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Category Archives: Eugenics

PUP's Jacqui Lambie compares parental leave to eugenics

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Palmer United Party senator-elect Jacqui Lambie. Photo: Peter Mathew

Tasmanian senator-elect Jacqui Lambie has compared the Coalition's paid parental leave scheme to eugenics - the discredited social policy associated with Adolf Hitler's Nazi-era attempts to breed a race of ubermenschen, or super humans.

As Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced he would scale back his ambitious paid parental leave scheme from an upper limit of $150,000 to $100,000, blaming the budget emergency created by the former Labor government, Ms Lambie accused the government's generous scheme of attempting to discourage poor people from having children.

Eugenics emerged in the 19th century as a "scientific" theory designed to control which people became parents and thereby limit which genes were passed on. It was adopted by the Nazis and used to justify the forced sterilisation of an estimated 400,000 people, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial museum, and the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

"Its clear that the Liberals paid parental leave scheme is a not-so-subtle attempt at discouraging Australians with the undesirable trait of being poor (when compared with those who are rich) from reproducing. Why else would Mr Abbott and his supporters champion a government scheme which ensures rich Australians receive more than double, sometimes triple the amount of parental leave that poor working Australians receive?" she said in a statement.

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"The only fair way to administer any government-sanctioned paid parental leave scheme is as per the Palmer United policy - and ensure that all Australian parents and babies are treated equally. Otherwise those championing a government scheme which clearly tries to influence or control who becomes parents must be associated with eugenics- and all the historic, moral and political baggage attached to this reviled social theory."

"If the Liberals really want to improve Australian society then they should allow our children to access free university degrees and visits to their GPs, not introduce a sly social policy which divides us into rich and poor - and attempts to influence which group reproduces the most."

Ms Lambie, a former soldier, has courted controversy since being elected to the Senate last September.

She has been engaged in a public stoush with her Palmer United Party colleague, Queensland MP Alex Douglas, who suggested she came from "Boganland". Ms Lambie hit back at that criticism, telling her local paper she was from the "underdog world".

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PUP's Jacqui Lambie compares parental leave to eugenics

'The German Doctor' is underplayed, which makes it even scarier

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'Doctor' follows a doctor calling himself Helmut Gregor living in a South American village who, the audience discovers, is actually notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Its appropriate that The German Doctor, set in Patagonia in 1960, resembles a monster movie even though we encounter no ghouls or goblins. The monsters here are strictly of the human variety. Based on a novel by the films writer-director, Luca Puenzo, the film is a fictional imagining of how a German doctor, calling himself Helmut Gregor (lex Brendemhl), insinuates himself into the South American village where he has taken up residence. As becomes clear all too soon, the good doctor is Josef Mengele, the notorious perpetrator of hideous human experiments at Auschwitz.

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The village is peopled with blond, German-speaking residents; a local school has photos of alumni beside a Nazi flag; and mysterious hydroplanes are constantly landing and taking off from a nearby lake. The spacious hotel housing Mengele is run by Eva (Natalia Oreiro) and Enzo (Diego Peretti), whose 12-year-daughter, Lilith (Florencia Bado), is unusually diminutive for her age a source of fascination for Mengele, who convinces her reluctant parents to submit to genetic research, developed in his home-grown lab, to grow her bones.

Since the real-life Mengele, who fled to South America along with numerous other Nazi war criminals, was obsessed with eugenics, it makes sense that the Mengele of this film would be fixated on Lilith, whom he deems a perfect specimen. Because Lilith is constantly taunted by her schoolmates, she is flattered and excited by Mengeles promise to make her grow. Only Enzo seems suspicious of Mengele almost from the start. His growing horror at what is slowly unwinding matches our own, especially when Eva becomes pregnant with twins. Twins were another Mengele fixation.

For people whose movie memories of Mengele conjure up Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil, The German Doctor will probably seem old-fashioned and underplayed. Puenzo doesnt allow her actors, most notably Brendemhl, to go all histrionic on us which, of course, makes everything seem even scarier.

Within its straightforward limits, The German Doctor is highly effective, but it doesnt stray beyond those confines. It doesnt do more than sketch the network of collaborators and criminals in this creepy community or delve more than superficially into Mengeles life history. That the film doesnt attempt to provide a psychological analysis of him I find commendable. Some monsters, at least in the movies, are beyond analysis.

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'The German Doctor' is underplayed, which makes it even scarier

The German Doctor Is a Fictionalized Run-In with a Nazi Psychopath

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Natalia Oreiro and Diego Peretti

The promise of perfection leads to disaster for an Argentinean family in 1960 Patagonia in The German Doctor, a fictionalized account of one clan's run-in with notorious Auschwitz psychopath Dr. Josef Mengele.

Adapting her own novel, writer-director Luca Puenzo keeps the evil physician's identity a secret for the first half of her story, in which Mengele (lex Brendemhl) meets and takes a liking to Lilith (Florencia Bado), a 12-year-old girl with a growth disorder, and consequently decides to stay at the hotel run by her father, Enzo (Diego Peretti), and pregnant-with-twins mother, Eva (Natalia Oreiro).

Soon, Mengele is experimenting on both Lilith and Eva, with Puenzo insinuating that Eva welcomes these hormone trials because her indoctrination at a pro-Nazi school has left her drawn, subconsciously, to eugenics-inspired ideals. Enzo is also eventually seduced by Mengele's ethos when he allows the doctor to finance his porcelain doll-making business (every figurine shall look exactly the same!), a symbolically on-the-nose development that builds to full-on melodramatic overkill.

Puenzo dramatizes her material with an overcooked sense of import that generates scant suspense, even once Israeli agents close in on their Nazi prey. Meanwhile, Lilith's hindsight narration, which plays over shots of the villain's twisted medical notebooks, merely further amplifies the action's borderline-tawdry mood of psychosexual ghoulishness.

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The German Doctor Is a Fictionalized Run-In with a Nazi Psychopath

Eugenics: Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Virginia …

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Photograph of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. [1.1] Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell

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 Three generations of imbeciles are enough. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Writing for the majority in the Supreme Courts affirmative decision of this landmark case, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described Charlottesville native Carrie Buck as the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted stating that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.

Current scholarship shows that Carrie Bucks sterilization relied on a false diagnosis premised on the now discredited science of eugenics. It is likely that Carries mother, Emma Buck, was committed to a state institution because she was considered sexually promiscuous, that the same diagnosis was made about Carrie when she became an unwed mother at the age of 17 due to being raped, and that her daughter Vivian was diagnosed as not quite normal at the age of six months largely in support of the legal effort to sterilize Carrie.

2004 Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

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Eugenics: Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Virginia ...

Liddick: Population, progeny and politics

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[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. Margaret Sanger, Birth Control Review, April 1932

Anyone finding the above disturbing is in good company. Anyone not recognizing the author as one of the founders of Planned Parenthood needs to brush up on their American history.

The branch of medicine carrying the anodyne title Reproductive Health Services has a long and sordid past which may help to explain why it attracts partisans willing to mask its most repugnant practices with the name of freedom. Why this segment of society believes that the legal ability of a doctor to dismember an unborn child in its mothers womb, because she wishes it, is an indispensable cornerstone of that mothers freedom as an individual may be incomprehensible, but they believe it. Further, it seems to be a doctrine of faith with the ascendant Progressive wing of the Democrat party.

Witness the recent Colorado Senate Bill 175, the grotesquely-titled Reproductive Health Freedom Act, which proposes a number of entitlements, including the right to make decisions free from discrimination, coercion or violence. This seems unobjectionable until one asks the innocent question would the inability to pay for an abortion constitute discrimination? Do not doubt, the answer is yes, which creates serious problems.

Section one of the bill posits entitlements to make reproductive health care decisions without interference from the state, and to have access to information based on current evidence-based scientific data and medical consensus. This is an attempt to remove those pesky emotional and religious objections to any reproductive health care decision, including abortion of any type, but again in their enthusiasm, the authors have forgotten their history. Not too long ago eugenics, represented by the sentiment at the top of the column, was a widely-accepted example of evidence-based scientific data and medical consensus.

Section two of the bill opines that action is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety. Possibly because of the rampaging, torch-and-pitchfork-bearing mobs destroying clinics across our fair state.

Despite the manifest threat to public safety, the bills sponsors spiked it last Wednesday. Perhaps they realized that, when the Catholic Archbishop and Greek Orthodox Metropolitan appear together on the Capitol steps to oppose your bill, you are in very deep, indeed.

The real safety issue is that of Democrat control of the state legislature. The party of Obama obviously thinks it can continue to rule Colorado through fear, ginning up the shopworn bogeyman of a Republican war on women. Coming from the party whose immediate past president was a serial sex offender and whose present leader pays his female employees 87 percent of what males receive, the accusation is both pathetic and hilarious.

Transparent hypocrisy aside, SB 175 does offer opportunity. Id like to see the government out of this contentious area, and I think many Coloradoans would agree. But if there is to be no interference, so there should be no subsidy. Not one thin dime of government money should go to support any aspect of reproductive health services, ever, anywhere.

By the same logic that sees government controls on abortion services and abortifacients as violating a womans right to choose, governments forcing those with moral or religious objections to pay for these services through taxes violates the right of this group to follow its beliefs, so that must go as well. Remember, as it is unconstitutional for Congress to establish a religion, so it is impermissible to prohibit the free exercise thereof. Said free exercise not being confined solely to churchgoing, despite the fevered argument of the Left.

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Liddick: Population, progeny and politics

What you dont learn in school

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One of the more frightful social experiments of the last century is almost unknown to the general public. Millions of people worldwide were forcibly sterilized. Sometimes babies judged to be unfit were euthanized or left to die. In some countries, Nazi Germany for example, entire groups of people were targeted for extermination. It was the practice of culling the inferior people from the human gene pool. It was called Eugenics. Even in the U.S., eugenics was sanctioned by law in many states and involved mass sterilization of tens of thousands of people. With women, sterilization involved the surgical removal of ovaries and it is estimated one out of five died because of the operation.

Eugenics followed two approaches. One was to eliminate, or at least prevent from reproducing, those people who were deemed to possess inferior characterizes. These included those with lower intelligence, physical deformities, mental illness, homosexual life styles, low women and prostitutes, inferior races, trouble makers, criminals, and in certain cases even the sick and the weak. Though the eugenics movement mostly died out by the end of WWII, Sweden did not remove eugenics laws from the books until 1975, and it is still practiced by some cultures.

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What you dont learn in school

Deadline set for sterilization claims

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People who were unknowingly sterilized by North Carolinas Eugenics Board program have until June 30 to submit a claim for compensation.

The state Office for Justice of Sterilization Victims, which received 376 claim forms from potential Eugenics Board sterilization victims, as of March 31. Among those, 199 were forwarded to the N.C. Industrial Commission to determine whether the claimants are eligible for compensation.

It is heartening that people are coming forward and making claims," Gov. Pat McCrory said in a statement. While the physical and emotional effects of forced sterilization are immeasurable, compensation is a small tangible way of showing support for the burdens they were forced to carry.

The 2012 Governors Eugenics Compensation Task Force found that 7,600 North Carolinians many of whom were poor, sick or disabled were sterilized by force or coercion under the authorization of the Eugenics Board from 1929-74.

Females made up 85 percent of sterilization victims in North Carolina. Blacks and Native Americans made up 40 percent, according to the task forces report. Task force researchers found some victims or their families were threatened with losing welfare benefits.

The Office of Justice for Sterilization Victims, established last year as part of the Department of Administration, is collecting documentation and helping individuals with their claims. Completed forms and documentation are sent to the Industrial Commission, which determines eligibility. The state is providing $10 million in compensation to be divided equally among certified living claimants. The payout is scheduled for June 30, 2015.

For more information, including claim forms, visit the Office for Justice of Sterilization Victims online or call (919) 807-4270.

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Deadline set for sterilization claims

Pew: Drones, eugenics worry public

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A majority of Americans believe that future changes in technology will generally improve people's lives. But a survey of 1,001 adults by the Pew Research Center also found lots of public anxiety about the rise of personal drones, genetically altering children, and the idea of relying on robots to care for the elderly.

Pew partnered with the Smithsonian magazine on the survey, which asked people to speculate on how science and technology might evolve, and how they would feel about specific changes, ranging from the creation of customized human organs to driver-less cars and manned space colonies.

Almost 60 percent of those surveyed said that the advance of technology will "mostly better" people's lives. But the overall tone of people's thoughts was one of caution and concern.

The Pew survey says:

At the moment, there also isn't a lot of love for driver-less cars, a technology that has been maturing quickly. Half of the respondents said that they would not take a ride in such a vehicle. Pew adds that 72 percent of those surveyed would undergo a brain implant to improve their memory and mental capacity and 78 percent wouldn't eat meat grown in a lab.

NASA engineers have explored the idea of manned space colonies.

The survey further found that 64 percent of the public doesn't believe that manned space colonies will be developed over the next half century, and 77 percent said that humans will not develop the ability to control the weather.

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Pew: Drones, eugenics worry public

Catch Up on Orphan Black With This Handy Cheat Sheet

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Image: Steve Wilkie/BBC America

There are perfectly legitimate reasons why you missed the first season of Orphan Black. Youve got plenty of things going on in your lifeand frankly, there are plenty of shows youre more likely to be spoiled on via social media. You might have gotten a casual recommendation here or there, but you havent been flooded with urgent texts telling you to get on it, so you didnt. And thats okay.

But on Saturday, Orphan Black is back for a new season. In other words, your grace period for getting into one of the best sci-fi thrillers on TV is officially over. At this point, you probably dont even have time to binge-watch the 10-episode first season in time. Never fear, though; with help from this handy-dandy cheat sheet, you can get through the first episode or two of the new season without having seen a minute of it.

Orphan Black is a show about a bunch of genetically engineered clones (all played by the terrifyingly talented Tatiana Maslany) who were separated and released into society as orphans.Its all the work of Aldous Leekie, charismatic geneticist whos convinced hes the Steve Jobs of neolutionisma fancy word for altering your genetic makeup to suit your whims.Neolutionism has developed a new-age cult following of people who get off on the idea of genetic enhancements (one dude in the first season had a Jason Alexander-esque tail). At its core, the ideology is pure, unadulterated eugenics, which isnot great, Bob.

Anyway, the clones grew up (and were closely monitored) under different circumstances around the world. We dont exactly know Leekies motivation, apart from observing nature-versus-nurture in its purest form. (Eventually, we found out that each clone has a single differentiating gene that acts like a nametag.) Two clones, Sarah and Helena, were spirited away by their birth mother to protect them, which means theyve grown up unmonitored, outside the experiment.Meanwhile, several of the other clones have begun to suffer from a mystery illness that involves coughing up your own blood. So far its affected Cosima, a dreadlocked Berkeleygenetics student, and Katja, a red-haired German who sought out other clones (and in doing so tipped off detective and fellow clone Beth Childs to the entire conspiracy). Meanwhile, yet another clone was brainwashed by a group of anti-Neolutionist religious extremists called the Proletheans; she believes that shes the original, and has been hunting down and killing the clones, one by one.

The surviving clones have discovered not only that they are the products of a highly unethical, super-illegal science experiment, but that their DNA sequences have been patented like any inorganic commodity, effectively turning them, living humans, into products. (Leekies moneyed lobbyists convinced governments to pass pro-business, genetic patent lawsa practice ruled illegal in the United States around the same time the episodes were airing.) At the end of the first season, Leekie has coerced the clones into a fishy set of contracts: Alison signs hers after shes promised safety and freedom (obviously untrue), in exchange for regular medical testing; Cosima is on the verge of signing one that offers employment at the Dyad Institute and freedom to study her and the clones genome; and Rachel seems to have kidnapped Sarahs daughter Kira to strongarm her into signing hers.

Image: Steve Wilkie/BBC America

Sarah Manning: Our protagonist clone. Sarah is a badass/screw-up British grifter who, before the story starts, has had some trouble staying out of, well, trouble. She dates thugs (like wantonly violent drug dealer Vic), sells drugs, and partakes in myriad other behaviors that prevent her from maintaining custody of her daughter, Kira. The show begins with her witnessing Beth Childs, a well-dressed woman who looks exactly like her, throw herself in front of an oncoming train, she assumes her identity, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that will eventually lead her to Alison, Cosima, Helena, and the whole clone plot.Her motives for anything and everything she does on this show are twofold: one, self-preservation (which makes her the de facto leader-slash-wild card of the clones), and two, regaining custody of Kira.

Image: BBC America

Cosima Niehaus: The lesbian scientist clone. Cosima is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, where she studies experimental evolutionary developmental biology (or evo devo). Shes the brain, researching the clones genetics and trying to stay two steps ahead of the Dyad Institute; through her connection to Leekievia her love affair with Delphine, orchestrated by Leekie to reel her in but somewhat backfiring considering Delphine flips and Cosima is aware of the manipulationshes able to keep the clone club informed.

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Catch Up on Orphan Black With This Handy Cheat Sheet

Using the KKK to Fight Abortion Rights

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"#Abortion is the KKK's dream come true. It kills more blacks in 3 days than the KKK did ever. #ProLife #tcot"

On Feb. 19, Mississippi State University's anti-abortion student club, Students for Life, retweeted that statement from Personhood Florida's Twitter account (tcot stands for Top Conservatives on Twitter).

Nick Bell, SFL president and a junior majoring in communication, said in an interview that the club is not a political group and does not advocate for Personhood.

Bell, who is white and handles the club's Twitter account, said referencing the KKK is a way to target and bring awareness to the history of Planned Parenthood, which he says wincludes ties to eugenics and race purification.

Eugenics was a movement popular with both conservatives and progressives in the early 20th century: More than 65,000 supposedly "feeble-minded" men and mostly women, of a variety of races, underwent forced sterilization in mental institutions (then called "insane asylums") across the country to keep them from reproducing and supposedly corrupting the gene pool. That included hundreds of victims in Mississippi, including at the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, just outside Jackson, and the Ellisville State School (then called the Mississippi School and Colony for the Feebleminded) in nearby Jones County.

Planned Parenthood's 'Racist' Goal

Margaret Sanger, birth-control pioneer and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a Ku Klux Klan ally, Bell said. He insists that Sanger believed the purpose of birth control and abortion was "to eradicate the black race and the unfit in society." Sanger did, in fact, speak to a group of KKK women in 1926 as documented in her autobiography. She spoke to many groups of women about contraception during her lifetime.

While eugenics was viewed as less controversial than birth control, Sanger sought to make contraceptives available to all women, especially those who could not afford them. A primary difference between eugenics and abortion was that eugenics did not allow the victims freedom to choose whether to have a child, and abortion does allow that choice. Planned Parenthood has promoted the principle that women should have the right to make their reproductive choices since its inception.

Laurie Bertram Roberts, Mississippi state president of the National Organization of Women and a columnist for the Jackson Free Press, said the historical context of Sanger's involvement in eugenics is important in understanding her goals.

"First of all, Margaret Sanger did not work on abortion. She worked on birth control. Context is everything. I will never deny that Margaret Sanger was connected to the eugenics movement," Roberts said. "What they (abortion opponents) never bothered to say is that eugenicists also wanted to limit the birth rate of poor white people and disabled people. It wasn't just black people; it was a whole lot of people they deemed to be unfit."

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Using the KKK to Fight Abortion Rights


  1. Eugenics