Daily Archives: June 14, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donna Weidemann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contraception

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

It has been variously practiced in ancient civilizations.

In Assyro-Babylonia

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

In Greece

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

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

In Rome

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

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

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

In Greece

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

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

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

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

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

What did the laws say about this custom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Rome

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

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

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

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

The petition surpassed 600 signatures in under a day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The petition can be found here.

Gonville & Caius College has been contacted for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That obviously has implications for bioethics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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