Category Archives: Eugenics

Theres an irony to the uproar over the claim that institutions of higher learning are advancing critical race theory to suppress white people. The reality is that many colleges and universities still struggle to make amends for their racism or even recognize that amends need to be made. While researching and publishing facts about an institutions ties to slavery is important and praiseworthy, this should be the bare minimum for colleges and universities that are committed to racial justice. Once past wrongs are identified, these institutions should develop and implement plans for restitution.

Racial reckonings are happening at many colleges and universities across the United States. The University of Richmond is now taking steps to mark and protect a burial ground for enslaved persons, which previous leadership knowingly desecrated. Students, faculty and staff have also lobbied to remove two names from school buildings the name of a slave owner, who is considered one of the founders of what became the University of Richmond, and the name of a segregationist who advocated for eugenics. While the university created signage marking the burial grounds, and is discussing ways to further memorialize the dead, the universitys board has refused to remove the names of the slave owner and of the eugenicist a noted historian from the buildings, despite sustained pressure.

Reparations are the most progressive and meaningful actions universities can take.

At a time when many of the nations public-facing institutions are grappling with what it means to become anti-racist, an increasing number of colleges and universities are finally acknowledging that white supremacy has been encoded into their land, built into their environment, and culture.

But in too many cases, acknowledging the racism at their institutions roots has been mere lip service, while action that could bring justice to victims and begin to right the wrongs of the past is halting or nonexistent.

Related: Student debt cancellation isnt regressive, its anti-racist

Over 80 institutions of higher education including the University of Richmond have joined the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium, created and led by the University of Virginia. The consortium builds on the pioneering work of Brown University, which began studying its own complicity in slavery in 2003 for a report published in 2006. And recently, Virginia legislators passed a law that requires five public institutions the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, Longwood University, Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia Military Institute to make reparations through scholarships or community-based economic development and memorial programs.

These colleges and universities, along with others elsewhere, are hoping that reparations in the form of preferred admission as well as scholarships and other financial aid will not only atone for the past but also help address issues of inequitable access to higher education and financial disparities in paying for that education. While there are still plenty of questions surrounding whether this approach will produce tangible results, the legal accountability is a welcome feature that will go a long way in ensuring meaningful action.

Reparations are the most progressive and meaningful actions universities can take. But the implementation of reparations is an ongoing challenge. For example, Georgetown University officials made headlines in 2019 when they announced the creation of a $400,000-a-year reparations fund after it was widely reported the school had once sold 272 enslaved men, women, and children for the equivalent of $3.3 million in todays dollars in order to remain financially solvent. Georgetown, which is a participant in the USS consortium, plans to invest this money to benefit descendants indirectly, through strengthening community services including health clinics.

But to the descendants of those enslaved persons, $400,000 a year in community investment is a paltry sum, particularly given the universitys $1.5 billion endowment. Georgetown students have critiqued the plan on the basis that it transforms the fund intended to repay a debt into a philanthropy effort. As one student put it, The fear is that the university will use these funds for their own purposes The university is trying to control the narrative, and were trying to prevent that. Georgetown students created their own proposal for handling reparations: 66 percent of the student body voted to levy a $27 student fee to be paid directly to the descendants. But the university has thus far chosen not to pursue this approach.

Related: If you dont want critical race theory to exist, stop being racist

Making direct cash payments to descendants is the most straightforward approach to reparations. If higher education leaders decide on a different approach, the burden is on them to demonstrate how their alternative approach will produce tangible results. Moreover, leaders often act as though universities particularly those with large endowments must choose between paying reparations or pursuing community development efforts to respond to local racial disparities in health, wealth and education.

That is a false choice. They can and should do both.

As we wrote in a recent Brookings report, institutions like the University of Richmond have the capacity to do heavy-lifting in addressing racial disparities through their sheer size as an employer to say nothing of their ability to leverage their assets and procurement and contracting power. There is no reason why colleges and universities cannot pursue a multi-pronged approach to reparations and racial justice.

Nevertheless, while the mechanics of reparations are important, we cannot allow the best to be the enemy of the good especially when that means lost momentum.

For every college or university that is demonstrating meaningful commitment to restitution, there are many others with an explicit history of being complicit in slavery and white supremacy that are now quietly hoping to avoid accountability altogether. Without unrelenting pressure, many leaders in higher education will be forever content with forming task forces, drafting reports and publishing committee recommendations while never taking the bold action required to formally address the injustices of the past. In the words of a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, most universities will do as little as they can get away with. It is our job to ensure that these schools do the most, not the least.

In the end, acknowledging previous wrongs is a crucial first step in establishing racial justice. But now its time for universities complicit in slavery to put their money where their mouth is, and pay the restitution that is owed.

This story about reparations was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechingers newsletter.

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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Universities are finally acknowledging their complicity in slavery, but they must offer reparations, too - The Hechinger Report

The question of white replacement theory is gaining some steam. First, let me say that the position held by supremacists and separatists is an ugly position and is contrary to the teachings of Christ. It has no place in church life. The Christian has no business participating formally or informally in such a worldview.

The manipulation of people through political rhetoric and contrived events has a lengthy history. It is easy to bait people, especially the reactionary, to get the desired result and advance an agenda.

Lets say youre an anti-capitalist. There are not too many of them around so that should make for a suitable test case. These anti-capitalists (ACs) are actually neo-Marxists whose desire is to erase national borders, convert government and economics to a socialist system, eliminate private property, and generally control the thought life of the nation. I cant think of any movement so extreme, so we should be able to look at this dispassionately.

Now back to white replacement theory (WRT). Its been around in various forms for a long time. It was a concern of progressives such as Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger. They were quite specific about limiting the Asian and Southern European populations in the U.S. Whether through the accusation of criminal intent (the Alien and Sedition Act) or through extermination (eugenics and abortion) the perception was part of progressive ideology. Thats just history. Part of that remains today. It is not uncommon to hear progressives articulate that all citizens of Israel ought to register as foreign agents. It is, again, an ugly system.

Then there are the KKK & related groups. Theyre all pretty small, at least formally. Only around five thousand KKK members are in the U.S. But with what you read in the news it seems like more. (sigh) And there are others, of course.

Again, this has no place in the Christian life or in the church.

But these people are often reactionary. We know there are reactionaries in every crowd. Whats the best way to bait them? If I were to guess it would be to open the border. Let a few million people stream in unquestioned, and in these days untested for COVID-19, and youre going to get a reaction.

Now the target reacts. Why he asks, would anyone want to let twenty million people into this country? One of the first reactions is that there is a hatred for what people who are of originally European descent have built. Then the response is they hate white people.

Similar reactions abound.

Does that mean its all white replacement theory? No. Some may be. Others, it seems, dont see the bigger AC picture. That picture is the intent to disrupt the system.

Reactionary comments that address the symptom of allowing millions to enter without restriction but dont address the issue behind the situation, those comments can be taken either way. Are they all partaking in WRT? Probably not. Are some? Likely so.

My friends from Singapore, from the Philippines, from China, Taiwan, and Japan, from various countries in Africa, from India and Nepal, all of these people have to do their paperwork. They do. And theyre all my friends. But when it comes to the Southern border, theres some manipulation going on. It is intended to disrupt our system. The full picture, all of the methods and plans, that Ive not gathered yet. And it seems many of the reactionary crowd has no idea of the broader framework at play. To many of us, closing the Southern border is not about race. Its about stopping the manipulation of a corrupt government. Nothing more, nothing less. Any suggestion otherwise is a complete fabrication. But its not like that hasnt happened before.

Cross-post.

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The White Replacement Theory Mess - Caffeinated Thoughts

Kristan Hawkins, Opinion contributor Published 4:00 a.m. ET July 23, 2020

How a woman who advocated for the selective breeding of her fellow citizens came to be memorialized with those who built a country is hard to understand.

All across America, video of activists attacking statues plays on a loop while some political leadersvoice their supportfor removing all reminders of people whose personal histories put them in a negative light. In asking for the U.S. Capitol to be cleansed of Confederate statues, House SpeakerNancy Pelosisaid they must go because their efforts were to achieve such a plainly racist end. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo saidon NBC's "Today" showthat removing statues is a healthy expression of priorities and values.

For those identifying historical figures with racist roots who should be removed from public view because of their evil histories, Planned Parenthoods founder, Margaret Sanger, must join that list. In promotingbirth control, she advanced a controversial "Negro Project," wrotein her autobiographyabout speaking to a Ku Klux Klangroup andadvocatedfor a eugenics approach to breeding for the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.

In a1939 letter to Dr. C. J. Gamble, Sanger urged him to get over his reluctance to hire a full time Negro physician as the colored Negroescan get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubt.

Like the abortion lobbytoday, Sanger urged Dr. Gamble to enlist the help of spiritual leaders to justify their deadly work, writing,We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

And that spirit of racism continues today, as more than 300 former and current employees of Planned Parenthood said recently inan open letter, noting a toxic environment.

Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist, white woman. That is a part of history that cannot be changed, they observed, writing that the pattern of systemic racism, pay inequity, and lack of upward mobility for Black staff continues.

Margaret Sanger in Washington, D.C., on March 1, 1934.(Photo: Unknown/AP)

Cultural iconKanye West has made headlines with hisrecent statements on Planned Parenthoodabortion vendors, which he said have"been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devils work.Hes right about the locations of the businesses.

The vast majority of the abortion vendors haveset up shopin minority neighborhoods, which can be seen in thescarce statisticsavailable at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Though they are only13% of the female population, African Americans made up 38% of all abortions tracked in 2016.

Democratic, not dramatic process: United or Divided States of America? 6 ways to think about removing Confederate statues

In the 1970s, when theSupreme Court's Roe V. Wade decision legalizedabortion, polling showed that Blacks were "significantly less likely to favor abortion" than whites. Yet in New York City,more black babies are abortedthan born aliveeach year.And the abortion industry think tank,the Guttmacher Institute,notes that the abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women.

It would seem that Sangers vision of ending Black lives has come to pass, though to be accurate she also endorsed endingChinese preborn lifeas well.

Among those who advocate for the removal of statutes, signs and traces of racist ancestors there is no balancing of good and bad deeds. It would be hypocritical to say that the racist attitudes andeugenics policy preferencesof Sanger should be ignored because it was a tacticto advancebirth control that some consider a social good, the position of famed feministGloria Steinem.

But consider Sangers own words. In an article titledA Better Race Through Birth Control,she wrote, Given Birth Control, the unfit will voluntarily eliminate their kind.

Birth Control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practised, Sanger wrote.It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society.

Just this week,Planned Parenthood of Greater New Yorkannounced it will remove Sanger's name from itsManhattan abortion vendor location because of her harmful connections to the eugenics movement.

Why stop there?

Sanger is honored in the SmithsoniansNational Portrait Galleryand atMargaret Sanger Squarein Manhattan. And aMargaret Sanger statuestands in the Old South Meeting House in Boston, which ironically enough is on theFreedom Trail commemorating the Revolutionary War. How a woman who advocated for the selective breeding of her fellow citizens came to be memorialized with those who built a country is hard to understand and a mistake easy to address.

Learning from an ugly past: Use Confederate statues and names to educate

While there are other places celebrating her, these three are a good place to start.They should not be removed through mob violence, but rather through the use of democratic tools, as a Students for Life group at theUniversity of Missouridid in successfully petitioning for posters of Sanger to be removed.

Students for Life of America is launching an SOS: Strike Out Sanger campaign calling on pro-life people nationwide to demand the removal of Sangers statues and symbols, which represent a racist who actively targeted minority communities because she did not value their lives. The founder of Planned Parenthood does not represent our American ideals, and her images and honors should be pulled down to gather dust in historys closet.

Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America. Followher on Twitter: @KristanHawkins, or subscribe to her podcast, Explicitly Pro-Life.

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Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/23/racism-eugenics-margaret-sanger-deserves-no-honors-column/5480192002/

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Margaret Sanger was a racist eugenics advocate who shouldn ...

Eugenics the science of improving the race was a powerful influence on the development of Western civilisation in the first half of the twentieth century. And Melbournes elite were among its chief proponents.

In this period all the institutions and practices of modern societies came into being and eugenics played an important role in moulding them.

As the home of the Australian federal government in the early decades of the twentieth century, Melbourne was the ideal place for activists wishing to pursue a national eugenic agenda.

An important leader of this loose alignment of like-thinking middle class academics and doctors was the Professor of Anatomy at Melbourne University from 1903 to 1929, Richard Berry. His influence extended beyond the university, which still has a building bearing his name, to some of the most important members of the citys society.

Although there was a short-lived Eugenics Education Society, until the founding of the Eugenics Society of Victoria in 1936 eugenicists operated primarily as a pressure group within the university, the education department and various government agencies and committees.

Important legislation, in the form of three Mental Deficiency Bills, was presented to the parliament in 1926, 1929 and 1939 by the Premier Stanley Argyle, a friend and colleague of Berry.

The bill aimed to institutionalise and potentially sterilise a significant proportion of the population - those seen as inefficient. Included in the group were slum dwellers, homosexuals, prostitutes, alcoholics, as well as those with small heads and with low IQs. The Aboriginal population was also seen to fall within this group.

The first two attempts to enact the bills failed not due to any significant opposition but rather because of the unstable political climate and the fall of governments.

The third in 1939 was passed unanimously, but not enacted in the first instance because of the outbreak of war and, later, due to the embarrassment of the Holocaust.

Other state parliaments were inspired to also institute such legislation by Berrys many town hall lectures across the nation.

Important national Royal Commissions in the 1920s also recommended a range of eugenic reforms including measures relating to child endowment, marriage laws and pensions.

Perhaps the culmination of all this activity was the commissioning of a national survey of mental deficiency by the Federal Minister for health, Sir Neville Howse, in 1928.

It was carried out by Berrys colleague, the Chief Inspector for the Insane in Victorian William Ernest Jones. In it, he claimed that the statistics collected showed the incidence of mental deficiency was rising, mainly due to genetics, and was more often found in the working class. He concluded that it required urgent government action along the lines previously championed by Berry. It was tabled before parliament and created a sensation in the press.

Little happened, however, as the government fell and the Great Depression hit the nation. The Director of the Department of Health, John Cumpston, claimed that the dire financial situation destroyed any chance of such a reform.

Another important influence of eugenic thinking was found in the development of post-primary education in Victoria.

The most important educationalists involved in the radical developments in the development of secondary and technical schools in Victoria were either active in eugenic circles or closely associated with Berry.

Perhaps the most influential, the first director of education, Frank Tate, was associated on most important government bodies with Berry and strongly supported his research on head size and, on occasions, introduced his public lectures.

Others, such as the first Director of the Carnegie funded Australian Council for Educational Research, Kenneth Cunningham, as well as one of the most significant early psychologists, Chris McRae, published research claiming to show that working class children were unfit for academic secondary education and the university study that it led to.

McRae replicated in Melbourne suburbs research carried out in a variety of different socio-economic suburbs of London. He subsequently reported in the Victorian Education Gazette (sent out to every state school primary teacher) that those in schools in poorer suburbs will never go to university and should not follow the same curriculum people live in slums because they are mentally deficient and not vice-versa.

As a consequence, in this period the Victorian Education Department set up technical schools in the poorer suburbs of Melbourne with just a few academic high schools.

In comparison, in New South Wales the Director of Education, Peter Board, vigorously opposed such thinking and championed higher education opportunity for all. Many more state school children in New South Wales were given an academic secondary education and went on to university.

Richard Berry returned to England in 1929 butothers took up the mantle, founding the Eugenics Society of Victoria.

Its membership read like a whos who of Melbournes elite including the Chief Executive Officer of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research the precursor to the CSIRO, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, the President of the Royal College of Physicians and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria.

Although the aims of the society included supporting the sterilisation of mental defectives, more and more they were involved in environmental reforms (such as slum clearance) and the birth control movement.

In Britain Richard Berry continued to preach his uncompromising theory of rotten heredity. In 1934 he would argue that to eliminate mental deficiency would require the sterilisation of twenty-five per cent of the population. At the same time he also advocated the kindly euthanasia of the unfit.

But his legacy in Australia continued, with the Eugenics Society of Victoria operating until 1961.

Although Melbourne may wish to forget its dark past, the powerful leaders of the eugenics movement once controlled the city, and their beliefs influenced a generation.

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Eugenics in Australia: The secret of Melbourne's elite

In the early 20th century, eugenics was widely supported among the educated classes all across the West. Eugenicists fancied themselves benefactors of the human race, putting to use the most cutting-edge science to eradicate human suffering, and to improve the human race.

By giving nature a helping hand, carefully encouraging the reproduction of the fittest members of the human race, and discouraging the reproduction of the unfit, eugenicists believed they could rapidly create a race of strong, healthy, and super-intelligent human beings. No longer would the state and society be burdened with moral degenerates (the memorable term used by eugenicist Margaret Sanger), the mentally disabled, and those prone to costly and painful diseases.

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was an enthusiastic proponent of eugenics. She openly advocated the forcible sterilization of the unfit, and the involuntary collection of such people into internment camps, where they would spend their entire lives in forced labor. She claimed that these methods were necessary, for the sake of peace. In various Western countries, including the United States, some of these recommendations were carried out. In the U.S. tens of thousands of people deemed unfit were forcibly sterilized.

Eugenics received a huge public relations blow, however, when Hitler took its principles further than most were willing to go, killing millions of Jews, mentally handicapped, gypsies, homosexuals, and other unwanted individuals, in the name of purifying the race. After Hitlers atrocities were exposed, the less brutal, but still profoundly inhumane experiments in eugenics being carried out by other Western nations fell out of favor.

Nowadays, however, people often speak of eugenics as a thing of the past a failed experiment.

This is wrong. Not only has eugenics not failed, but it is also a more potent force than ever before. The explosion in popularity of assisted reproduction techniques means that every day, parents all around the world choose what kind of baby they would like to have. While in some cases this is restricted only to a choice between a boy and a girl, some IVF clinics are offering to test embryos for such things as intelligence, susceptibility to certain diseases, eye color, etc. Those embryos human beings that do not meet the chosen criteria are unceremoniously discarded as waste, i.e. destroyed, murdered. They are treated as commodities, products, and judged to be unequal in dignity to their parents.

The same utilitarian, commercial, and eugenic treatment of human reproduction is found in clinics that offer artificial insemination. Women or couples who choose to become pregnant in this way, must first browse catalogues of sperm donors, selecting donors for desirable characteristics such as artistic ability, IQ, physical build, looks, etc.

These forms of eugenics are dressed up in the respectability of white lab coats, and presented in the language of modern marketing and choice. However, the same mentality that motivated Margaret Sanger i.e. the reduction of the value of human beings to certain qualities they possess is present. And in the case of IVF, the end result is often the same: i.e. a dead human being.

One thinker Garland-Thomson refers to this modern form of eugenics as velvet eugenics. As the author of a recent in-depth article on the problem in The Atlantic summarizes, Like the Velvet Revolution from which she takes the term, its accomplished without overt violence [Note: I disagree with her here. True, the violence is not overt, in the sense that it is hidden in IVF and abortion clinics; but modern eugenics is deeply violent]. But it also takes on another connotation as human reproduction becomes more and more subject to consumer choice: velvet, as in quality, high-caliber, premium-tier. Wouldnt you want only the best for your babyone youre already spending tens of thousands of dollars on IVF to conceive?

It turns people into products, says Garland-Thomson.

However, one particularly brutal form of eugenics is the practice of testing unborn children for various diseases, and then, should they test positive, aborting them, often quite late in the pregnancy. While this is always a horrific evil, there is something viscerally jarring about the degree to which this has been perpetrated on people with Down syndrome.

While Down syndrome unquestionably comes with many detrimental health problems, many people with Downs also live long, productive, and happy lives. In fact, an overwhelming majority of people with Downs describe themselves as happy far more than those without Downs. And yet, in many countries around the world, Down syndrome is practically going extinct. Some medical experts are hailing this as some kind of a medical triumph. This is a farce. If the extinction of a disease by killing everyone with that disease is a triumph, we could achieve the miracle of eradicating all disease in a matter of days. We dont, because killing a person with a disease is not a solution to that disease.

One country that has attracted a lot of attention on this issue is Denmark, in which only a tiny handful of people with Down syndrome are born every year. Many of these are born only because in utero testing failed to detect the disease, or because the parents werent deemed at risk and didnt bother getting the testing in the first place. Only rarely do the parents of a child diagnosed with Downs choose to give birth to that child.

The article in The Atlantic mentioned above provides a fascinating in-depth look into the moral quagmire of this issue. While the publication and the author are clearly pro-choice, nevertheless, the article seriously wrestles with the issue, and provides some fascinating insights and conclusions. I urge you to read it, if you have the time.

The author calls Down syndrome the canary in the coal mine for selective reproduction. As she writes: Recent advances in genetics provoke anxieties about a future where parents choose what kind of child to have, or not have. But that hypothetical future is already here. Its been here for an entire generation.

Testing for Downs is relatively accurate, which means that a large percentage of children with Downs are detected before birth. In many Western countries, the default position is to abort that child, basing the decision on a quality of life definition and determining the childs life unworthy of living.

The irony, however, is that we currently live in something of a golden age for people with Downs. Treatment options are better than they ever have been. People with Downs live longer than they ever have. Most persons with Downs will learn to read and write, and many of them will work paying jobs.

The author of the article rightly questions why, in light of this, abortion has become the default position, and whether there may be some other way we should be looking at the issue.

One theme that emerges strongly in the article is the degree to which fear plays a part in the decision to abort. However, as the author notes, this fear often simply doesnt match the reality of what life with a child with Downs is like. That is, when couples receive a diagnosis of Downs, their imagination often immediately leaps to the worst-case scenario. The decision to abort, to end the life of their child, is made based upon this worst-case.

As the sister of one man with Downs who was interviewed in the article notes, If you handed any expecting parent a whole list of everything their child could possibly encounter during their entire life spanillnesses and stuff like thatthen anyone would be scared. Her mother agrees, adding, Nobody would have a baby.

One researcher in the U.S., David Wasserman, a critic of eugenic selective abortion, has made the excellent point that (in the words of The Atlantic author) prenatal testing has the effect of reducing an unborn child to a single aspectDown syndrome, for exampleand making parents judge the childs life on that alone.

This is the dark side of our societys pursuit of perfection, and perfect control.

Modern science comes to us wrapped in a mythology the mythology of perfect control. This mythology promises us that if we just use the scientific method the right way, we can eradicate all pain and uncertainty in our lives. This promise in turn leads us to have certain expectations. We expect easy, predictable lives. And when science fails to deliver on its promises as it inevitably will our whole world is shattered.

Often, we respond by desperately seeking to wrest control back. For parents with an unborn child with Downs, this often means that they will be tempted (and often strongly encouraged by doctors and family) to erase the problem, instead of welcoming life, accepting the challenge to love, and experiencing the learning and personal growth that always come from embracing lifes difficulty.

Every child should be welcomed and loved. To welcome a child into the world requires a leap of faith. It is a leap that should come with no conditions.

As the Bible tells us, every child is created in the image and likeness of God. No characteristic can alter that no disease, no handicap, not even any sin or crime, can efface that dignity. Humans are not beasts. It is acceptable to select and breed animals for certain characteristics, since humans have authority to use animals for certain, specific purposes. But humans can never be reduced in this way to something-to-be-used. To do so is to do incomparable violence to their immeasurable value, which is not found in their usefulness, but in their being.

The author of The Atlantic article, while maintaining loyalty to the pro-choice worldview, does a decent job of highlighting the beauty and humanity of those with Downs, and contrasting it with the fear and rejection that meet children diagnosed with Downs.

The mother of one family featured in the article runs a charity intended to provide couples with accurate information about Downs. She herself has a grown son with Downs.

In the article, she describes one case where someone sent her a link to a documentary with the heartless title, Dd Over Downs (Death to Down Syndrome). Her son, she said, was peering over her shoulder when she opened the link. When he read the title, his face crumpled. He curled into the corner and refused to look at us. He had understood, obviously, and the distress was plain on his face.

The author concludes, The decisions parents make after prenatal testing are private and individual ones. But when the decisions so overwhelmingly swing one wayto abortit does seem to reflect something more: an entire societys judgment about the lives of people with Down syndrome. Thats what I saw reflected in Karl Emils face.

As a society, we must do better than this.

Every life is precious, without exception. No life should ever be viewed as unworthy or unwelcomed.

We once believed that we destroyed the beast of eugenics on the beaches of Normandy in World War II. But we hadnt killed it; instead, we simply thrust it underground, and then allowed it to creep back into our hospitals, laboratories, and universities. To eradicate eugenics, we must drive a knife into the very heart of its poisonous philosophy. That means that we must reject the core premise of the culture of death that the worth of human beings can be measured by what they do, or some characteristic they have, instead of what they are. Instead of expanding our sense of control, we must expand our hearts. We must help parents of children diagnosed with Downs, and other diseases, to reject fear, and live in hope, the hope that comes of unconditional love.

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Modern-Day Eugenics: Who Lives and Who Dies? | Human Life ...

In a post-Dobbs world, pre-viability abortion might be even more restrictedor not exist at all. So-called eugenic prohibitions will be the first past the constitutional post.

The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, a case that will decide whether restrictions that states place on pre-viability abortions are constitutional. Much commentary has focused on the real possibility the court will overturn Roe v. Wade. Less attention has been paid to another, potentially more likely outcome: The court could uphold Roeand preserve constitutional protection for abortionbut create exceptions for pre-viability bans. Indeed, thats similar to what happened in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, a decision in which the court preserved constitutional abortion rights, yet rejected Roes trimester framework and weakened protections for those rights.

Over the last year, states have enacted numerous pre-viability restrictions: Texas just passed a law banning abortions at six weeks, to take one example. A different law that applies before viability has received less press, but is increasingly popular with anti-abortion legislators. Twenty states have adopted laws that prohibit abortions performed because of the fetuss sex, race or disability. In a post-Dobbs world, where some pre-viability abortion bans are permissible, these so-called eugenic prohibitions will be the first past the constitutional post.

Federal appellate courts are split on the constitutionality of reason-based bans after the Sixth Circuit upheld Ohios law prohibition on abortion because of a Down syndrome diagnosis. Reason-based bans apply throughout pregnancy, but Ohios law responds specifically to innovations in early prenatal genetic testing. With a non-invasive prenatal test, patients can detect a limited number of conditions, including Down syndrome, with a blood test administered during the first trimester of pregnancy.

The new conservative majority Supreme Court is poised to decide the question of whether a state can vet someones reason to end a pregnancy.In a 2019 concurring opinion, Justice Thomas, writing about a race-based ban, opined that to uphold such a law would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement. Essentially, Justice Thomas argued that anti-abortion laws are on the side of equality and justice. And an increasing segment of the public appears to agree. Reason-based bans like Ohios make sense to people as the most recent Gallup poll reports. Almost 50 percent of people responded that abortions because of a Down syndrome diagnosis should be illegal.

That the Supreme Court might allow states to make criminals out of health professionals and possibly patients who choose to end a pre-viability pregnancy is startling. But what is also troubling is how popular opinion favors substituting the states judgment for that of the pregnant person, at least in certain circumstances.Moreover, the polls question, as well as public discourse, doesnt capture the complexity of the issues individuals face when their fetus is diagnosed with a genetic anomaly or another condition. Just asking whether abortion should be legal or illegal ignores how contextwhat support or needs does a pregnant person have or the stage of pregnancyshapes abortion decisions.

Whether or not people feel equipped to raise and the meet the needs of children is something only they can discern. But in the case of prenatal diagnosis and abortion, new technology and states abortion animus are on a collision course. On the one hand, pregnant people are encouraged to learn as much about their pregnancies as early as possible. On the other, states are legislating to bar what people do with that information.

Perhaps more saliently, criminalizing choice does not create the conditions for racial, gender and disability equality. And policing pregnant peoples decisions does not result in deeper inclusivity or greater acceptance of and support for people with Down syndrome, for instance. To the contrary, reason-based bans do nothing to assist potential parents and ignore the many considerations that drive peoples decisions to raise a child.

Instead, these laws incrementally advance an agenda of ending legal abortion for all reasons. Equating decisions to terminate a pregnancy with the state-sponsored eugenics gives cold comfort to anyone who receives a diagnosis of fetal impairment and further stigmatizes their choices. And make no mistake, there will be more reason-based bans: not being able to afford another child or the interruption of other life plans will be next on the chopping block, denounced as frivolous in comparison to an alleged state interest in protecting potential life or the health of the pregnant person.

Drawing the line for abortion restrictions at viability always has been a constitutional compromise; one that protected early abortion in exchange for recognizing that states could limit patients decision-making at some point in a pregnancy. Post-Dobbs, pre-viability abortion might be even more restrictedor not exist at all. In either scenario, nationwide rights to abortion could be established by federal law.

One such proposal is the Womens Health Protection Act, which soon will be introduced in Congress. The legislation would preempt state laws that ban abortion before viability and prohibit reason-based bans specifically. We may not be able to count on the Supreme Court to protect abortion rights. But we should demand laws more in step with peoples lived realities from our legislators.

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What the Public Gets Wrong About "Reason-Based" Abortion Bans - Ms. Magazine

Audrey Clare Farley's new book "The Unfit Heiress" explores eugenics, the history of women's ... [+] reproductive rights, and high-society scandal.

There are bad mothers, and then there is Maryon Cooper Hewitt.

In Audrey Clare Farleys new book, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, the author tells the story of a young heiress who was sterilized without her knowledge. The culprit? Her own mother, Maryon.

Hewitts tale shows a snapshot of America in the early 1900s, when women began to challenge old standards of Victorian propriety. It also follows the development and popularization of eugenics, a movement that encouraged sterilization of certain women to stop them from passing on their defects to others.

Farley, a historian who specializes in early 20th-century culture, religion and science, actually found her topic when she was doing research unrelated to work.

My daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and I was researching about the history of insulin. I read a few books that mentioned one of the first people to receive insulin, Elizabeth Hughes, whose father was a statesman, so he got to cut the line to get insulin, says Farley.

She discovered that Hughes father supported selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits in the hopes of getting rid of disabilities and disease and elevating white supremacy. Farley wondered how someone whose daughter had a disease could support a movement to get rid of people with disabilities. She then took a deep dive into the world of eugenics, where she discovered Hewitt.

Farley pitched a story on Hewitt to Narrativelys Hidden History section. It became an instant hit, racking up more than 100,000 views within hours of publishing and becoming one of the sites most popular articles of 2019 despite being published halfway through the year.

Several agents reached out to Farley about turning the article into a book, and she signed with one and sold the book to a publisher just a few months later.

I think the book has two things going for it. No. 1 is what I call the Jerry Springer factorhere are these two wealthy women both accusing the other one of being oversexed. And two, it also has an intellectual component, which is exploring this hidden history of eugenics that few people know about, Farley says.

In addition to Unfit Heiress, here are 11 other must-read nonfiction books out right now.

Abdurraqib, known for his playful, intelligent sense of humor on Twitter, highlights amazing performances that shed light on societal constructions and moments of sheer joy his book about Black culture in America. Writing about joy is challenging; falling back on cliche is a constant temptation that Abdurraqib avoids in this insightful tome.

How do you form an identity? The answer to that question is never easy, but when you grow up in an infamous cult (and are a lesbian who later joins the armed forces), it is perhaps even harder. Hough explores the formation of her identity in a series of essays touching on her past and future.

In 1927, the Barbizon opened in New York City. The women-only hotel hosted many of the era's most luminous talents over the years, including Sylvia Plath (who included a fictionalized account of the hotel in The Bell Jar), Joan Didion, Joan Crawford and more. Brens book serves as a portrait of ambitious and motivated women and a reminder of how much things have changed since they needed a hotel of owns own.

Who shaped the leaders who shaped large parts of the civil rights movement? Tubbs tells the often-overlooked stories of the mothers of three influential leaders, adding a fantastic resource to the still-distressingly thin canon of Black motherhood reflections and showing her incredible research chops.

Did you know that the first woman admitted to an American medical school was let in only because the male students who voted on accepting her did so as a joke? Campbell covers the many difficult aspects of becoming a doctor in a male-dominated world, including how the women's families supported (or didn't support) them.

Brina writes that she "grew up not knowing my mother or myself," referring to the 30 years she spent between moving from Okinawa to the United States and asking her mother about her history. As an adult, Brina revisited her memories of a brief childhood in Okinawa, spoke to her mom about her memories, and traced the critical history of Okinawa after World War II.

Utter candor has become Febos' trademark in books such as Whip Smart and Abandon Me, and she uses the same honest storytelling in Girlhood, in which she deconstructs the sexism associated with coming of age. As a girl whose body developed early, Febos has a unique perspective on the male gaze and voices the critical need to set her own boundaries, which many girls can relate to.

Though this book was written before so much changed about our work relationship to technology during the pandemic, the focus is perhaps even more relevant. Newport creates a case for reimagining work to eliminate the communication overloads that seem (but are they?) unavoidable.

This memoir is like nothing written before. It melds memoir and imagination into an intensive look at how America treats little queer and fat and feminine and neurodivergent child of color and how different it is from how white kids are treated. Gonsalez works through his brothers death as well by exploring the fate of all the Pedros, real and imaginary, who inhabit our world.

The book, built off a viral essay of the same name in The New Yorker, explores Zauner's struggle with her Korean American identity in the face of her mother's terminal cancer diagnosis. She has a raw and vibrant voice that makes her story pulse.

Owusu describes grief as "slow internal bleeding," and her honest, unflinching memoir delivers many such perfect observations. From the death of her father at 13 to her mother's refusal to take in Owusu and her sister afterward, the author navigates hardships and searches for identity, eventually pulling herself back together following a breakdown that threatens to unmoor her.

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12 Must-Read Nonfiction Books Out Right Now - Forbes

YORK DISPATCH EDITORIAL BOARD Published 1:00 a.m. ET June 9, 2021

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell(Photo: Luis M. Alvarez, AP)

The National Football League has finally seen the light.

Its just too bad that it took an avalanche of bad publicity for Commissioner Roger Goodell and the league to finally reverse course on race-norming.

For those who missed it, the NFL has promised to end the controversial practice, which assumed Black players started out with a lower level of cognitive function. That assumption made it harder for Black NFL retirees to prove that they qualified for payouts in the 2017 $1 billion-plus concussion settlement.

The NFL only made the decision after a pair of Black players filed a civil rights lawsuit over the practice, medical experts raised concerns and a group of NFL families last month dropped 50,000 petitions at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia where the lawsuit had been thrown out by the judge overseeing the settlement.

Race-norming sounds like something from the long-disgraced eugenics movement that aimed to improve the genetic quality of the human population by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior, while promoting those judged to be superior.

The NFL said in a statement that no actual discrimination took place in the administration of the settlement and that the race-norming practice was never mandatory, but left to the discretion of doctors taking part in the settlement program.

That sounds very much like double talk.

How the NFL couldve considered the use of race-norming under any circumstances in a league that is 74% Black is almost mind boggling.

Harry Edwards(Photo: Josie Lepe, AP)

Edwards weighs in: Harry Edwards, a noted sociologist and a longtime staff consultant for the San Francisco 49ers, has spent 50 years studying the intersection of sports and society.

He rightly called the race-norming practice by the NFL ridiculous, asinine and almost comedic. He added that its morally unconscionable, politically unsustainable and legally indefensible.

Thats quite a condemnation from a man who has long ties to the NFL.

Checkered history: Of course, the NFLs history with race relations is checkered at best.

Heres just a recent example.

Quarterback Colin Kaepernick led the San Francisco 49ers to a Super Bowl, but still cant even get a tryout for an NFL job. Tim Tebow, meanwhile, was a first-round bust, but is still getting an NFL opportunity with the Jacksonville Jaguars at age 33 despite not playing in the league for more than six years.

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Kaepernick is Black and well known for social activism, especially his decision to kneel for the national anthem. Tebow is white and a beloved figure in Florida, where he starred for the Florida Gators.

History of foot-dragging: Then theres the NFLs foot-dragging when it came to the concussion issue in the first place.

The NFL spent years denying any link between head injuries suffered while playing football with long-term brain disorders.

Finally, in the 2017 concussion settlement, the league caved in to the obvious football is a violent, collision sport that will lead to concussions, which can leave permanent brain damage.

The NFL likes to bill itself as an organization that is ahead of the curve on the issue of social justice. But when given the opportunity to act on those supposed beliefs, the league has repeatedly failed to act in an appropriate and timely manner.

At least the NFL has finally come to the realization that race-norming has no place in the concussion settlement.

Its just unfortunate that it took the league so long to see the light.

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EDITORIAL: NFL, at last, comes to realization that 'race-norming' should be discontinued - York Dispatch

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminatedmillions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race."

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the Twentieth Century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

Stanford president David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as the Pasadena-based Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations--which functioned as part of a closely-knit network--published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.

Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented people only married other talented people, the result would be measurably better offspring. At the turn of the last century, Galton's ideas were imported into the United States just as Gregor Mendel's principles of heredity were rediscovered. American eugenic advocates believed with religious fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and intellectual character of man.

In an America demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early twentieth century. Elitists, utopians and so-called "progressives" fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind--and less or none of everyone else.

The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.

How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior--the so-called "unfit." The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point eight was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a "lethal chamber" or public locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, Applied Eugenics, which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."

Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to forty percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.

Nonetheless, with eugenicide marginalized, the main solution for eugenicists was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as more marriage restrictions. California led the nation, performing nearly all sterilization procedures with little or no due process. In its first twenty-five years of eugenic legislation, California sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women. Many were classified as "bad girls," diagnosed as "passionate," "oversexed" or "sexually wayward." At Sonoma, some women were sterilized because of what was deemed an abnormally large clitoris or labia.

In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilizations were performed, 700 of which were on women. The state's two leading sterilization mills in 1933 were Sonoma State Home with 388 operations and Patton State Hospital with 363 operations. Other sterilization centers included Agnews, Mendocino, Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state hospitals.

Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's words in their own defense.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."

Hitler's struggle for a superior race would be a mad crusade for a Master Race. Now, the American term "Nordic" was freely exchanged with "Germanic" or "Aryan." Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became the driving force behind Hitler's Nazism. Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in Hitler's war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, and even hand-select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.

During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, "You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought.I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."

That same year, ten years after Virginia passed its sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in 21st-Century money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, later to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.

Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's eugenic complex of institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the Institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The Institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the Institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rdin. Rdin's organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.

Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.

Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing aroundthe Germans were calling a spade a spade."

A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades, American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity. The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.

At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that Institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the Institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenic press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed up by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenic doctor's journal he edited, that Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."

Verschuer had a long-time assistant. His name was Josef Mengele. On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German Research Society, "My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmfhrer [captain] and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsfhrer [Himmler]."

Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them, he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer's institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin's eugenic institutes.

Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenic studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the institutions they helped found, and the science it helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.

After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity--an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California statutes in their defense. To no avail. They were found guilty.

However, Mengele's boss Verschuer escaped prosecution. Verschuer re-established his connections with California eugenicists who had gone underground and renamed their crusade "human genetics." Typical was an exchange July 25, 1946 when Popenoe wrote Verschuer, "It was indeed a pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my colleagues in Germany. I suppose sterilization has been discontinued in Germany?" Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenic luminaries and then sent various eugenic publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies.

Verschuer wrote back, "Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation."

Soon, Verschuer once again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists and geneticists.

In the fall of 1950, the University of Mnster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.

Human genetics' genocidal roots in eugenics were ignored by a victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the years leading up to war. Now governors of five states, including California have issued public apologies to their citizens, past and present, for sterilization and other abuses spawned by the eugenics movement.

Human genetics became an enlightened endeavor in the late twentieth century. Hard-working, devoted scientists finally cracked the human code through the Human Genome Project. Now, every individual can be biologically identified and classified by trait and ancestry. Yet even now, some leading voices in the genetic world are calling for a cleansing of the unwanted among us, and even a master human species.

There is understandable wariness about more ordinary forms of abuse, for example, in denying insurance or employment based on genetic tests. On October 14, America's first genetic anti-discrimination legislation passed the Senate by unanimous vote. Yet because genetics research is global, no single nation's law can stop the threats.

This article was first published in the San Francisco Chronicle and is reprinted with permission of the author.

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Provided by The LA Times President Trump speaks at a campaign rally Sept. 18 in Bemidji, Minn., where he made remarks espousing eugenics. (Associated Press)

Politicians often flatter their audiences, but at a rally in Bemidji, Minn., last month, President Trump found an unusual thing to praise about the nearly all-white crowd: its genetics. You have good genes, he insisted. A lot of it is about the genes, isnt it, dont you believe? The racehorse theory. You have good genes in Minnesota.

In case it was not clear from the sea of white faces that he was making a point about race, Trump later said the quiet part out loud. Every family in Minnesota needs to know about Sleepy Joe Bidens extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet, he declared.

Trumps ugly endorsement of race-based eugenics got national attention, but in a presidency filled with outrages, our focus quickly moved to the next. Besides, this wasnt the first time wed heard about these views. A "Frontline" documentary reported in 2016 that Trump believed the racehorse theory of human development that he referred to in Minnesota that superior men and women will have superior children. That same year, the Huffington Post released a video collecting Trumps statements on human genetics, including his declarations that Im a gene believer and Im proud to have that German blood.

On eugenics, as in so many areas, the scariest thing about Trumps views is not the fact that he holds them, but that there is no shortage of Americans who share them. The United States has a long, dark history with eugenics. Starting in 1907, a majority of states passed laws authorizing the sterilization of people deemed to have undesirable genes, for reasons as varied as feeblemindedness and alcoholism. The Supreme Court upheld these laws by an 8-1 vote, in the infamous 1927 case Buck vs. Bell, and as many as 70,000 Americans were sterilized for eugenic reasons in the 20th century.

Americas passion for eugenics waned after World War II, when Nazism discredited the idea of dividing people based on the quality of their genes. But in recent years, public support for eugenics has made a comeback. Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, tweeted in 2017, We cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies. The comment struck many as a claim that American children were genetically superior, though King later insisted he was concerned with the culture, not the blood of foreign babies.

Eugenics has also had a resurgence in England, where the movement was first launched in the 1880s by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. In February, Andrew Sabisky, an advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, resigned after it was revealed that he had reportedly written blog posts suggesting that there are genetic differences in intelligence among races, and that compulsory contraception could be used to prevent the rise of a permanent underclass. Richard Dawkins, one of Britains most prominent scientists, added fuel to the fire by tweeting that although eugenics could be criticized on moral or ideological grounds, of course it would work in practice. Eugenics works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses, he said. Why on earth wouldnt it work for humans?

There is reason to believe the eugenics movement will continue to grow. Americas first embrace of it came at a time when immigration levels were high, and it was closely tied to fears that genetically inferior foreigners were hurting the nations gene pool. Eugenicists persuaded Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply reduced the number of Italian, Jewish and Asian people allowed in.

Today, the percentage of Americans who were born outside the United States is the highest it has been since 1910, and fear of immigrants is again an animating force in politics. As our nation continues to become more diverse, the sort of xenophobia that fueled Trump's and Kings comments is likely to produce more talk of better genes and babies.

It is critically important to push back against these toxic ideas. One way to do this is by ensuring that people who promote eugenics are denounced and kept out of positions of power. It is encouraging that Sabisky was forced out and that King was defeated for reelection in his Republican primary in June. Hopefully, Trump will be the next to go.

Education, including an honest reckoning with our own tragic eugenics history, is another form of resistance. It is starting to happen: Stanford University just announced that it is removing the name of its first president, David Starr Jordan, a leading eugenicist, from campus buildings, and that it will actively work to better explain his legacy. We need more of this kind of self-scrutiny from universities like Harvard, Yale and many others that promoted eugenics and pseudo race science, as well as institutions like the American Museum of Natural History, which in 1921 hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress, at which eugenicists advocated for eliminating the unfit.

Trumps appalling remarks in Minnesota show how serious the situation is now. Seventy-five years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, a United States president not only spoke about good genes in racialized terms he believed that his observations would help him to win in the relatively liberal state of Minnesota. It is crucial that everyone who understands the horrors of eugenics works to defeat these views before they become any more popular.

Adam Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, is the author of "Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck" and, this year, "Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Courts Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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Op-Ed: Eugenics is making a comeback. Resist, before ...