Worries about the bad blood of children available for adoption were a prominent feature of the adoption landscape during the first four decades of the twentieth century. They help to explain why most child welfare professionals favored family preservation over adoption. At the time, a vigorous eugenics movement sought to control the reproduction of genetically inferior people through sterilization (called negative eugenics) and encourage the reproduction of genetically superior people (called positive eugenics). The movement drew support from Americans of all political persuasions. Henry Chapin, a famous pediatrician whose wife, Alice, founded one of the first specialized adoption agencies, claimed that the divergent fertility rates of rich and poor were fueling the demand for adoptable babies because citizens with better genetic endowment were more likely to suffer from infertility. For Chapin, eugenic factors always mattered in adoption. Not babies merely, but better babies, are wanted.
Fears about childrens quality or stock were shared by ordinary people as well as professionals and policy-makers. In 1928, one couple wrote to the U.S. Childrens Bureau, We are very anxious to adopt a baby but would like to get one that we know about its parentage. Are there any homes or orphanages where a person can find out whether there is insanity, fits, or other hereditary diseases in its ancestors? We would like to have one from Christian parentage. In addition to religious preferences, specifications for gender, racial, ethnic, and national qualities in children illustrated popular ideas about heredity. Physical health, mental health, criminality, educability, sexual morality, intelligence, and temperament were all associated with blood.
Before 1940, eugenic concerns were expressed frequently and bluntly. Henry Herbert Goddard, a national authority on feeble-minded children, insisted that compassion for needy children was shortsighted because adoption was a crime against those yet unborn. The eugenic threat adoption posed, according to Goddard, was directly tied to illegitimacy. Unmarried mothers were likely to be feeble-minded themselves and have feeble-minded children whose adoptions would contaminate the gene pool by reproducing future generations of defectives. Goddard advocated segregating these children and adults in benevolent institutions, where their dangerous sexuality could be contained.
Even professionals who believed in making adoption work believed that it was a social crime to place inferior children with parents who expectedand deservednormal children. Agencies sometimes required parents to return children if and when abnormal characteristics appeared and laws, such as the Minnesota Adoption Law of 1917, treated feeble-mindedness as cause for annulment. Medical writers in the popular press warned parents to be careful whom you adopt. Adopters faced frightening risks because children unlucky enough to need new parents were also unlucky enough to be genetic lemons.
Tragic stories of unregulated adoptions which ignored or overlooked the hard facts of bad heredity were publicized by reformers determined to institute minimum standards and protect couples from their own foolish desires to adopt newborns and infants. Professionals used mental tests and other assessment techniques to reveal hard-to-detect problems. Elaborate genealogies, extending well beyond parents to grandparents and other natal relatives, were considered evidence of thoroughness in child placement. Case records showed that many social workers expected anti-social behavior of all kinds to be passed intergenerationally from birth parents to children. Nature-nurture studies often reflected eugenic convictions about the heritability of intelligence and tried to establish scientifically the maximum tolerable gap between hereditary background and adoptive home.
Many people believe that eugenics disappeared in America after the specter of Nazism made eugenics synonymous with racism and genocide. While public discussion of taint and degeneration certainly decreased after World War II, blood and biology remained central themes in adoption history. Anxieties about miscegenation in transracial adoptions and international adoptions, as well as strenuous efforts to make racial predictions and offer genetic counseling in cases of mixed-race infants illustrate that eugenics did not disappear so much as change into a less aggressive, more polite form.
Continued here:
Adoption History: Eugenics - University of Oregon
- Anton Chaitkin: the British Monarchy & Euthanasia - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Rate the The Mental Hygiene Society - Yale University connection - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Len Horowitz files pandemic charges against Rockefeller - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Judge Napolitano on Forced Vaccinations in Massachusetts - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Joseph Moshe (MOSSAD Microbiologist): “Swine flu vaccine is bioweapon” - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Canadian study that suggests seasonal flu shots raise a person's risk of catching swine flu - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Doctor Admits Vaccine Is More Deadly Than Swine Flu Itself & Will Not Give It To His Kids - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ineffectiveness And Dangers Of Flu Shots - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Maafa 21 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Doctors Concerned FluMist Vaccine Could Spread Live H1N1 Virus - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Martial Law Soon - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Humanity's Greatest Challenge - Fear or Love - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Does the Vaccine Matter? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ten questions about flu vaccines that doctors and health authorities refuse to answer - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Swear NO Oaths (UNDERSTANDING JURISDICTION) - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- WARNING! Goodbye U.S Sovereignty... Hello One World Government ! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Glenn Beck interviews Lord Monckton on the Soviet style takeover of America by the NWO & BHO - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- TAVISTOCK - THE BEST KEPT SECRET IN AMERICA - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Become a Free Man { SUI JURIS } - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Income Tax Trial of the Century - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Gary Null Speaking Out Against vaccines at the NYS Assembly Hearing | 10-13-2009 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- WHO memos 1972 explains how to turn vaccines into a means of killing - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Swine Flu (aka 'H1N1) That's Not A Flu At All - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Lord Christopher Monchton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, answers critics of his claim that Obama intends to cede U.S. sovereignty - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Swine Flu Government Data Scam Government using fraud to generate flu hysteria - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Strecker Memorandum video - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- United States Patent 4,647,773 Gallo -Continuous production of retroviruses - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS FOR 1970 : The funding of the Bio-terrorism AIDS virus - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Merchants of AIDS - full article - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Another Tool of Eugenics: Fluoride - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- 1988: Dr. Jonathan Mann : Killed in Plane Crash - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Boyd Graves: Interview with Alex Jones - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Boyd Graves: Letter to Ninth Circuit Court - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Gallo and Litton Bionetics: Creators of Aids - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- This site is being developed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- 2002: Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Kissinger, Eugenics and Nazis - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- July 27, 1990: Aids is man-made - By William Cooper [Killed by Law enforcement in 2001] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Merchants of aids - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Why we should not trust the health market. - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Dr. David James preview - conscious media network - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- AIDS HIV BAYER CORPORATION HEMOPHELIA TAINTED BLOOD SUPPLY - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ugandians not dying fast enough. International Eugenists (Aids experts) want them to engage in casual sex - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Proof that AIDS was engineered to kill primarily blacks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- In lies we Trust. The history of American Bioterrorism - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Dallas: A possible Aids Cure? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Glutathione Accelerator - Any Good? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Dr. Boyd Ed Graves International AIDS activist dies age 57 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Genocide in Progress with novel flu virus. - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Genocide in Progress with new flu virus- CDC is suspect - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Vaccines: The Bargain Basement Technology of the 20th Century - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Anthrax - as American as Apple Pie. Eustace Mullins - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Swine flu: Some pregnant women shunning H1N1 vaccine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- CFR lies to get You to take the Shot - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- US spraying Ukraine?? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Eustace Mullins: Murder By Injection - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Microbiologist nabbed by FBI after warning us that vaccine is a bioweapon deployment - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Airplanes sprayed mysterious substance over Ukraine days before pneumonic plague outbreak - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- NIH Whistleblower Alexander S. Jones: Deadly Flu Spreads Across Ukraine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- RBD Change D225G in Ukraine Lungs Raises Concerns - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Young Boy in Agony After AH1N1 Nasal Flu Mist - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Unconfirmed Reports of Large Numbers of Deaths from the Vaccine in the Ukraine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Vaccinations are Causing Impaired Blood Flow (Ischemia), Chronic Illness, Disease and Death for us All - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- British scientists suspect that swine flu virus has mutated in Ukraine. - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Vaccination: Federal Health Agencies Continue to Deceive Americans - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Ukraine plagues and now heavy supply and personnel movement in and out of US Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBs) - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- College Students Getting Smarter, Shunning H1N1 Vaccine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Deeper down the rabbit hole - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Ukraine Pneumonic Plague Research Nov 2009 - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Keiser on 'Tsunami alert': Dubai debt crisis awakes storm? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Christopher Story - EU Corruption - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- John Harris - Undermining Democracy - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The first case of HIV/AIDS cure and no mention in the media. Why? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- What is AIDS? - January 7th, 2010 [January 7th, 2010]
- Europe to Investigate the UN Over “Pandemic” Scam - February 13th, 2010 [February 13th, 2010]
- Nuke @ Olympics ????? - February 13th, 2010 [February 13th, 2010]
- Intelligent Anti-Fluoride Statement - Dr. J. William Hirzy - February 24th, 2010 [February 24th, 2010]
- Testimony [4-9] Fluoride's Definitive Medical Indictment - February 24th, 2010 [February 24th, 2010]
- History Lesson - March 10th, 2010 [March 10th, 2010]
- As the Bank System fails so will society - March 13th, 2010 [March 13th, 2010]