, modern political correctness (the mantra of the academic elite) sharply criticizes any scientific discovery which might possibly show natural causes for any behavioral difference based on sexual, mental, criminal, economic or racial class. They choose to believe, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that social pressures are the entire cause. Since scientific discovery is from this academic elite class, it is heavily influenced by their ideology, resulting in severe scientific hypocrisy.

The United States Supreme Court overturned anti-miscegenation laws in 1967, and the United States Congress substantially eliminated racist features of our immigration laws in l968.

E. O. Wilson, the eminent Harvard biologist, first wrote The New Synthesis (1975) and later the Pulitzer Prize winning On Human Nature. He said: "Can the cultural evolution of higher ethical values gain a direction and momentum of its own and completely replace genetic evolution? I think not. The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior - like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it - is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact".

Rational thinking is extremely difficult on human culture. The bases for all human cultures are not rational. All current human cultures were established by and are based on the irrational - the emotional drives of the human instincts. The most perfect logic fails miserably in its analysis and projection of even the simplest of cultural processes. Human culture is political, with all the subterfuge, sophistry, and dishonesty that term implies. The instant that a single bit of new real knowledge is uncovered by science, it is seized on by one or more political groups, who then twist and turn it to their own advantage.

This is why it is so necessary for humankind to reconstruct human culture, to abandon its current hodgepodge of sub-cultures based on cultural evolution (a cut and try process without goal or plan) in favor of an intellectual culture based on real knowledge, one with real plans and goals.

As the human collective culture responded to knowledge about heredity, that knowledge became politicized. One social group used it to attack another, based on social differences. Eugenics as a science became a torture machine for social inquisitions, and ceased being a science. If eugenics should become a science, and it certainly will, it must not be used as a social tool. It is a tool that may be used by politicos for right or wrong reasons. No process should use the human as a guinea pig. Each of eugenics' proposed processes must pass the test of moral analysis before being applied. That test is the net effect on the survival and welfare of the human species.

There is no detectable correlation between human construction and human behavior. Many have tried various means such as: shape of the skull, color of skin, lines on the palm of the hand, astrological sign, economic class, IQ tests, conduct, etc. Every attempt leads to as many failures as successes.

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Nature once provided man with a cave for shelter. It was not designed for the task, it only happened to be there for our use. It was cold, drafty and damp. Water had to be hauled in from a nearby stream. A trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night often meant wading in the snow for a couple of hundred yards each way. A fire that was warm enough in the cave choked its occupants with smoke. A baby with a bad cold either lived or died. The warmth of a bed of skins was shared with mice and cockroaches. There was some protection from the elements, and for that we were thankful, but it was far from comfortable.

It took a while but the human changed things. We now live in comfortable homes with inside plumbing, electric lights, central heat, air conditioning, a two car enclosed garage, and, yes, a television set.

The human genome which forms us and, through our instincts, guides us, also happened. It was shaped by the elements in the same manner as the cave. It was only partially designed for our task of that time, of living in that cave. Millions of years of trial and error left us with a genome as primitive as that cave, and it is littered with the genetic garbage of all the genetic failures along the way. It offers a living for most of us, but many suffer from its inadequacies.

The human genome was certainly not designed for modern living, and is now degenerating under an evolution which we have crippled. It's time we took a hard look at that old cave and see if we can bring it up to modern needs.

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The sperm supplies a complete copy of one of the two sets of nuclear DNA (nDNA) required for the human. This set may include an X or a Y chromosome. The mother's egg is much more complex. It also contains one of the two sets of nuclear DNA but it also contains an X chromosome, never a Y. In the new human and starting at conception these two sets of chromosomes, the genome, work in harmony to supply the basic physical and neural pattern. If each cell in the human body works properly, these patterns will result in a human being which accurately reflects the coded specification in the genome.

A human nDNA set consists of 22 chromosomes. The human genome consists of two of these nDNA sets. In the female human both sets are the same, they both carry the X chromosome. In the male the two sets of nDNA differ in that one of the sets contains an X chromosome and the other a Y chromosome. The resulting human is an average between the functioning of the two nDNA sets, the physical and neural differences between the male and female being the result of the averaging between the X and Y chromosome in the male genome.

The egg from the female, however is much more complex. It is a single cell and it carries the mother's nuclear DNA contribution. This cell also contains the mitochondrial DNA. The mother supplies all of the mitochondrial DNA. The father contributes none. This mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) provides the coded specifications for the construction, maintenance and function of the cell itself. If these function patterns are all proper, the cell is able to properly execute the commands from the genome. The actual production by the cell is determined by its position in the body. It may produce bone mass, a neural signal, blood cells, hair, skin, etc.

Within the nDNA there are function elements called genes. Each gene is the specification for the construction of a particular protein. When a gene is activated, it sends this pattern to the cell in which it resides with the command to produce that particular protein.

Cloning has recently been headline material. The first successful cloning was with sheep. The single set of nDNA in the sheep's egg was physically replaced with a complete genome from another cell source in the sheep's body. Since the egg and its mtDNA came from the mother as well as the genome, the newborn was a genetic copy of the mother - a clone. There is no essential difference between cloning a sheep and cloning a human. Cloning a male is much more difficult since there is no male counterpart of the embryo cell in which to transplant the genome from the male. Since that embryonic cell must always come from a female, a true male clone is still some distance away.

A spin-off from cloning is now quite possible. By substituting a genome that is not from the mother into the egg, a hybrid is produced which has the capability within the cell with its mtDNA but with the physical and neural specifications of the genome. Both males and females could be produced this way. They would not be clones of the mother although those features determined by mtDNA would be hers.

This division of features between nDNA and mtDNA provides an interesting and fertile ground for greatly improving the basic genetic structure of the human. Defects in the mtDNA reflect in genetic defects (diseases) which are carried only through the mother. Those could all be eliminated through perfecting the host structure of the embryonic cell (the egg). This perfection process is within the horizon of current knowledge. Such cells could be cultured. The implication is that an idealized embryonic cell could be produced, one which could properly comply with any nDNA instruction and therefore useful throughout the species. Once introduced through intervention, it would become permanent in the genetic process and carried through the mother into future generations in the same manner as now used. The mutation rate is quite slow in mtDNA so a single introduction should be good for a thousand generations or more. Periodic testing could insure the integrity of the embryonic egg within a given generational strain and if found defective it could be replaced by a new one as required.

The current mapping of the human genome has produced many tools that will become quite useful in future eugenics work. Still quite primitive and useful only for very short DNA strings, they nevertheless provide great hope for future manipulation on a much larger scale, even the human genome for example. We are currently able to read a DNA sequence into computer memory. We are also capable of taking a pattern from a computer memory and producing the corresponding DNA sequence.

The implication is that once we understand the functions of the various genes in the DNA and are able to identify those which are defective and cause genetic diseases in the resulting human, we will be able to read into computer memory the genetic pattern of a parent, make the necessary corrections in the computer, then read out of the computer into an nDNA string which can then be used in the cloning process. Once this new string of DNA is introduced, it will propagate through future generations in the same manner as the original would have done. Mutational stability should remain good, even with the normal sexual reproduction process, for many generations. If the string should mutate in future generations, the same procedure can be used again.

Future work will include investigation into the relationships between certain genetic configurations and corresponding physical and mental features. When these relationship are found, birth design catalogs may be composed. Parents may then choose to substitute certain idealized features in lieu of those which naturally occur in their own gene set into a a new gene set which may be utilized in their child. In a like manner, the instincts and moods may be investigated and substituted also. Since ideas of beauty, health and social behavior are relatively universal and uniform among humans and those ideas change relatively little with time, these attributes, once implemented, will need little change in future generations.

Each step in this development of the designer child will be expensive. At the forefront in this development will be those parents who can afford the expenditure and are adventurous enough to commit their progeny and their resources to better their own strain. This, then, is the new intellectual evolution. In lieu of death and misery for all as the tool for human development, the brave and the successful will pave the way while the timid and less successful will watch and wait. The brave and successful will be the guinea pigs that will blaze the trail. No one should be forced to participate. As the process becomes developed, it will quickly become safer and far less expensive. When the process is tried and true, then all should be given the opportunity. Genetic screening and correction should, in time become a standard part of the birth process. Only then will all humankind be truly created equal, by bringing all to the optimum condition.

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If the human society survives its current degeneration due to natural evolution long enough, eugenics will be developed and applied, even though no concerted species wide effort is made. It may take an extended time, perhaps 500 to 1,000 years, a significant period in light of the rate of human degeneration. If the society collapses before the underlying causes are recognized and corrected, then the species will become extinct.

Electronics (computers and such) is the current economic growth field. Medicine is also growing at a fast clip. The new field, however, one that will in time eclipse all of these, is molecular genetics. Modified, special purpose, life forms are being developed. Current experimentation includes hybrid biological/electronic devices, biological computer memories and research leading to the minimum molecular complexity for life. Creation of new life forms directly from biological raw (non-living) materials are quite possible in the near future.

The genome project has been enlightening. The human genome is being mapped. Current work on this project carries little resemblance to that envisioned when it started. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new techniques, ways of looking at the problem, solutions to problems not even realized before starting, have poured from the inventive minds working on it. But knowing its construction is a long way from knowing the functions within it, and how to correct it or improve on it.

A human culture is capable, when faced with a cause of sufficient importance, of a culture wide concerted effort. Witness the US during WWII and the subsequent cold war. An effort equal in scope to our military since WWII over a similar time period would provide the technical infrastructure for negating natural evolution and correcting the human genetic structure throughout the world, a gift from the US to every living human.

It would be a great adventure, collecting the finest human minds and providing them with the facilities to eliminate a sizable portion of all the ills the human is now afflicted with. We are capable of doing it to kill people, why not do it for the sake of saving an endangered species - us?

RECENT NEWS

Los Angeles Times - Washington Post News Service, May 12,1999

Healthy girls born after sickle cell gene excised.

Genetic researchers have for the first time used high-tech reproductive techniques to remove the threat of sickle cell disease from a black family's lineage.

Using a combination of in vitro fertilization and genetic analysis on a single cell taken from 3-day-old embryos, a team from the Weill Medical College of Cornell University helped a couple produce healthy twin girls who neither suffer from the lethal disease nor carried the defective gene that causes it.

Although the technique had been previously used to produce children free of cystic fibrosis, Taylor-Sachs disease and certain sex-linked disorders, this was the first time it had been used for such a common genetic disease.

(Ed., note - not only were the children protected but they will not contribute to further spreading of the disease in their progeny.)

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Eugenics - a planned evolution for life

http://www.naturalnews.com/035105_Bill_Gates_Monsanto_eugenics.html

The Gates Foundation, aka the tax-exempt Gates Family Trust, is currently in the process of spending billions of dollars in the name of humanitarianism to establish a global food monopoly dominated by genetically-modified (GM) crops and seeds. And based on the Gates family's history of involvement in world affairs, it appears that one of its main goals besides simply establishing corporate control of the world's food supply is to reduce the world's population by a significant amount in the process.

Gates also admitted during the interview that his family's involvement in reproductive issues throughout the years has been extensive, referencing his own prior adherence to the beliefs of eugenicist Thomas Robert Malthus, who believed that populations of the world need to be controlled through reproductive restrictions. Though Gates claims he now holds a different view, it appears as though his foundation's initiatives are just a modified Malthusian approach that much more discreetly reduces populations through vaccines and GMOs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus).

The Gates Foundation has admittedly given at least $264.5 million in grant commitments to AGRA (www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Documents/BMGFFactSheet.pdf), and also reportedly hired Dr. Robert Horsch, a former Monsanto executive for 25 years who developed Roundup, to head up AGRA back in 2006. According to a report published in La Via Campesina back in 2010, 70 percent of AGRA's grantees in Kenya work directly with Monsanto, and nearly 80 percent of the Gates Foundation funding is devoted to biotechnology (http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_21606.cfm).

The same report explains that the Gates Foundation pledged $880 million in April 2010 to create the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), which is a heavy promoter of GMOs. GAFSP, of course, was responsible for providing $35 million in "aid" to earthquake-shattered Haiti to be used for implementing GMO agricultural systems and technologies.

Back in 2003, the Gates Foundation invested $25 million in "GM (genetically modified) research to develop vitamin and protein-enriched seeds for the world's poor," a move that many international charities and farmers groups vehemently opposed (http://healthfreedoms.org). And in 2008, the Gates Foundation awarded $26.8 million to Cornell University to research GM wheat, which is the next major food crop in the crosshairs of Monsanto's GM food crop pipeline (http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_21606.cfm).

Rather than promote real food sovereignty and address the underlying political and economic issues that breed poverty, Gates and Co. has instead embraced the promotion of corporately-owned and controlled agriculture and medicine paradigms that will only further enslave the world's most impoverished. It is abundantly evident that GMOs have ravished already-impoverished people groups by destroying their native agricultural systems, as has been seen in India (http://www.naturalnews.com/030913_Monsanto_suicides.html).

Some may say Gates' endeavors are all about the money, while others may say they are about power and control. Perhaps it is a combination of both, where Gates is still in the business of promoting his own commercial investments, which includes buying shares in Monsanto while simultaneously investing in programs to promote Monsanto.

Whatever the case may be, there is simply no denying that Gates now has a direct interest in seeing Monsanto succeed in spreading GMOs around the world. And since Gates is openly facilitating Monsanto's growth into new markets through his "humanitarian" efforts, it is clear that the Gates family is in bed with Monsanto.

"Although Bill Gates might try to say that the Foundation is not linked to his business, all it proves is the opposite: most of their donations end up favoring the commercial investments of the tycoon, not really "donating" anything, but instead of paying taxes to state coffers, he invests his profits in where it is favorable to him economically, including propaganda from their supposed good intentions," wrote Silvia Ribeiro in the Mexican news source La Jornada back in 2010.

"On the contrary, their 'donations' finance projects as destructive as geoengineering or replacement of natural community medicines for high-tech patented medicines in the poorest areas of the world ... Gates is also engaged in trying to destroy rural farming worldwide, mainly through the 'Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa' (AGRA). It works as a Trojan horse to deprive poor African farmers of their traditional seeds, replacing them with the seeds of their companies first, finally by genetically modified (GM)."

Sources for this article include:

http://www.guardian.co.uk

http://www.seattleglobaljustice.org

http://english.pravda.ru

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_21606.cfm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eugenics_Society

http://www.naturalnews.com/033148_seed_companies_Monsanto.html

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Bill Gates, Monsanto, and eugenics: How one of the worlds ...

(This article first appeared in the January 20, 1992 edition of Citizen magazine)

How Planned Parenthood Duped America At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.

Sanger's other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists. One, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy. Stoddard was something of a Nazi enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as "scientific" and "humanitarian." And Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger associate and board member for her group, spoke of purifying America's human "breeding stock" and purging America's "bad strains." These "strains" included the "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South."

Not to be outdone by her followers, Margaret Sanger spoke of sterilizing those she designated as "unfit," a plan she said would be the "salvation of American civilization.: And she also spike of those who were "irresponsible and reckless," among whom she included those " whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers." She further contended that "there is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped." That many Americans of African origin constituted a segment of Sanger considered "unfit" cannot be easily refuted.

While Planned Parenthood's current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. The eugenic theme figured prominently in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded in 1917. She published such articles as "Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics" (June 1920), "The Eugenic Conscience" (February 1921), "The purpose of Eugenics" (December 1924), "Birth Control and Positive Eugenics" (July 1925), "Birth Control: The True Eugenics" (August 1928), and many others.

These eugenic and racial origins are hardly what most people associate with the modern Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which gave its Margaret Sanger award to the late Dr. Martin Luther King in 1966, and whose current president, Faye Wattleton, is black, a former nurse, and attractive.

Though once a social pariah group, routinely castigated by religious and government leaders, the PPFA is now an established, high-profile, well-funded organization with ample organizational and ideological support in high places of American society and government. Its statistics are accepted by major media and public health officials as "gospel"; its full-page ads appear in major newspapers; its spokespeople are called upon to give authoritative analyses of what America's family policies should be and to prescribe official answers that congressmen, state legislator and Supreme Court justiices all accept as "social orthodoxy."

Blaming Families Sanger's obsession with eugenics can be traced back to her own family. One of 11 children, she wrote in the autobiographical book, My Fight for Birth Control, that "I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jails with large families." Just as important was the impression in her childhood of an inferior family status, exacerbated by the iconoclastic, "free-thinking" views of her father, whose "anti-Catholic attitudes did not make for his popularity" in a predominantly Irish community.

The fact that the wealthy families in her hometown of Corning, N.Y., had relatively few children, Sanger took as prima facie evidence of the impoverishing effect of larger families. The personal impact of this belief was heightened 1899, at the age of 48. Sanger was convinced that the "ordeals of motherhood" had caused the death of her mother. The lingering consumption (tuberculosis) that took her mother's life visited Sanger at the birth of her own first child on Nov. 18, 1905. The diagnosis forced her to seek refuge in the Adirondacks to strengthen her for the impending birth. Despite the precautions, the birth of baby Grant was "agonizing," the mere memory of which Sanger described as "mental torture" more than 25 years later. She once described the experience as a factor "to be reckoned with" in her zealous campaign for birth control.

From the beginning, Sanger advocacy of sex education reflected her interest in population control and birth prevention among the "unfit." Her first handbook, published for adolescents in 1915 and entitled, What Every Boy and Girl Should Know, featured a jarring afterword:

It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stoop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them. To Sanger, the ebbing away of moral and religious codes over sexual conduct was a natural consequence of the worthlessness of such codes in the individual's search for self-fulfillment. "Instead of laying down hard and fast rules of sexual conduct," Sanger wrote in her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, "sex can be rendered effective and valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands of the pupil himself." Her attitude is appropriately described as libertinism, but sex knowledge was not the same as individual liberty, as her writings on procreation emphasized.

The second edition of Sanger's life story, An Autobiography, appeared in 1938. There Sanger described her first cross-country lecture tour in 1916. Her standard speech asserted seven conditions of life that "mandated" the use of birth control: the third was "when parents, though normal, had subnormal children"; the fourth, "when husband and wife were adolescent"; the fifth, "when the earning capacity of the father was inadequate." No right existed to exercise sex knowledge to advance procreation. Sanger described the fact that "anyone, no matter how ignorant, how diseased mentally or physically, how lacking in all knowledge of children, seemed to consider he or she had the right to become a parent."

Religious Bigotry In the 1910's and 1920's, the entire social orderreligion, law, politics, medicine, and the mediawas arrayed against the idea and practice of birth control. This opposition began in 1873 when an overwhelmingly Protestant Congress passed, and a Protestant president signed into law, a bill that became known as the Comstock Law, named after its main proponent, Anthony Comstock. The U.S. Congress classified obscene writing, along with drugs, and devices and articles that prevented conception or caused abortion, under the same net of criminality and forbade their importation or mailing.

Sanger set out to have such legislation abolished or amended. Her initial efforts were directed at the Congress with the opening of a Washington, D.C., office of her American Birth Control League in 1926. Sanger wanted to amend section 211 of the U.S. criminal code to allow the interstate shipment and mailing of contraceptives among physicians, druggists and drug manufacturers.

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BlackGenocide.org | The Truth About Margaret Sanger

When Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking theory of Natural Selection in 1859, it was received by the public with considerable vexation. Although the esteemed naturalist had been kind enough to explain his theory using mounds of logic and evidence, he lacked the good manners to incorporate the readers preconceived notions of the universe. Nevertheless, many men of science were drawn to the elegant hypothesis, and they found it pregnant with intriguing corollaries. One of these was a phenomenon Darwin referred to as artificial selection: the centuries-old process of selectively breeding domestic animals to magnify desirable traits. This, he explained, was the same mechanism as natural selection, merely accelerated by human influence.

In 1865, Darwins half-cousin Sir Francis Galton pried the lid from yet another worm-can with the publication of his article entitled Hereditary Talent and Character. In this essay, the gentleman-scientist suggested that one could apply the principle of artificial selection to humans just as one could in domestic animals, thereby exaggerating desirable human traits over several generations. This scientific philosophy would come to be known as eugenics, and over the subsequent years its seemingly sensible insights gained approval worldwide. In an effort to curtail the genetic pollution created by inferior genes, some governments even enacted laws authorizing the forcible sterilization of the insane, idiotic, imbecile, feebleminded or epileptic, as well as individuals with criminal or promiscuous inclinations. Ultimately hundreds of thousands of people were forced or coerced into sterilization worldwide, over 65,000 of them in the country which pioneered the eugenic effort: The United States of America.

From the beginning, Sir Francis Galton and his league of extraordinary eugenicists were concerned that the human race was facing an inevitable decline. They worried that advances in medicine were too successful in improving the survival and reproduction of weak individuals, thereby working at odds with natural evolution. Darwin himself expressed some concern regarding such negative selection:

[We] do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. [] Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. [] Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.

The early proponents of eugenics were also distressed over the observation that the poor segments of an industrialized society tend to have more children than the well-off, an effect now known as the demographic-economic paradox. It was feared that this lopsided fertility would dilute the quality of the human gene pool, leading to the deterioration of socially valuable traits such as intelligence. Indeed, this reversion towards mediocrity was suspected by some historians to be a major contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire. The gloomy prediction of mankinds decline was dubbed dysgenics, and it was considered to be the antithesis of the eugenics movement; but it was not considered inevitable. It was believed that a society could reverse its own genetic decay by reducing breeding among the feebleminded and increasing fertility of the affluent.

The cornerstone of eugenics was that everyone has the right to be well-born, without any predisposition to avoidable genetic flaws. The 1911 edition of The Encyclopdia Britannica looked fondly upon the philosophy, defining it as the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity. Prominent people gravitated towards the idea and engaged in vigorous intellectual intercourse, including such characters as Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and US presidents Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge. Supporters popularized eugenics as an opportunity to create a better world by using natural processes to elevate the human condition, both mentally and physically.

The eugenicists concerns regarding a falloff in average intelligence were not entirely unreasonable. It had long been observed that intelligence is inheritable to a large degree, and history had illustrated that science and culture owe much of their advancement to the contributions of a few gifted people. Ingenious composers such as Beethoven and Bach advanced the art of music, thinkers such as such as Pascal and Newton improved the power of mathematics, and insights from scientists such as Einstein and Hawking have furthered the field of physics. Deprived of any one of those men, todays world would be a measurably poorer place. Even before modern IQ tests existed, it was evident that a populations intelligence adheres to a Gaussian distribution, or bell curve. Consequently, even a small decline in average IQ causes a sharp reduction in the number of geniuses. For instance, if the average intelligence of a community were to decline by five IQ points, the number of individuals in the 130+ Gifted category would drop by 56%. A ten-point decline would result in an 83% drop. Although IQ testing is far from perfect, it is clear that even modest erosion of average IQ could severely compromise the long-term progress of a society.

As a cautionary measure, many US states enacted laws as early as 1896 prohibiting marriage to anyone who was epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded. But in 1907, eugenics truly passed the threshold from hypothesis into practice when the state of Indiana erected legislation based upon the notion that socially undesirable traits are hereditary:

it shall be compulsory for each and every institution in the state, entrusted with the care of confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles, to appoint upon its staff, in addition to the regular institutional physician, two (2) skilled surgeons of recognized ability, whose duty it shall be, in conjunction with the chief physician of the institution, to examine the mental and physical condition of such inmates as are recommended by the institutional physician and board of managers. If, in the judgment of this committee of experts and the board of managers, procreation is inadvisable and there is no probability of improvement of the mental condition of the inmate, it shall be lawful for the surgeons to perform such operation for the prevention of procreation as shall be decided safest and most effective.

Although this particular law was later overturned, it is widely considered to be the worlds first eugenic legislation. The sterilization of imbeciles was put into practice, often without informing the patient of the nature of the procedure. Similar laws were soon passed elsewhere in the US, many of which withstood the legal gauntlet and remained in force for decades.

Meanwhile the founders of the newly-formed Eugenics Record Office in New York began to amass hundreds of thousands of family pedigrees for genetic research. The organization publicly endorsed eugenic practices, and lobbied for state sterilization acts and immigration restrictions. The group also spread their vision of genetic superiority by sponsoring a series of Fitter Families contests which were held at state fairs throughout the US. Alongside the states portliest pigs, swiftest horses, and most majestic vegetables, American families were judged for their quality of breeding. Entrants pedigrees were reviewed, their bodies examined, and their mental capacity measured. The families found to be most genetically fit were awarded a silver trophy, and any contestant scoring a B+ or higher was awarded a bronze medal bearing the inscription, Yea, I have a goodly heritage.

The eugenics movement took another swerve for the sinister in 1924 when the state of Virginia enacted a matched set of eugenics laws: The Sterilization Act, a variation of the same sterilization legislation being passed throughout the US; and the Racial Integrity Act, a law which felonized marriage between white persons and non-whites. In September of the same year, this shiny new legislation was challenged by a patient at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck child to a promiscuous mother, and mother to an illegitimate child refused her mandatory sterilization and a legal challenge was arranged on her behalf. A series of appeals ultimately brought the Buck v. Bell case before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Courts ruling was delivered by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.:

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubesThree generations of imbeciles are enough.

With the apparent vindication of these myopic eugenics laws, sterilization procedures were ordered by the thousands. Carrie Buck and her daughter Vivian were among them. It was later discovered that Carrie had been become pregnant with Vivian after being raped by her foster parents nephew, and that her commitment into the Colony had been a gambit to preserve the familys reputation. It seems that Carrie was neither feebleminded nor promiscuous, she was merely inconvenient.

These sorts of negative eugenics policies enjoyed widespread adoption in the US and Canada throughout the 1920s and 30s, with some lawmakers contemplating plans to make welfare and unemployment relief contingent upon sterilization. In the years leading up to the Second World War, however, the eugenic philosophy received the endorsement of the Nazis, and their racial hygiene atrocities rapidly dragged the eugenic philosophy from public favor. When Nazi leaders were put on trial for war crimes, they cited the United States as the inspiration for the 450,000 forced sterilizations they conducted. The eugenic laws in the US remained in force, however, and sterilization programs continued quietly for many years thereafter. One by one the state laws were repealed, and by 1963 virtually all US states had dismantled their sterilization legislation but not before 65,000 or so imbeciles, criminals, and fornicators were surgically expelled from the gene pool. As for the legal precedent of Buck v. Bell, it has yet to be officially overruled.

Even with the shifts in public opinion, concerns regarding the decline of the species still remained. It was believed that certain undesirable diseases could be reduced or eliminated from humanity through well-informed mate selection, including such maladies as hypertension, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, and certain types of cancer. In an effort to improve general quality of life, some scientists hypothesized that the ideal way to save humanity would be for healthy and attractive women to breed with men of science. Unfortunately, no orgy of intellectuals ensued.

In 1980, millionaire inventor Robert Klark Graham took a similar positive eugenics approach when he established the Repository for Germinal Choice in an underground bunker in Escondido, California. His goal was to procure and propagate the crme de la crme of genius DNA. It was his earnest hope that this institution would spawn thousands of gifted children to offset the unbridled copulation among the retrograde population. For nineteen years he courted the semen of Nobel Prize laureates, prosperous scientists, Olympic gold medalists, or anyone with a proven high IQ. Even as news reports decried Grahams scheme to produce a master race of superbabies, hundreds of pre-screened women made the pilgrimage to his fortress of fertility. Owing to the popularity of the Repository and the stiff requirements demanded of the donors, there was never quite enough sperm on hand, and the founder was forced to spend much of his time seeking brilliant men to come to his aid.

Graham died in 1997, aged 90, and within two years his reservoir of super-sperm dried up due to lack of funding. Reports vary regarding the exact number of babies produced by the Repository for Germinal Choice, but at least 215 were born in almost two decades of operation. Only a few of the offspring have since come forward as products of the Repository, and though they tend to exhibit intellectual and physical excellence, the sample is too small to draw any concrete conclusions. Time will tell whether these superbabies are secretly plotting to enslave humanity for their own diabolical ends.

The breeding behaviors of humans remains of utmost interest to geneticists today. In Israel, the Dor Yeshorim organization was founded to provide genetic screenings for couples considering marriage. If it is discovered that both the man and woman carry the recessive gene for Tay-Sachs disease a genetic defect which causes a slow, painful death within a childs first five years the couple are advised against marrying. The same process screens for several other hereditary diseases which are common among Jews, and owing to this eugenic guidance, the number of affected individuals has been reduced considerably. A similar screening system has been successful in nearly eradicating the disease thalassemia on the island of Cyprus. Such applications align with the original vision of eugenics before it became distorted by misguided minds: voluntary, altruistic, and based upon scientifically measurable criteria. Unfortunately the imperfections in screening methods have occasionally led to bizarre wrongful life lawsuits, where disabled individuals seek compensation for their unprevented afflictions.

It is only a matter of time until advances in genetic engineering place true designer babies within our grasp, and because the offspring of such offspring would receive a complement of tweaked genes, they fall well within the realm of eugenics. It seems that the eugenic philosophy of intelligent evolution is inseparable from humanitys future and we have only just begun to open the massive ethical worm-cans. Historian Daniel Kevles from Yale University suggests that eugenics is akin to the conservation of natural resources; both can be practiced horribly so as to abuse individual rights, but both can be practiced wisely for the betterment of society. There is no doubt that the forced sterilizations in the name of eugenics were an indefensible trespass upon the rights of individuals; but considering the value of programs like Dor Yeshorim, and the potential of ideas such as the Repository for Germinal Choice, one must be careful not to throw out the superbaby with the bathwater.

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Eugenics and You Damn Interesting

Nazi eugenics were Nazi Germany's racially based social policies that placed the biological improvement of the Aryan race or Germanic "bermenschen" master race through eugenics at the center of Nazi ideology.[1] Those humans targeted for destruction under Nazi eugenics policies were largely living in private and state-operated institutions, identified as "life unworthy of life" (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), including prisoners, degenerate, dissident, people with congenital cognitive and physical disabilities (including feebleminded, epileptic, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, deaf, blind) (German: erbkranken), homosexual, idle, insane, and the weak, for elimination from the chain of heredity. More than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will, while more than 300,000 were killed under Action T4, a euthanasia program.[2][3][4]

After the eugenics movement was well established in the United States, it was spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals.[5] By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's.[6]

In 1927, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology (KWIA), an organization which concentrated on physical and social anthropology as well as human genetics, was founded in Berlin with significant financial support from the American philanthropic group, the Rockefeller Foundation.[7] German professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics, Eugen Fischer, was the director of this organization, a man whose work helped provide the scientific basis for the Nazis' eugenic policies.[8][9] The Rockefeller Foundation even funded some of the research conducted by Josef Mengele before he went to Auschwitz.[5][10]

Upon returning from Germany in 1934, where more than 5,000 people per month were being forcibly sterilized, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe bragged to a colleague:

"You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought... I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."[11]

Eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin often bragged that his Model Eugenic Sterilization laws had been implemented in the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws.[12] In 1936, Laughlin was invited to an award ceremony at Heidelberg University in Germany (scheduled on the anniversary of Hitler's 1934 purge of Jews from the Heidelberg faculty), to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the "science of racial cleansing". Due to financial limitations, Laughlin was unable to attend the ceremony and had to pick it up from the Rockefeller Institute. Afterwards, he proudly shared the award with his colleagues, remarking that he felt that it symbolized the "common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics."[13]

Adolf Hitler read racial hygiene tracts during his imprisonment in Landsberg Prison.[14]

Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by dysgenics, the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream.[15]

The racialism and idea of competition, termed social Darwinism in 1944, were discussed by European scientists and also in the Vienna press during the 1920s. Where Hitler picked up the ideas is uncertain. The theory of evolution had been generally accepted in Germany at the time but this sort of extremism was rare.[16]

In his Second Book, which was unpublished during the Nazi era, Hitler praised Sparta, (using ideas perhaps borrowed from Ernst Haeckel),[17] adding that he considered Sparta to be the first "Vlkisch State". He endorsed what he perceived to be an early eugenics treatment of deformed children:

"Sparta must be regarded as the first Vlkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses".[18][19]

In organizing their eugenics program the Nazis were inspired by the United States' programs of forced sterilization, especially on the eugenics laws that had been enacted in California.[20]

The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, enacted on July 14, 1933, allowed the compulsory sterilisation of any citizen who according to the opinion of a Genetic Health Court" suffered from a list of alleged genetic disorders and required physicians to register every case of hereditary illness known to them, except in women over 45 years of age.[21] Physicians could be fined for failing to comply.

In 1934, the first year of the Law's operation, nearly 4,000 persons appealed against the decisions of sterilization authorities. A total of 3,559 of the appeals failed. By the end of the Nazi regime, over 200 Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte) were created, and under their rulings over 400,000 persons were sterilized against their will.[22]

The Hadamar Clinic was a mental hospital in the German town of Hadamar used by the Nazi-controlled German government as the site of Action T4. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927. Hartheim Euthanasia Centre was also part of the euthanasia programme where the Nazis killed individuals they deemed disabled. The first method used involved transporting patients by buses in which the engine exhaust gases were passed into the interior of the buses, and so killed the passengers. Gas chambers were developed later and used pure carbon monoxide gas to kill the patients.[citation needed] In its early years, and during the Nazi era, the Clinic was strongly associated with theories of eugenics and racial hygiene advocated by its leading theorists Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer, and by its director Otmar von Verschuer. Under Fischer, the sterilization of so-called Rhineland Bastards was undertaken. Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centers, and today it is a memorial place dedicated to the victims of the Action T4.[23]

The Law for Simplification of the Health System of July 1934 created Information Centers for Genetic and Racial Hygiene, as well as Health Offices. The law also described procedures for 'denunciation' and 'evaluation' of persons, who were then sent to a Genetic Health Court where sterilization was decided.[24]

Information to determine who was considered 'genetically sick' was gathered from routine information supplied by people to doctor's offices and welfare departments. Standardized questionnaires had been designed by Nazi officials with the help of Dehomag (a subsidiary of IBM in the 1930s), so that the information could be encoded easily onto Hollerith punch cards for fast sorting and counting.[25]

In Hamburg, doctors gave information into a Central Health Passport Archive (circa 1934), under something called the 'Health-Related Total Observation of Life'. This file was to contain reports from doctors, but also courts, insurance companies, sports clubs, the Hitler Youth, the military, the labor service, colleges, etc. Any institution that gave information would get information back in return. In 1940, the Reich Interior Ministry tried to impose a Hamburg-style system on the whole Reich.[26]

After the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, it became compulsory for both marriage partners to be tested for hereditary diseases in order to preserve the perceived racial purity of the Aryan race. Everyone was encouraged to carefully evaluate his or her prospective marriage partner eugenically during courtship. Members of the SS were cautioned to carefully interview prospective marriage partners to make sure they had no family history of hereditary disease or insanity, but to do this carefully so as not to hurt the feelings of the prospective fiancee and, if it became necessary to reject her for eugenic reasons, to do it tactfully and not cause her any offense.[27]

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Nazi eugenics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Life is preciousno matter how short or how impaired that life may be.

In 1915 a baby boy was born to Anna Bollinger. The baby had obvious deformities, and medical doctor Harry Haiselden decided the baby was not worth saving.1 The baby was denied treatment and died. The story became national news and the cruelty of eugenic practices became public knowledge.

The year 1915 seems far removed from our modern times, but the concept of eugenics is alive and well. In 2005, two doctors from the Netherlands published The Groningen ProtocolEuthanasia in Severely Ill Newborns.2 This protocol was published to help doctors decide whether or not a newborn should be actively killed based on the newborns disease and perceived quality of life.3

In this chapter we will explore historical and modern perspectives of eugenics, how Planned Parenthood has played a role in furthering the cause of eugenics in the past and present, and what the proper biblical perspective on these issues should be.

The term eugenics was first coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, father of eugenics and cousin of Charles Darwin. The term comes from the Greek roots eu (good) and genics (in birth) to communicate the idea of being well-born.

The ultimate goal of eugenics was to create a superior race of humans.4 Many adherents believed in evolution by natural selection, but that natural selection was moving too slowly in favoring the best and eliminating the worst.5 They also believed that charity in the form of taking care of the poor and sick was prohibiting natural selection from working properly and thus the need to intervene with artificial selection.6

Artificial selection was accomplished through two types of eugenicspositive and negative. Positive eugenics focused on increasing the fit through promoting marriages among the well-born and promoting those fit couples to have multiple children. Negative eugenics focused on decreasing the number of the unfit through prohibiting birth (birth control and sterilization) and segregation (e.g., institutionalization of the unfit, marriage restriction laws, and immigration restriction).

Although many people associate eugenics with the late 1800s and early 1900s, it is an ancient idea that was in practice long before it was called eugenics. The Law of the Twelve Tables (449 B.C.), which served as the foundation of Roman Law, states Cito necatus insignis ad deformitatem puer esto, which means, An obviously deformed child must be put to death.7 Both Plato and Aristotle supported this practice8 and it was not uncommon for infants to be exposed or left outside the home for a period of time to determine if they were fit enough to survive. The Romans wanted only the most fit for their future warriors.

Francis Galton, Darwins cousin, promoted eugenic beliefs.

Francis Galton, upon reading his cousin Charless book Origin of Species, 9 decided to apply the mechanisms of natural and artificial selection to man. He stated, Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?10 Galton promoted the ideas that human intelligence and other hard-to-measure traits such as behaviors were greatly influenced by heredity (not the environment, which was the popular mindset of the day).11 He advocated for a program of positive eugenics. His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was well liked by Charles12 and had a great influence on the ideas presented in his book Descent of Man (1871).13

In the early 1900s the eugenics movement became well established in the United States. The movement was well-funded by men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Kellogg. Eugenic societies, conferences, research institutions, and journals gave a faade of real science to the study of eugenics. This was further promoted by eugenic departments and courses at the university level.

The American eugenics movement focused heavily on negative eugenics.14 Ten classes of social misfits were determined upon which programs of negative eugenics were applied.

All of these traits were thought to be inheritable.16 Ten percent of the American population was thought to fit into these broad, ill-defined categories (sometimes known as the submerged tenth).17 Many of those people were forcibly institutionalized in asylums for the feebleminded and epileptic. Although not stated in the list, those of races other than the Caucasian race would also, by the mere fact of ethnic background, be placed into one or more of these categories. Unfortunately, the eugenics movement in the United States heavily influenced Hitler and his scientists and, in return, many eugenicists and eugenic publications supported the horrifying practices of Hitlers Nazi regime. Negative eugenic practices were even sanctioned by the American government.

Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921

In 1907, Indiana enacted the first forced sterilization law. The law would be applied to mentally impaired patients, poorhouse residents, and prisoners.18 Over 30 states enacted sterilization laws, and between 60,000 and 70,000 people were forcibly sterilized between 1900 and 1970.19 Most forced sterilizations were performed after 1927. In 1927 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck20 (in Buck v. Bell) with justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stating, It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime ... society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. ... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.21

The Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas on the number of people allowed into the United States from other countries. Lawmakers were heavily influenced by scientific data presented to them by high-ranking members of the eugenics movement.22

These laws (which varied by state) were designed to keep the Caucasian race pure. The laws prohibited mixed race marriages (i.e., Negro and Caucasian) but also marriages with those considered defective (e.g., blind).

The Christian response to eugenics was mixed. The Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton condemned eugenics in his 1922 book Eugenics and Other Evils. He saw how eugenics was being used in Germany to support Nazi ideals.23

However, some pastors used their pulpits to promote eugenics. The American Eugenics Society sponsored a sermon contest in 1926. Of the five sermons I read online, all were filled with popular rhetoric from the eugenics movement with little scriptural support given for eugenics. The pastors seemed to have accepted the science of eugenics without analyzing it in light of the Bible.24 This is very similar to the modern situation in which many Christian pastors accept the science of evolution, promote the idea in their churches, and dont analyze the conflicts between evolution and Scripture.

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, promoted birth control as a means of controlling the unfit in society.

The name most commonly associated with Planned Parenthood is that of its founder Margaret Sanger. Margaret was born in 1879, the 6th of 11 children in a poor family, in New York.25 She was initially quite committed to the Catholic faith but eventually became very cynical in part due to the influence of her free thinking father.26 Margaret married into money and eventually became an active member of the Socialist Party. She was attracted to the partys fight for womens suffrage, sexual liberation, feminism, and birth control.27 Sanger also became a fan of the concepts promoted by Thomas Malthus (who also heavily influenced C
harles Darwin in the development of the concept of evolution by natural selection). Malthus was concerned that the human population was growing too rapidly (especially the poor, diseased, and racially inferior) and would outgrow natural resources. The solution proposed by his followers, like Sanger, was to decrease and eliminate the inferior population through birth control (including sterilization and abortion).28 Sanger stated, The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.29

Sanger became one of the foremost champions of birth control and not just for the benign reason of helping poor women who could not afford large families, but also for the liberation of sexual desire and the new science of eugenics.30 In 1921 she organized the American Birth Control League. In 1922 she published the book The Pivot of Civilization which unashamedly called for the elimination of human weeds, for the cessation of charity, for the segregation of morons, misfits, and the maladjusted and for the sterilization of genetically inferior races. 31 Sanger stated:

Her magazine, The Birth Control Review, contained many articles authored by leading eugenicists of her day. Sanger openly endorsed the concepts and methods of race purification carried out by the Nazis.33 Sanger believed sex was an evolutionary force that should not be prohibited because of its ability to create genius.34 In 1942, the American Birth Control League became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA).

Eugenics became associated with the horrors of the Nazi regime in the 1940s and so its popularity in the public arena began to fade. In addition, much of the so-called science of eugenics was shown to be false by increased knowledge in the field of genetics. It became almost laughable to think that the eugenic-defined trait of sense of humor (no pun intended!) could be associated with a particular gene and/or somehow quantified.

However, eugenic concepts and the eugenic ideals of PPFA didnt die. Edwin Black states, While human genetics was becoming established in America, eugenics did not die out. It became quiet and careful.35 The eugenic agenda today is not different in principle or goal but only in name and methods. Eugenicist Frederick Osborn in 1965 stated, The term medical genetics has taken the place of the term negative eugenics.36 Genetic databases filled with individual genetic identities could now generate precise family genetic profiles as opposed to the subjective determination of non-measurable traits by self or other family members stored on millions of index cards that filled eugenic institutions in the early 20th century. In recent years, many feared the adverse use of genetic identities and profiles when applying for jobs and insurance.37

James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, stated in 2003, If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease. The lower 10 percent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, whats the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, Well, poverty, things like that, It probably isnt. So Id like to get rid of that, to help lower the 10 percent.38 The idea of the submerged tenth is still alive and well in the 21st century.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) allows parents who have embryos created for use in in vitro fertilization (IVF) to check for genetic disorders and chromosomal abnormalities before the embryos are implanted. The defective embryos are destroyed. PGD is also being used for sex selection (only babies of the desired sex are used for IVF), disability selection (e.g., deafness), and predisposition or late-onset disease selection (i.e., predispositions to cancer and late-onset diseases like Alzheimers).39 Embryos are destroyed if they are not the desired sex, will have a disability, or may have cancer or disease later in life. PPFA endorses prenatal diagnosis procedures and genetic counseling.40 Eugenic concepts of prohibiting the birth of the unfits is still popular in the 21st century.

Planned Parenthood still endorses many eugenic ideas. This should not be surprising as the PPFA website History and Successes page clearly states, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, is one of the movements great heroes. Sangers early efforts remain the hallmark of Planned Parenthoods mission. ...41 Sangers efforts advocated sterilization, abortion, and infanticide of defectives in the name of eugenics. Further indicative of the promotion of eugenics, PPFA endorses abortion of deformed babies:

Thus, those infants who are gravely deformed should have been permitted to be eliminated according to PPFA. According to the American Life League, in 2006 PPFA was directly responsible (through its clinics) for 289,750 abortions.43 Thus, PPFA was responsible for almost 25 percent of the abortions estimated to have occurred in the U.S. in 2006.44

PPFA also still advocates for sexual liberation by encouraging the concept that sex and sexual desire is part of a normal, healthy lifestyle.45 These concepts are in line with Sangers view of sex, which she wrote about in a letter to her 16-year-old granddaughter: Kissing, petting, and even intercourse are alright as long as they are sincere.46 Alan Guttmacher, former president of PPFA stated, We are merely walking down the path that Mrs. Sanger carved out for us.47 How true!

When we start with the truth of Gods Word, we see that eugenics and the ideas promoted by Planned Parenthood do not align with the Bible.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).

And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth (Acts 17: (26a)).

God doesnt care whether people have dark brown skin or light brown skin, whether they are deaf or have perfect hearing God does not show partiality.

Then God said, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Genesis 1:2627).

For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mothers womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them (Psalm 139:1316).

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16).

God created each of us individually and we are His image-bearers on earth. He loved us so much that He sent His Son Jesus to die for us so that we might have eternal life.

You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child. If you afflict them in any way, and they cry at all to Me, I will surely hear their cry (Exodus 22:2123).

Then the King will say to those on His right hand, Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I
was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me (Matthew 25:3436).

God commands us to care for people no matter what their affliction.

My friends John and Tina were told after 19 years of marriage that they were going to have a baby.48 They were very excited and then the news came that the baby might have a chromosomal abnormality. Tina shared with me:

John said:

As difficult as Edens death was, we cherish our time with her. My heart breaks for those who lose their child before birth due to miscarriage or abortion. They have missed out on a marvelous experience with a new life.

The seven days we had with Eden were more glorious than I can describe. I will hold on to those precious memories for the rest of my life.50

Life is preciousno matter how short or how impaired that life may be. Contrary to the ideas supported by eugenics and Planned Parenthood, all human life has value because it comes from the Life Giver.

More here:
What about Eugenics and Planned Parenthood? | Answers in Genesis

In August 1912, Harvard president emeritus Charles William Eliot addressed the Harvard Club of San Francisco on a subject close to his heart: racial purity. It was being threatened, he declared, by immigration. Eliot was not opposed to admitting new Americans, but he saw the mixture of racial groups it could bring about as a grave danger. Each nation should keep its stock pure, Eliot told his San Francisco audience. There should be no blending of races.

Eliots warning against mixing raceswhich for him included Irish Catholics marrying white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Jews marrying Gentiles, and blacks marrying whiteswas a central tenet of eugenics. The eugenics movement, which had begun in England and was rapidly spreading in the United States, insisted that human progress depended on promoting reproduction by the best people in the best combinations, and preventing the unworthy from having children.

The former Harvard president was an outspoken supporter of another major eugenic cause of his time: forced sterilization of people declared to be feebleminded, physically disabled, criminalistic, or otherwise flawed. In 1907, Indiana had enacted the nations first eugenic sterilization law. Four years later, in a paper on The Suppression of Moral Defectives, Eliot declared that Indianas law blazed the trail which all free states must follow, if they would protect themselves from moral degeneracy.

He also lent his considerable prestige to the campaign to build a global eugenics movement. He was a vice president of the First International Eugenics Congress, which met in London in 1912 to hear papers on racial suicide among Northern Europeans and similar topics. Two years later, Eliot helped organize the First National Conference on Race Betterment in Battle Creek, Michigan.

None of these actions created problems for Eliot at Harvard, for a simple reason: they were well within the intellectual mainstream at the University. Harvard administrators, faculty members, and alumni were at the forefront of American eugenicsfounding eugenics organizations, writing academic and popular eugenics articles, and lobbying government to enact eugenics laws. And for many years, scarcely any significant Harvard voices, if any at all, were raised against it.

Harvards role in the movement was in many ways not surprising. Eugenics attracted considerable support from progressives, reformers, and educated elites as a way of using science to make a better world. Harvard was hardly the only university that was home to prominent eugenicists. Stanfords first president, David Starr Jordan, and Yales most acclaimed economist, Irving Fisher, were leaders in the movement. The University of Virginia was a center of scientific racism, with professors like Robert Bennett Bean, author of such works of pseudo-science as the 1906 American Journal of Anatomy article, Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain.

But in part because of its overall prominence and influence on society, and in part because of its sheer enthusiasm, Harvard was more central to American eugenics than any other university. Harvard has, with some justification, been called the brain trust of twentieth-century eugenics, but the role it played is little remembered or remarked upon today.It is understandable that the University is not eager to recall its part in that tragically misguided intellectual movementbut it is a chapter too important to be forgotten.In part because of its overall prominence and influence on society, and in part because of its sheer enthusiasm, Harvard was more central to American eugenics than any other university.

Eugenics emerged in England in the late 1800s, when Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin, began studying the families of some of historys greatest thinkers and concluded that genius was hereditary. Galton invented a new wordcombining the Greek for good and genesand launched a movement calling for society to take affirmative steps to promote the more suitable races or strains of blood. Echoing his famous half cousins work on evolution, Galton declared that what Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.

Eugenics soon made its way across the Atlantic, reinforced by the discoveries of Gregor Mendel and the new science of genetics. In the United States, it found some of its earliest support among the same group that Harvard had: the wealthy old families of Boston. The Boston Brahmins were strong believers in the power of their own bloodlines, and it was an easy leap for many of them to believe that society should work to make the nations gene pool as exalted as their own.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.A.B. 1829, M.D. 36, LL.D. 80, dean of Harvard Medical School, acclaimed writer, and father of the future Supreme Court justicewas one of the first American intellectuals to espouse eugenics. Holmes, whose ancestors had been at Harvard since John Oliver entered with the class of 1680, had been writing about human breeding even before Galton. He had coined the phrase Boston Brahmin in an 1861 book in which he described his social class as a physical and mental elite, identifiable by its noble physiognomy and aptitude for learning, which he insisted were congenital and hereditary.

Holmes believed eugenic principles could be used to address the nations social problems. In an 1875 article in The Atlantic Monthly, he gave Galton an early embrace, and argued that his ideas could help to explain the roots of criminal behavior. If genius and talent are inherited, as Mr. Galton has so conclusively shown, Holmes wrote, why should not deep-rooted moral defectsshow themselvesin the descendants of moral monsters?

As eugenics grew in popularity, it took hold at the highest levels of Harvard. A. Lawrence Lowell, who served as president from 1909 to 1933, was an active supporter. Lowell, who worked to impose a quota on Jewish students and to keep black students from living in the Yard, was particularly concerned about immigrationand he joined the eugenicists in calling for sharp limits. The need for homogeneity in a democracy, he insisted, justified laws resisting the influx of great numbers of a greatly different race.

Lowell also supported eugenics research. When the Eugenics Record Office, the nations leading eugenics research and propaganda organization, asked for access to Harvard records to study the physical and intellectual attributes of alumni fathers and sons, he readily agreed. Lowell had a strong personal interest in eugenics research, his secretary noted in response to the request.

The Harvard faculty contained some of nations most influential eugenics thinkers, in an array of academic disciplines. Frank W. Taussig, whose 1911 Principles of Economics was one of the most widely adopted economics textbooks of its time, called for sterilizing unworthy individuals, with a particular focus on the lower classes. The human race could be immensely improved in quality, and its capacity for happy living immensely increased, if those of poor physical and mental endowment were prevented from multiplying, he wrote. Certain types of criminals and paupers breed only their kind, and society has a right and a duty to protect its members from the repeated burden of maintaining and guarding such parasites.

Harvards geneticists gave important support to Galtons fledgling would-be science. Botanist Edward M. East, who taught at Harvards Bussey Institution, propounded a particularly racial version of eugenics. In his 1919 book Inbreeding and Outbreeding: Their Genetic and Sociologi
cal Significance, East warned that race mixing would diminish the white race, writing: Races have arisen which are as distinct in mental capacity as in physical traits. The simple fact, he said, was that the negro is inferior to the white.

East also sounded a biological alarm about the Jews, Italians, Asians, and other foreigners who were arriving in large numbers. The early settlers came from stock which had made notable contributions to civilization, he asserted, whereas the new immigrants were coming in increasing numbers from peoples who have impressed modern civilization but lightly. There was a distinct possibility, he warned, that a considerable part of these people are genetically undesirable.

In his 1923 book, Mankind at the Crossroads, Easts pleas became more emphatic. The nation, he said, was being overrun by the feebleminded, who were reproducing more rapidly than the general population. And we expect to restore the balance by expecting the latter to compete with them in the size of their families? East wrote. No! Eugenics is sorely needed; social progress without it is unthinkable.

Easts Bussey Institution colleague William Ernest Castle taught a course on Genetics and Eugenics, one of a number of eugenics courses across the University. He also published a leading textbook by the same name that shaped the views of a generation of students nationwide. Genetics and Eugenics not only identified its author as Professor of Zoology in Harvard University, but was published by Harvard University Press and bore the Veritas seal on its title page, lending the appearance of an imprimatur to his strongly stated views.

In Genetics and Eugenics, Castle explained that race mixing, whether in animals or humans, produced inferior offspring. He believed there were superior and inferior races, and that racial crossing benefited neither. From the viewpoint of a superior race there is nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race, he wrote. From the viewpoint of the inferior race also the cross is undesirable if the two races live side by side, because each race will despise individuals of mixed race and this will lead to endless friction.

Castle also propounded the eugenicists argument that crime, prostitution, and pauperism were largely due to feeblemindedness, which he said was inherited. He urged that the unfortunate individuals so afflicted be sterilized or, in the case of women, segregated in institutions during their reproductive years to prevent them from having children.

Like his colleague East, Castle was deeply concerned about the biological impact of immigration. In some parts of the country, he said, the good human stock was dying outand being replaced by a European peasant population. Would this new population be a fit substitute for the old Anglo-Saxon stock? Castles answer: Time alone will tell.

One of Harvards most prominent psychology professors was a eugenicist who pioneered the use of questionable intelligence testing. Robert M. Yerkes, A.B. 1898, Ph.D. 02, published an introductory psychology textbook in 1911 that included a chapter on Eugenics and Mental Life. In it, he explained that the cure for race deterioration is the selection of the fit as parents.

Yerkes, who taught courses with such titles as Educational Psychology, Heredity, and Eugenics and Mental Development in the Race, developed a now-infamous intelligence test that was administered to 1.75 million U.S. Army enlistees in 1917. The test purported to find that more than 47 percent of the white test-takers, and even more of the black ones, were feebleminded. Some of Yerkess questions were straightforward language and math problems, but others were more like tests of familiarity with the dominant culture: one asked, Christy Mathewson is famous as a: writer, artist, baseball player, comedian. The journalist Walter Lippmann, A.B. 1910, Litt.D. 44, said the results were not merely inaccurate, but nonsense, with no more scientific foundation than a hundred other fads, vitamins, or correspondence courses in will power. The 47 percent feebleminded claim was an absurd result unless, as Harvards late professor of geology Stephen Jay Gould put it, the United States was a nation of morons. But the Yerkes findings were widely accepted and helped fuel the drives to sterilize unfit Americans and keep out unworthy immigrants.The Yerkes findings were widely accepted and helped fuel the drives to sterilize unfit Americans and keep out unworthy immigrants.

Another eugenicist in a key position was William McDougall, who held the psychology professorship William James had formerly held. His 1920 book The Group Mind explained that the negro race had never produced any individuals of really high mental and moral endowments and was apparently incapable of doing so. His next book, Is America Safe for Democracy (1921), argued that civilizations declined because of the inadequacy of the qualities of the people who are the bearers of itand advocated eugenic sterilization.

Harvards embrace of eugenics extended to the athletic department. Dudley Allen Sargent, who arrived in 1879 to direct Hemenway Gymnasium, infused physical education at the College with eugenic principles, including his conviction that certain kinds of exercise were particularly important for female students because they built strong pelvic muscleswhich over time could advantage the gene pool. In giving birth to a childno amount of mental and moral education will ever take the place of a large well-developed pelvis with plenty of muscular and organic power behind it, Sargent stated. The presence of large female pelvises, he insisted, would determine whether large brainy children shall be born at all.

Sargent, who presided over Hemenway for 40 years, used his position as a bully pulpit. In 1914, he addressed the nations largest eugenic gathering, the Race Betterment Conference, in Michigan, at which one of the main speakers called for eugenic sterilization of the worthless one tenth of the nation. Sargent told the conference that, based on his long experience and careful observation of Harvard and Radcliffe students, physical educationis one of the most important factors in the betterment of the race.

If Harvards embrace of eugenics had somehow remained within University confinesas merely an intellectual school of thoughtthe impact might have been contained. But members of the community took their ideas about genetic superiority and biological engineering to Congress, to the courts, and to the public at largewith considerable effect.

In 1894, a group of alumni met in Boston to found an organization that took a eugenic approach to what they considered the greatest threat to the nation: immigration. Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Charles Warren, and Robert DeCourcy Ward were young scions of old New England families, all from the class of 1889. They called their organization the Immigration Restriction League, but genetic thinking was so central to their mission that Hall proposed calling it the Eugenic Immigration League. Joseph Lee, A.B. 1883, A.M.-J.D. 87, LL.D. 26, scion of a wealthy Boston banking family and twice elected a Harvard Overseer, was a major funder, and William DeWitt Hyde A. B. 1879, S.T.D. 86, another future Overseer and the president of Bowdoin College, served as a vice president. The membership rolls quickly filled with hundreds of people united in xenophobia, many of them Boston Brahmins and Harvard graduates.

Their goal was to keep out groups they regarded as biologically undesirable. Immigration was a race question, pure and simple, Ward said. It is fundamenta
lly a question as towhat races shall dominate in the country. League members made no secret of whom they meant: Jews, Italians, Asians, and anyone else who did not share their northern European lineage.

Drawing on Harvard influence to pursue its goalsrecruiting alumni to establish branches in other parts of the country and boasting President Lowell himself as its vice presidentthe Immigration Restriction League was remarkably effective in its work. Its first major proposal was a literacy test, not only to reduce the total number of immigrants but also to lower the percentage from southern and eastern Europe, where literacy rates were lower. In 1896the league persuaded Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, A.B. 1871, LL.B. 74, Ph.D. 76, LL.D. 04, to introduce a literacy bill. Getting it passed and signed into law took time, but beginning in 1917, immigrants were legally required to prove their literacy to be admitted to the country.

The league scored a far bigger victory with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. After hearing extensive expert testimony about the biological threat posed by immigrants, Congress imposed harsh national quotas designed to keep Jews, Italians, and Asians out. As the percentage of immigrants from northern Europe increased significantly, Jewish immigration fell from 190,000 in 1920 to 7,000 in 1926; Italian immigration fell nearly as sharply; and immigration from Asia was almost completely cut off until 1952.

While one group of alumni focused on inserting eugenics into immigration, another prominent alumnus was taking the lead of the broader movement. Charles Benedict Davenport, A.B. 1889, Ph.D. 92, taught zoology at Harvard before founding the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1910. Funded in large part by Mrs. E.H. Harriman, widow of the railroad magnate, the E.R.O. became a powerful force in promoting eugenics. It was the main gathering place for academics studying eugenics, and the driving force in promoting eugenic sterilization laws nationwide.Davenport explained that qualities like criminality and laziness were genetically determined.

Davenport wrote prolifically. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, published in 1911,quickly became the standard text for the eugenics courses cropping up at colleges and universities nationwide, and was cited by more than one-third of high-school biology textbooks of the era. Davenport explained that qualities like criminality and laziness were genetically determined. When both parents are shiftless in some degree, he wrote, only about 15 percent of their children would be industrious.

But perhaps no Harvard eugenicist had more impact on the public consciousness than Lothrop Stoddard, A.B. 1905, Ph.D. 14. His bluntly titled 1920 bestseller, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, had 14 printings in its first three years, drew lavish praise from President Warren G. Harding, and made a mildly disguised appearance in The Great Gatsby, when Daisy Buchanans husband, Tom, exclaimed that civilizations going to piecessomething hed learned by reading The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard.

When eugenics reached a high-water mark in 1927, a pillar of the Harvard community once again played a critical role. In that year, the Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell, a constitutional challenge to Virginias eugenic sterilization law. The case was brought on behalf of Carrie Buck, a young woman who had been designated feebleminded by the state and selected for eugenic sterilization. Buck was, in fact, not feebleminded at all. Growing up in poverty in Charlottesville, she had been taken in by a foster family and then raped by one of its relatives. She was declared feebleminded because she was pregnant out of wedlock, and she was chosen for sterilization because she was deemed to be feebleminded.

By an 8-1 vote, the justices upheld the Virginia law and Bucks sterilizationand cleared the way for sterilizations to continue in about half the country, where there were similar laws. The majority opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., A.B. 1861, LL.B. 66, LL.D. 95, a former Harvard Law School professor and Overseer. Holmes, who shared his fathers deep faith in bloodlines, did not merely give Virginia a green light: he urged the nation to get serious about eugenics and prevent large numbers of unfit Americans from reproducing. It was necessary to sterilize people who sap the strength of the State, Holmes insisted, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. His opinion included one of the most brutal aphorisms in American law, saying of Buck, her mother, and her perfectly normal infant daughter: Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

In the same week the Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell, Harvard made eugenics news of its own. It turned down a $60,000 bequest from Dr. J. Ewing Mears, a Philadelphia surgeon, to fund instruction in eugenics in all its branches, notably that branch relating to the treatment of the defective and criminal classes by surgical procedures.

Harvards decision, reported on the front page of The New York Times, appeared to be a counterweight to the Supreme Courts ruling. But the Universitys decision had been motivated more by reluctance to be coerced into a particular position on sterilization than by any institutional opposition to eugenicswhich it continued to embrace.

Eugenics followed much the same arc at Harvard as it did in the nation at large. Interest began to wane in the 1930s, as the field became more closely associated with the Nazi government that had taken power in Germany. By the end of the decade, Davenport had retired and the E.R.O. had shut down; the Carnegie Institution, of which it was part, no longer wanted to support eugenics research and advocacy. As the nation went to war against a regime that embraced racism, eugenics increasingly came to be regarded as un-American.

It did not, however, entirely fade awayat the University, or nationally. Earnest Hooton, chairman of the anthropology department, was particularly outspoken in support of what he called a biological purge. In 1936, while the first German concentration camps were opening, he made a major plea for eugenic sterilizationthough he emphasized that it should not target any race or religion.

Hooton believed it was imperative for society to remove its worthless people. Our real purpose, he declared in a speech that was quoted in The New York Times, should be to segregate and to eliminate the unfit, worthless, degenerate and anti-social portion of each racial and ethnic strain in our population, so that we may utilize the substantial merits of its sound majority, and the special and diversified gifts of its superior members.Our real purposeshould be to segregate and to eliminate the unfit, worthless, degenerate and anti-social portion of each racial and ethnic strain in our population, so that we may utilize the substantial merits of its sound majority.

None of the news out of Germany after the war made Hooton abandon his views. There can be little doubt of the increase during the past fifty years of mental defectives, psychopaths, criminals, economic incompetents and the chronically diseased, he wrote in Redbook magazine in 1950. We owe this to the intervention of charity, welfare and medical science, and to the reckless breeding of the unfit.

The United States also held onto eugenics, if not as enthusiastically as it once did. In 1942, with the war against the Nazis raging, the Supreme Court had a chance to overturn Buck v. Bell and hold eugenic sterilization unconstitutional, but it d
id not. The court struck down an Oklahoma sterilization law, but on extremely narrow groundsleaving the rest of the nations eugenic sterilization laws intact. Only after the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s, and changes in popular views toward marginalized groups, did eugenic sterilization begin to decline more rapidly. But states continued to sterilize the unfit until 1981.

Today, the American eugenics movement is often thought of as an episode of national follylike 1920s dance marathons or Prohibitionwith little harm done. In fact, the harm it caused was enormous.

As many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized for eugenic reasons, while important members of the Harvard community cheered andas with Eliot, Lowell, and Holmescalled for more. Many of those 70,000 were simply poor, or had done something that a judge or social worker didnt like, oras in Carrie Bucks casehad terrible luck. Their lives were changed foreverBuck lost her daughter to illness and died childless in 1983, not understanding until her final years what the state had done to her, or why she had been unable to have more children.

Also affected were the many people kept out of the country by the eugenically inspired immigration laws of the 1920s. Among them were a large number of European Jews who desperately sought to escape the impending Holocaust. A few years ago, correspondence was discovered from 1941 in which Otto Frank pleaded with the U.S. State Department for visas for himself, his wife, and his daughters Margot and Anne. It is understood today that Anne Frank died because the Nazis considered her a member of an inferior race, but few appreciate that her death was also due, in part, to the fact that many in the U.S. Congress felt the same way.

There are important reasons for remembering, and further exploring, Harvards role in eugenics. Colleges and universities today are increasingly interrogating their paststhinking about what it means to have a Yale residential college named after John C. Calhoun, a Princeton school named after Woodrow Wilson, or slaveholder Isaac Royalls coat of arms on the Harvard Law School shield and his name on a professorship endowed by his will.

Eugenics is a part of Harvards history. It is unlikely that Eliot House or Lowell House will be renamed, but there might be a way for the University community to spare a thought for Carrie Buck and others who paid a high price for the harmful ideas that Harvard affiliates played a major role in propounding.

There are also forward-looking reasons to revisit this dark moment in the Universitys past. Biotechnical science has advanced to the brink of a new era of genetic possibilities. In the next few years, the headlines will be full of stories about gene-editing technology, genetic solutions for a variety of human afflictions and frailties, and even designer babies. Given that Harvard affiliates, again, will play a large role in all of these, it is important to contemplate how wrong so many people tied to the University got it the first timeand to think hard about how, this time, to get it right.

Read more here:
Harvard's eugenics era | Harvard Magazine