Monthly Archives: June 2022

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, by a vote of 8 to 1, to uphold a state's right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate. The case, known as Buck v. Bell, centered on a young woman named Carrie Buck, whom the state of Virginia had deemed to be "feebleminded."

Author Adam Cohen tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that Buck v. Bell was considered a victory for America's eugenics movement, an early 20th century school of thought that emphasized biological determinism and actively sought to "breed out" traits that were considered undesirable.

"There were all kinds of categories of people who were deemed to be unfit [to procreate]," Cohen says. "The eugenicists looked at evolution and survival of the fittest, as Darwin was describing it, and they believed 'We can help nature along, if we just plan who reproduces and who doesn't reproduce.' "

All told, as many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized during the 20th century. The victims of state-mandated sterilization included people like Buck who had been labeled "mentally deficient," as well as those who who were deaf, blind and diseased. Minorities, poor people and "promiscuous" women were often targeted.

Adam Cohen is a former member of The New York Times editorial board and former senior writer for Time magazine. Eleanor Randolph/Penguin Press hide caption

Cohen's new book about the Buck case, Imbeciles, takes its name from the terms eugenicists used to categorize the "feebleminded." In it, he revisits the Buck v. Bell ruling and explores the connection between the American eugenics movement and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.

Cohen notes that the instinct to "demonize" people who are different is still prevalent in the U.S. today, particularly in the debate over immigration.

"I think these instincts to say that we need to stop these other people from 'polluting us,' from changing the nature of our country, they're very real," Cohen warns. "The idea that those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it it's very troubling that we don't remember this past."

On the case of Carrie Buck

This is this poor young woman, really nothing wrong with her physically or mentally, a victim of a terrible sexual assault, and there's a little hearing, she's declared feebleminded and she gets sent off to the colony for epileptics and feebleminded. ...

Imbeciles

The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

by Adam Cohen

When she's at the colony, the guy who is running the colony, Dr. Albert Priddy, is on the prowl. He's looking for someone to put at the center of this test case that they want to bring, so he's looking for someone to sterilize, and he sees Carrie Buck when she comes in, he does the examination himself, and there are a lot of things about her that excite him. She is deemed to be feebleminded, she has a mother who is feebleminded, so that's good because you can show some genetics, and then they're hoping that [her] baby could be determined to be feebleminded too, then you could really show a genetic pattern of feeblemindedness. The fact that she had been pregnant out of wedlock was another strike against her. So he fixes on her and thinks Carrie Buck is going to be the perfect potential plaintiff. ...

He chooses her, and then under the Virginia law, they have to have a sterilization hearing at the colony, which they do and they give her a lawyer (who is really not a lawyer for her; it's really someone who had been the chairman of the board of the colony and was sympathetic to the colony's side) and they have a bit of a sham hearing where she is determined to be a suitable person for sterilization; they vote to sterilize her, and that is the order that then gets challenged by Carrie as the plaintiff first in the Virginia court system and then in the Supreme Court.

On why he considers Buck v. Bell to be one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history

If you start by just looking at all the human misery that was inflicted, about 70,000 Americans were sterilized as a result of this decision, so that's an awful lot of people who wanted to have children who weren't able to have children. Also, we have to factor in all the many people who were being segregated, who were being held in these institutions for eugenic reasons, because they were feebleminded, whose lives unfolded living in places like the colony, rather than living in freedom. Beyond the human effect though, there was something just so ugly about this decision and when [we] think about what we want the Supreme Court to be, what the founders wanted the Supreme Court to be, it was supposed to be our temple of justice, the place that people could go when all the other parts of our society, all the other parts of the government, were not treating them right.

On how eugenicists sought to address the "threat" to the gene pool

The eugenicists saw two threats to the national gene pool: One was the external one, which they were addressing through immigration law; the other was the internal one what to do about the people who were already here. They had a few ideas.

The first eugenics law in the United States was passed in Connecticut in 1895, and it was a law against certain kinds of marriages. They were trying to stop certain unfit people from reproducing through marriage. It wasn't really what they wanted, though, because they realized that people would just reproduce outside of marriage.

So their next idea was what they called segregation. The idea was to get people who were deemed unfit institutionalized during their reproductive years, particularly for women, keep them there, make sure they didn't reproduce, and then women were often let go when they had passed their reproductive years because they were no longer a threat to the gene pool. That had a problem too, though. The problem was that it would be really expensive to segregate, institutionalize the number of people the eugenicists were worried about. ...

Their next idea was eugenic sterilization and that allowed for a model in which they would take people in to institutions, eugenically sterilize them, and then they could let them go, because they were no longer a threat. That's why eugenic sterilization really became the main model that the eugenicists embraced and that many states enacted laws to allow.

On deeming people "feebleminded"

"Feebleminded" was really the craze in American eugenics. There was this idea that we were being drowned in a tide of feeblemindedness that basically unintelligent people were taking over, reproducing more quickly than the intelligent people but it was also a very malleable term that was used to define large categories of people that again, were disliked by someone who was in the decision-making position. So, women who were thought to be overly interested in sex, licentious, were sometimes deemed feebleminded. It was a broad category and it was very hard to prove at one of these feeblemindedness hearings that you were not feebleminded.

On the involuntary sterilization procedure

For men it was something like a vasectomy. For women it was a salpingectomy, where they cauterized the path that the egg takes toward fertilization. It was, in the case of women, not minor surgery and when you read about what happened, it's many, many days of recovery and it had certain dangers attached to it, and a lot of the science was still quite new. ...

When you add onto all that, the fact that in many, many cases the women involved were not told what was being done to them, they might be told that they were having an appendectomy, they weren't being told that the government has decided that you are unfit to reproduce and we're then going to have surgery on you, so that just compounds the horror of the situation.

On how the Nazis borrowed from the U.S. eugenics sterilization program

We really were on the cutting edge. We were doing a lot of this in the 1910s and 1920s. Indiana adopted a eugenic sterilization law, America's first in 1907. We were writing the eugenics sterilization statutes that decided who should be sterilized. We also had people who were writing a lot of what might be thought of as pro-Aryan theory. So you have people like Madison Grant who wrote a very popular book called The Passing of a Great Race, which really talked about the superiority of Nordics, as he called them, and how they were endangered by all the brown people and the non-Nordics who were taking over.

On a 1924 immigration law, which was inspired by eugenicists, that prevented Anne Frank's family from entering the U.S.

Under the old immigration laws where it was pretty much "show up," they would've been able to emigrate, but suddenly they were trapped by very unfavorable national quotas, so this really was a reason that so many Jews were turned away.

One very poignant aspect of it that I've thought about as I was working on the book is in the late '90s some correspondence appeared, was uncovered, in which Otto Frank was writing repeatedly to the State Department begging for visas for himself and his wife and his two daughters, Margot and Anne, and was turned down, and that was because there were now these quotas in place. If they had not been, it seems clear that he would've been able to get a visa for his whole family, including his daughter Anne Frank.

So when we think about the fact that Anne Frank died in a concentration camp, we're often told that it was because the Nazis believed the Jews were genetically inferior, that they were lesser than Aryans. That's true, but to some extent Anne Frank died in a concentration camp because the U.S. Congress believed that as well.

Continue reading here:

The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced Sterilizations

The eugenics movement has never been about giving women the right to choose when theyre ready to bear children. On the contrary, it has been about ripping that autonomy from women deemed inferior, unworthy, irrelevant.

Get Weekend Reads from Ideas

A weekly newsletter from the Boston Globe Ideas section, forged at the intersection of 'what if' and 'why not.'

The eugenics movement in the United States was nurtured in the early 20th century by academics, such as Edwin Alderman, the first president of the University of Virginia, who declared that white males were the fittest to rule. His racial hierarchies led his state, and many others, to violently deny those they deemed unfit the right to reproduce.

More than 100,000 women, mostly Black, Latina, and Indigenous, were forcibly sterilized under state-sanctioned programs over decades all the way into the 1970s. As journalist Linda Villarosa recently wrote in The New York Times Magazine, The practice of being sterilized, including during unrelated surgery, grew so common among poor Black women in the South that it came to be known as a Mississippi appendectomy.

It is no coincidence that Hitlers 1933 eugenics law, which led to the sterilization of hundreds of thousands of undesirables, mostly Jews, was modeled after US legislation.

In the United States, the practice continued even after a landmark lawsuit filed in 1973 on behalf of two Black girls who were sterilized without their parents consent forced the federal government to stop funding such procedures. From 2006 to 2010, at least 148 women inmates were sterilized by the California Department of Corrections without required state approvals; some told reporters that theyd been coerced into the procedure.

Toxic remnants of the eugenicist ideology persist to this day, fueling extremist views like the great replacement narrative, which frames our nations demographic evolution as a plot to suppress white power. It was this ideology that reportedly motivated a heavily armed 18-year-old to drive 200 miles last month to target Black shoppers at a supermarket in Buffalo.

This is the true history of eugenics in the United States.

To suggest, in a Supreme Court opinion no less, that abortion rights advocates are somehow abetting this abhorrent ideology by ensuring women have access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care is stunningly wrong.

It was Justice Clarence Thomas who first brought this disinformation to the Supreme Court, in a 2019 concurrence. Conservative activists echoed it in an amicus brief in the current case. The first subheading in the brief sums up their argument: The Birth Control Movement, Abortion Advocacy, and Eugenics Are All Rooted In Social Darwinism and the Elimination of Undesirable Populations.

This framing implies, offensively, that Black women and other women of color are not capable of making informed decisions about their own bodies and their own futures but are being manipulated by racist forces when they choose abortion. I hear reprehensible echoes of the eugenicists cries about the feeble-minded in this argument.

It is also a stunning misdirection. The truth is, the very states that claim to care the most about protecting the unborn also do the least to protect the health of women and children.

In Mississippi, the state at the center of this Supreme Court case, a single mother with two young children and an annual income of just $6,000 earns too much to qualify for subsidized health care. This can be a death sentence. More than 4,000 women in the United States, a disproportionate share of them Black, die each year from cervical cancer. The disease can be treated successfully with early detection. Yet those screens are out of reach for many women, especially in the South, because legislators refuse to extend Medicaid access.

Mississippi also has the worst records on infant mortality and preventable mortality of any state, and a maternal mortality rate five times higher than Californias, which launched an impressive statewide effort in 2006 to recognize and effectively treat the most common causes of death in pregnancy and childbirth. Again, this is due in large part to legislative decisions about who deserves access to quality health care.

To suggest that women who choose not to carry a pregnancy to term in this environment are falling into a eugenicist trap is absurd. Yet that reasoning has propelled strands of the antiabortion movement for years, and within days could be cited by the Supreme Court as one justification for overturning Roe v. Wade.

At this crucial moment, we must raise our voices to declare these truths: Abortion is an essential component of health care. Health care is a human right. And choice is not eugenics. Lets stand together to set the record straight.

Michelle A. Williams is dean of the faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Read more:

The Supreme Court is misinformed on eugenics - The Boston Globe

The Supreme Courts decision to strike down a constitutional right to abortion that has been in place for 49 years reverberated through campus on Friday, prompting more than 150 students, faculty, and community members to rally on the Green.

The crowd chanted, cheered the students, state lawmakers, and others who spoke in support of reproductive freedom, and waved as drivers honked their horns in response to signs that bore such messages as Bans Off Our Bodies and Real Men Trust Women.

Carolina Brown-Vasquez 24, of Alexandria, Va., rolled up on her bicycle to listen to the speakers.

When shed heard the courts decision that morning, a wave of sadness had come crashing over her, the psychology and anthropology student said. Its really scary and sad to see the U.S. take steps backwards.

Nearby, Griffin Thomas 24, a theater and history major from San Mateo, Calif., also stood in the early evening sun, listening to the short, impassioned talks.He owed it to his female friends to be out here and to make sure they stay safe in whatever they choose to do, Thomas said. I hope that we can get Roe v. Wade back.

In its ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the court upheld the Mississippi law that would ban nearly all abortions after 15 weeks. The decision effectively overruled Roe v. Wade and places abortion law in the hands of state legislatures.

Nearly half of the states are poised to ban or restrict abortion. Some 16 states and Washington, D.C., currently have laws protecting access to abortion.

Dartmouthreleased a statementFriday afternoon on the decision.

Dartmouthscommitment to reproductive health care, autonomy, and well-being for every member of our community is unwavering. Dartmouth is fortunate to have a medical school that is deeply committed to reproductive rights for all, including childbearing decisions, maternal health, and their effect on families through its research and education missions. As a medical school focused on training supportive health care professionals, the Geisel School of Medicine will continue promoting better health outcomes and access for women and people from all gender identities, the statement said.

Across the institution, Dartmouth will continue to offer insurance coverage to our students and to our employees and their families through a national medical network in support of reproductive health and in compliance with federal and state law. Such care includes pregnancy termination, infertility services, counseling, and family planning.

Some faculty and other community members also shared their thoughts about the implications of the ruling with Dartmouth News:

Planned Parenthood Generation Action Co-President Eliza Holmes 24 speaks at the rally on Friday. (Photo by Erin Supinka)

Eliza Holmes 24Co-President, Planned Parenthood Generation Action

Today, I am in mourning. I grieve with those who fought so hard for Roe to be law of the land, now living to see it fall not even 50 years later. I grieve with those who will now be affected by this decision, those who will be forced to travel outside of their state lines in order to receive abortion care. I grieve with people who cannot afford to take time off work and pay unnecessary travel expenses in order to receive abortion care. I grieve with Black and Indigenous people and people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people, who already experience racism and discrimination when it comes to reproductive care, and who will now face greater abortion restrictions in their communities with this decision. We are all in mourning today over what has been lost, but we are also angryat the Supreme Court, at legislators who want to take away our right to choose. We are angry at politicians who want to control our futures and make decisions about our bodies without our consent.

(Courtesy of Randall Balmer)

Randall BalmerJohn Phillips Professor in Religion

On the face of it, the Supreme Courts Dobbs decision is cause for great celebration for the religious right, and I have no doubt they will treat it as such. This moment, according to their own narrative, represents the culmination of a half-centurys efforts to overturn a grave wrong.

Well, not exactly. Evangelicals came late to the antiabortion cause; they considered it a Catholic issue throughout the 1970s. The religious right mobilized as a political movement in the late 1970s to defend racial segregation in their institutions, including Bob Jones University and various church-sponsored segregation academies. Abortion was cobbled into the religious rights agenda much later, just in time for the 1980 presidential election.

As a historian, I cant help wondering if the Dobbs decision doesnt have a parallel in the 18th Amendment, the Prohibition amendment. Evangelicals of an earlier age celebrated ratification of the amendment, but it turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. Prohibition became unenforceable, and it led to rampant lawlessness.

The lesson? Ive long believed that abortion should be treated as a moral issue, not a legal matter. (The only thing both sides of the abortion debate agree on is that making abortion illegal will not materially affect the incidence of abortion.) If the anti-abortion people truly care about limiting abortion, they would do well to focus on changing the moral conversation around the issueas well as advocating sex education and making contraception more available.

(Courtesy Esther Rosario)

Esther M. RosarioLecturer, Department of Philosophy

Roe v. Wades overturn is shattering but not surprising. Anti-abortionists have been working toward overturning Roe for over a decade. Texans have been suffering the life-threatening and life-diminishing consequences of anti-abortion legislation for just as long, and now approximately 36 million people who can become pregnant will suffer those same consequences.

What I find particularly egregious about the decision is Justice Samuel Alitos invocation of previous comments from Justice Clarence Thomas, which allege that access to abortion is eugenic. Footnote 41 of the opinion states, Other amicus briefs present arguments about the motives of proponents of liberal access to abortion. They note that some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population

What is egregious about this part of the decision is that its not only a red herring but boldly mischaracterizes eugenics in the U.S. context. According to Thomas, having access to abortion harms Black women, but this couldnt be further from the truth.

In fact, not providing Black cis women with reproductive choices and access to reproductive healthcare is a form of negative eugenics. Just as state-mandated sterilization denies Black cis women a reproductive choice, so does lack of abortion access. Black cis women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the U.S., and this decision is likely to compound maternal and infant mortality rates. Removing abortion as a health care option will only further foreclose the lives of Black cis women and the futures of all people who can become pregnant.

Planned Parenthood Generation Action Co-President Advaita Chaudhari 24 speaks at the rally on Friday. (Photo by Corinne Arndt Girouard)

Meanwhile, Dartmouth Health, whose president and CEO is Joanne Conroy 77, also said access to abortion is critical.

Dartmouth Health is unwavering in its belief in the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship to make the best-informed decisions for patients to reflect their needs and healthcare priorities, the health care system said in a statement.

We also strongly believe that abortion is an essential component of health care. Like all medical matters, decisions regarding abortion should be made by patients in consultation with their health care providers. Abortion remains legal and accessible in New Hampshire and Vermont, and Dartmouth Health will continue to provide this care as part of our commitment to our patients.

And the Dartmouth College Health Service reiterated on Friday that it is committed to the sexual and reproductive health of Dartmouth students.

See original here:

Anti-Abortion Ruling Reverberates Through Campus - Dartmouth News

Do the supporters of abortion know who founded Planned Parenthood? Margaret Sanger (founder) was a racist, supported eugenics, selective breeding, eliminate lesser humans and hatred for children. Two quotes from Ms.Sanger: But in my view, I believe that there should be no more babies. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.

Ms. Sanger wrote many books but the one that stands out is entitled Motherhood In Bondage.Sixty three million babies have been aborted since the onset of Roe v. Wade. Do the pro abortion advocates really know what they are protesting for. It is sad to realize that they are not well informed.

Linda L. Eberhardt, Scotts Valley

The Sentinel welcomes your letters to the editor. Letters should be short, no more than 150 words. We do not accept anonymous letters. Letter-writers should include their full name as well as a street address and telephone number. We dont publish those details in the newspaper, but need the information for verification purposes. Occasionally, we reject letters simply because weve had so many on the same subject. Submit your letters online at http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/submit-letters.

Go here to see the original:

Letter | Pro abortion camp not well informed about past - Santa Cruz Sentinel

As with so many aspects of the culture wars, the American debate over abortion seems to spend little time considering what policies will actually do to the people at whom theyre aimed.

Proponents of restrictions or outright bans believe theyre fighting to save unborn lives. But while the question of when an unborn fetus becomes a person ismore a question of faith than science, those restrictions can have profound impacts on many who are undeniably people.

Of course, the people who will be most profoundly affected will be women and families who dont or barely have the money to leave the state for an abortion in the likely event that Ohio severely restricts or bans the procedure after Roe v Wade is overturned.

So it seems important to see what data can say about who these women are and what restricting their ability to end unwanted pregnancies means for Ohio and the rest of the country.

Each year, the Ohio Department of healthcompiles abortion statisticsin the state, giving a partial picture of who is getting them.

One striking fact is how many fewer women from all backgrounds are terminating their pregnancies. The number has plummeted from just under 45,000 in 1977, the first year for which the state published the statistics, to around 20,000 in 2020, the most recent year for which numbers are available.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the largest group of women who got Ohio abortions in 2020 were in their 20s 59% followed by women in their 30s, 29%. Also unsurprising is that 62% of women got abortions before they were nine weeks pregnant, while less than 2% got them after 19 weeks of pregnancy.

And, while its not surprising that unmarried women are more likely to get abortions, in 2020 they were much more so. The Ohio health stats indicated that82% of the 20,605 women who received abortions in the state were never married, separated, divorced, or widowed.

But what is perhaps most striking among the Ohio statistics is how overrepresented Black women were.

Ohio is only13% Black, but Black women received 48% of all abortions in in 2020, the largest single group. Whites, by contrast, make up 82% of the states population, but white women made up only 44% of the group receiving abortions.

The fact that so many unmarried and Black women were having abortions might suggestthey didnt believe they have the emotional and financial support they needed to raise a child often in addition to children they already have. Also,more than 27% of Ohio Black people were living in povertyin 2020, compared to just 10% of white people.

However, there is evidence that at least nationally, the poorest women are less likely to seek abortions than their more affluent peers.

A 2015 studyby the Brookings Institution found that while women living below the poverty line were much less likely to use contraception and more likely to become unintentionally pregnant, those who did were less likely to get abortions.

Between 2011 and 2013, 32% of women making four times the federal poverty level who had become unintentionally pregnant got abortions, the study said. That compares to less than 9% of women living below the poverty line during the same period.

Cost might be something keeping the poorest women away from the abortion clinic.

Planned Parenthood reports that its lowest-cost, early-pregnancy procedure in Ohiocosts $650. If so, further restrictions seem likely to force up the cost particularly if they force women to travel out of state for the procedure.

It seems important with the U.S. Supreme Court apparently poised to overturn the 1973 decision to look at the consequences it might have for women who wont be able to get abortions and society generally.

One paperpublished in 2020 by the National Bureau of Economic Research attempted to do that.

In it, two economists and a demographer used credit data to build on the 2016Turnaway Study, which followed 1,000 women who had sought abortions at 30 clinics across the country. Through follow-up interviews, that study sought to compare women who were turned away from abortions to those who received them.

In the follow-up analysis, The Economic Consequences of Being Denied an Abortion, the research team compared credit information between women who were denied abortions due to gestational limits in states to those of women who received abortions, but were within two weeks of those limits. It sought to look at financial stress caused not only not only from the costs of having and raising a child, but also from a well-documented large and persistent decline in earnings (i.e. child penalty) that women experience on average following the birth of a child.

The three researchers detected a lot of financial stress.

We find that abortion denial resulted in increases in the amount of debt 30 days or more past due of $1,750, an increase of 78% relative to their pre-birth mean, and in negative public records on the credit report such as bankruptcy, evictions, and tax liens, of about 0.07 additional records, or an increase of 81%, the paper said.

It added, These effects are persistent over time, with elevated rates of financial distress observed the year of the birth and for the entire 5 subsequent years for which we observe the women. Our point estimates also suggest that being denied an abortion may reduce credit access and self-sufficiency, particularly in the years immediately following the birth, although these estimates are not always statistically significant.

Of course, worse economic outcomes for those mothers and their babies dont just affect them. They also affect any other children and family members the woman is caring for.

Being forced to carry a child to term might also increase the chances that a child is unwanted and that can cause bad societal outcomes, such as an increase in crime.

In 2001, economists John J. Donohue III and Steven Levitt published The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It tried to explainthe precipitous drop in crimethrough the 1990s from all-time highs in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

After ruling out other theories for the drop, it concluded that the 1973 legalization of abortion resulted in many fewer unwanted children and, as that cohort came of age, a lot less crime.

Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50% of the recent drop in crime, it said.

The paper stirred a ferocious response across the political spectrum. Some, includingSupreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, compared it to the pseudo-science ofeugenics, which advocated sterilization of people with traits deemed undesirable.

In a2019 podcast, Levitt said subsequent research reinforced their earlier work. He also denied that his and Donohues research advocated forcing anybody to do anything.

I actually think that our paper makes really clear why this has nothing to do with eugenics, Levitt said. In our hypothesis what happens is abortion becomes legal, women are given the right to choose and what out data suggest is that women are pretty good at choosing when they can bring kids into the world; when they can provide good environments for them.

This story was republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license.

See more here:

Beyond the rhetoric: Abortion restrictions will affect poor & minorities unequally - TiffinOhio.net

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected. With those chilling words an illegitimately obtained Supreme Court majority tore up the lives of Americans & the Constitution in the Dobbs opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito. The votes for this opinion were only available because Merrick Garland was wrongly blockaded at the end of the Obama administration and Amy Coney Barrett hypocritically jammed through at the end of the Trump one.

Indeed, with this decision, we must ask if the Trump administration has really ended or simply migrated down Pennsylvania Avenue and taken up occupancy in the third branch.

The Alito opinion comes in the midst of congressional hearings exposing the sickness of Trumps style of governanceTrumpery, as we term it in a new book. The Dobbs opinion also exemplifies Trumpery, and its features provide a useful framework for understanding just how bad the opinion is. The Court should be known from here on out as the Trump Court.

Perhaps the single most defining characteristic of Trumpery is its disdain for the rule of law. The Alito opinion in the Dobbs case has that in spades. A central tenet of Supreme Court jurisprudence is stare decisis, the idea that once the Supreme Court has ruled on something, it is settled law and is entitled to permanence, even if later courts may disagree with it. That is particularly true where you have a decades long established precedent like Roe.

By upending one of the core legal principles governing the Supreme Courts functioning, the Alito opinion undermines the rule of lawand the courts legitimacy. It is akin to Trumps incessant assault on the laws and norms of the presidency that we have heard so much and so powerfully about in the Jan. 6 hearings. As we are being painfully reminded in the Jan. 6 hearings, that assault over time undermined and weakened the executive branch and Americans faith in it. Alito and the five justices who joined with him are sending the Supreme Court down that same slippery slope.

And they are transmitting a dangerous message: If Roe can be tossed out, then any Supreme Court precedent is in jeopardy. There goes stare decisis. In his concurrence Justice Clarence Thomas says the quiet part out loud: in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Courts substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Americans right to contraception, to make consensual choices in the bedroom and to same-sex marriage are all up for grabs. How long before states are also free to re-criminalize premarital sex and interracial relationships?

This madness is driven by the second core tenet of Trumpery: elevation of personal interests over public policy ones. Alito is himself reportedly opposed to abortion in his personal life, as are some of the other members of the majority. With this decision, they have allowed their personal agendas to seep into their abandonment of stare decisis and their official policymaking.

Sound familiar? Not just Trump but many in his administration used and abused government as a tool for their personal ends. Judges are supposed to adjudicate legal issues on the merits, independent of their personal ideologies. Alito and those joining the opinion have done the exact opposite here.

The third trait of Trumpery is also glaringly evident in the opinion: shamelessness. Alito feels no embarrassment at his naked attack on stare decisis, his pursuit of his personal agenda, or his dishonesty. Nor do he and his Dobbs colleagues see the need for baby steps, save for Roberts, who said he would have proceeded more slowly but who still joined the judgment. The majority opinions bold in declaring Roe and Casey dead. Like Trumps openly professed desire to overturn the election, Alito and his cronies overthrow of a half-century of precedent is unashamed and even brazen.

Fourth, Trumpery divides our society. Like the former presidents policies on immigration and building his wall, or his declaration that the white supremacist rioters in Charlottesville, Virginia, included fine people, Dobbs is a burning torch thrown into the tinderbox of our politics and society. Once the court proceeded with great caution to avoid popular turmoil. Not here. The result will foment widespread unrest.

Bringing to mind Melania Trumps infamous slogan, Alito and crews attitude is I really dont care, do you? The opinion states, We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the publics reaction to our work. That is just wrong. Avoiding the kind of political turmoil and escalation we are now facing is part of why we have stare decisisjudges should care about upsetting long-settled expectations and the societal ruptures that causes. Disregard for (and even intentionally exacerbating) social divisions was a specialty of the former president, who did everything possible to gratify his base. Tragically, this opinion smacks of a similar approach, consequences be damned.

That will do great harm not just to the social fabric, but to our system of government itself. The assault on democracy is the fifth foundational aspect of Trumpery. This decision will decimate the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. It was already on shaky ground, with its current composition owed to two presidents, George W. Bush and Trump, who did not win the popular vote during their initial victorious campaigns to the White House. To make matters worse, the shape of the court was, as we noted above, manipulated by the GOP Senate blockade during President Barack Obamas last year in office of his pick for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, purportedly because it was an election year. Then when a Supreme Court seat became vacant even later in the last months of Trumps administration, a Republican majority in the Senate abandoned any pretense of consistency to rush through Justice Amy Coney Barrett. This decision will devastate whatever remaining bipartisan legitimacy the court enjoyed had.

The sixth core characteristic of Trumpery is dishonesty, perhaps the single most overriding theme of the Jan. 6 hearings. The Dobbs opinion is rife with disinformation. For example, Alito justifies his reasoning on Roe with the fact that abortion is an unenumerated rightamong the civil and human rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. These rights, Alito contends, should only receive federal protections if they are deeply rooted in U.S. history and culture. Abortion is not, according to Alito.

But the truth is the court has many timesincluding recentlyinstituted or upheld protections for unenumerated rights that dont have the long history Alito is describing. That includes protecting interracial and same-sex marriage. To apply this reasoning to other unenumerated rights but not to abortion is contradictory and disingenuous, to say the least. They may be next on the chopping block.

On the factual side, Alito cites fellow Justice Clarence Thomas in saying that abortion amounts to eugenics targeted at Black people. The truth is much more complicated, and ignores that outlawing abortion will disproportionately hurt women of color. To take only one other example of many, Alito also references Justice Amy Coney Barretts contention that safe haven lawswhich protect from penalization parents who give up their childobviate the need for abortions. But whether those laws lead to better outcomes for mothers is inconclusive, and experts disagree on their efficacy in general.

That brings us to the seventh and final of the seven deadly sins of this opinion and Trumpery alike: disdain for ethics. The Dobbs opinionand what Justice Thomas chillingly signals it may auguris cruel to women, to all Americans and to the rule of law itself.

Fortunately, all is not lost. The Supreme Court may have taken away Americans right to choice over their bodies, but they have not yet stolen our power to vote. With this deeply unethical screed, Alito and the rest of the Trump Court majority have given many millions of angry Americans a reason to turn out in November. Voters should give us state elected officials who will pass laws to protect choice. And the electorate should send to Washington a Congress that will pass a federal right-to-choice billand one that addresses the wrongly manipulated composition of the court by increasing its membership.

Congress has that unquestioned power under the Constitution. It has changed the numbers of justices before. And it should do so again.

Read the original here:

From now on, we should call it the Trump Court - Brookings Institution

Humans remain fascinated with dinosaurs: It's why scientists recently announced discoveries, to acclaim, about dinosaurs being warm-bloodedor maintaining a delicate co-existence with exotic plants. And it is why as the blockbuster"Jurassic World: Dominion" rampages through theaters, a quieter adventure is being told on bookshelves throughout America.Reuters senior reporter David K. Randall resurrects the world of early 20th-century robber barons and western adventurers in his new book,"The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World."

If the story has a hero, it is Barnum Brown, who made history by unearthing the first Tyrannosaurus rex fossils in the wilderness of Montana. The hero's foil is Henry Fairfield Osborn, an upper crust eugenicist who competed with Brown to fill the American Museum of Natural History with dinosaur bones. It is a rip-roaring tale, albeit one with many sober moments of contemplation. For instance, it is difficult to read this book and not notice how class, gender, race and other social constructs determine the fates of these men and others in the tale. Randall's skill as a writer is undeniable. "The Monster's Bones" reads like a novel, complete with real-life scientific, political and social issues at stake.

At the center of all this human-fueled chicanery are the stars of the show the dinosaurs themselves.

In the interview segment below, Salon spoke with Randall about why a bunch of fossils can fuel so much drama and serve as the focal point of human dreams, from museums to movies, all of these years later.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and context.

I was wondering if you'd be willing to elaborate a little on what you would say was the feeling in the air to people like Osborn or Brown when they were engaged in their endeavors? What was the ideology, the philosophy, the sentiment of the time?

One thing I was struck by was the idea that science was for the first time kind of being seen as a social aspect. There's a social aspect of science as well. It wasn't just people doing experiments and finding out the laws of nature. It was more so, how did these laws of nature affect human beings and affect society? So with, Osborn, his idea was that dinosaurs were a way to bring in people to the Natural History Museum. In many ways that was almost the lure for the trap. If you bring people in the door, then you can also expose them to some of his white supremacist theories in eugenics, in a kind of subtle way.

Brown on the other hand was kind of the opposite. He was the idealistic part of the Gilded Age. Where he says we have these resources and we have this idea that the history of the Earth is much longer and stranger than anyone thought possible. So now let's go out and explore it. Let's kind of attempt to master the Earth and its history in some ways. And by doing that, he would go into essentially the blank spots in the map and see what was there. One thing I was really struck by was that, he was a college student and he writes this letter saying, essentially saying I can find dinosaurs for you.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe toSalon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

I want to briefly digress from discussing your book. We will return, but your book discusses using dinosaurs for evil purposes. Now, I must mention the current blockbuster stomping through the cineplexes throughout the world, "Jurassic World: Dominion."

Well, one thing I was struck by and I haven't seen the full movie yet, I've only seen a trailer but with "Jurassic Park," the first one, the 1993 version, dinosaurs really kind of fill in this sense of what are our cultural worries right now. The new "Jurassic World" seems like the idea that dinosaurs live among us and there's this world where they're not just in a park, they're free range, essentially. They're moving throughout the world. In some ways, it seems like that kind of fills in for our concerns about climate change. We have through science, we've changed the earth, and now we have to deal with this monster, and we don't know how to put the genie back into the bottle, essentially.

Reuters senior reporter David K. Randall resurrects the world of early 20th-century robber barons and western adventurers in his new book,"The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World."

If you go back to the 1990s, "Jurassic Park" was the beginning of this sense of what technology could do. The Human Genome Project was in its early stages. Then pretty soon they were cloning sheeps like Dolly. It was this new computer age and dinosaurs really seemed to fill in this very tidy metaphor of what science can do, and also fears of science. I think dinosaurs overall, taking a step away from the "Jurassic" franchise, I think dinosaurs are overall this blank slate that we project our fears onto.

I want to return to your book because you said that the dinosaurs are a blank slate that we project our fears onto. You could also say that they are a blank slate onto which people project their ambitions. Is that not in many ways the theme of the book?

I think that's a very fair point.

I think for someone like Brown, for sure, this was a way to get out of his life, or the life that was kind of handed down to him, as someone living on a farm in Kansas, which is the last thing he wanted to do. The dinosaurs were a path to a bigger life. And you saw that for many people in the book, the history of paleontology is filled with people who were looking for dinosaurs as a way to do something bigger I think once they were put into museums, the public reaction to them was the first time you realized that this Earth is strange and that natural history is strange. And there were these creatures that were much larger than you and had teeth the size of your hand. It makes perhaps feel diminished in a different way.

But it also makes people feel inspired. I'm thinking of little children who love T. Rexes and Brontosauruses, and it's because they're fearsome. Have you ever thought of that? Why do little children, you would think that if T Rexes represent the apex of human fear, that children mm-hmm would view them with dread, like they view the concept of death with dread? In "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" the horrible scene where the dinosaur dies because the volcano explodes and everyone in the audience gets teary-eyed. People care about dinosaurs and feel inspired by them. And I feel like in "The Monster's Bones" that sentiment is captured as well.

I think that's a good point.

I think "Jurassic Park" is interesting that people want to be a part of it until the safety mechanisms break down and then they're face to face with the T. Rex and suddenly that becomes a much different story. I think that kids like dinosaurs so much because in some ways it's an alien right in front of you that you are told that this is how the world works, and this is how everything has been. And then suddenly you see essentially what were real-life monsters walking around. And this, I think , dinosaurs represent the era of possibility at this age, of this sense of possibility too, that life as it is right now is not how it always has been, or perhaps will always will be, that once upon a time, there were these enormous creatures walking the Earth, and that has changed. So whatever circumstances you may be in right now, you can kind of lean on that to say, you know, life does change.

See more here:

The real world behind "Jurassic World": How the story of dinosaurs reflects the story of humans - Salon

More than half the UK backs the idea of rewriting the DNA of human embryos to prevent severe or life-threatening diseases, according to a survey.

Commissioned by the Progress Educational Trust (PET), a fertility and genomics charity, the Ipsos poll found that 53% of people support the use of human genome editing to prevent children from developing serious conditions such as cystic fibrosis.

There was less enthusiasm for use of the procedure to prevent milder conditions such as asthma, with only 36% in favour, and to create designer babies, with only a fifth expressing support, but views on the technology differed dramatically with age.

Younger generations were far more in favour of designer babies than older people, with 38% of 16- to 24-year-olds and 31% of 25- to 34-year-olds supporting the use of gene editing to allow parents to choose features such as their childs height and eye and hair colour.

In the UK and many other countries it is illegal to perform genome editing on embryos that are intended for pregnancies, but the restrictions could be lifted if research shows the procedure can safely prevent severe diseases.

Genome editing has been hailed as a potential gamechanger for dealing with a raft of heritable diseases ranging from cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy to Tay-Sachs, a rare condition that progressively destroys the nervous system. In principle, the faulty genes that cause the diseases can be rewritten in IVF embryos, allowing those embryos to develop into healthy babies.

Despite enormous progress in the field, work is still needed to perfect genome editing and ensure it does not cause unintended changes to DNA. Because the edits would be performed in embryos, the altered DNA would affect every cell in the childs body, and could be passed on to future generations.

In 2018 a Chinese researcher, He Jiankui, provoked global condemnation when he announced he had tried to edit the genomes of two baby girls in the hope of making them immune to HIV. He was later jailed for violating medical regulations. The furore led to an international commission, convened by the Royal Society and others, which concluded that genome editing was far from ready for the clinic.

In a report on the surveys findings, PET says that if genome editing is put to medical use, it must be done in a scientifically and ethically rigorous way.

The authors say it is striking that younger people are more willing to countenance human genome editing for preferred characteristics such as eye and hair colour. It is worth paying attention to these views, but we should continue to prioritise medical needs in the first instance, they write.

John Harris, emeritus professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, said he supported the maximum possible choice for parents in choosing the physical traits of their children if the traits in themselves are not harmful.

I dont think its wrong in principle to engineer either harmless or better than original traits in our children if we can, he said. If its not wrong to wish for a bonnie brown-eyed girl, how does it become wrong to implement that if you have the power? We are too ready to shout eugenics when people want to exercise innocent preferences.

According to the survey of a nationally representative 2,233 UK adults, two-thirds believe the NHS should offer fertility treatment for people who are infertile and want to conceive, but the report notes that access to free IVF is still a postcode lottery. Support is greatest for childless heterosexual couples, at 49%, while only 19% are in favour of the NHS providing fertility treatment for single people or transgender people.

Its disappointing that despite gender discrimination being illegal in the UK, attitudes to family structures remain traditional, said Prof Alison Murdoch, the president of the British Fertility Society. The better news, though, is that most people seem to have no objection to IVF a major change from 40 years ago. IVF is now a routine procedure, so why doesnt the NHS give everyone a chance?

See the rest here:

Half in UK back genome editing to prevent severe diseases - The Guardian