Category Archives: Eugenics

House Bill 4 53. The corporate greed, Representative McGarrell ralph Bradford baker in our hospital 4 53 of intervene Thailand to protect against discrimination of human life, johnson not cleaning lady from carter. It represented. Michael raft is recognized to debate the bill and the House will come to order. Thank you Mr speaker and thank you members. Um I just want to thank my primary co sponsors. Representative Kristen baker, Representative Art and Representative Bradford. And I would truly appreciate their leadership in this. Um, I am gonna be brief and leave time for questions. But I just want to say how honored I am to be on this bill because I do believe that all babies born and unborn have intrinsic dignity and worth and should be protected from the practice of eugenic abortion. Eugenics is defined as the practice of arranging reproduction within a human population. To increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable eugenics has been used in attempts to systematically erase entire populations of human beings due to inherit characteristics such as ethnicity, race and, yes, disability. It's a tragedy that one that continues today. Tiny babies with Down syndrome are denied their right to life due to an extra chromosome. The U. S. Supreme Court has been zealous in in in vindicating the rights of people who are even potentially subjected to raise sex and disability discrimination. In fact, the inherent right against discrimination on the basis of race, sex and genetic abnormality is protected by federal and state laws. And I was shocked to find out over 70 of these precious babies to get a prenatal diagnosis of down syndrome. Never, never get a chance at life. Our state has a compelling interest to protect these Children from discriminatory eugenic abortion. What the bill does, It amends the statutes and it prohibits abortion unless a physician knows that the woman is not seeking this abortion because of any of the following the actual or presumed race or racial makeup of the unborn child. The sex of the unborn child is already, it's already in our statute. The presence are presumed presence of Down syndrome. Section 1B would actually um add whether the race sex or presence of in presumption of down syndrome and the on board child has been detective And um the doctor would have to report on that as he does. Or she does if there is um an abortion that's after 16 weeks gestation Science tells us that positive tests from a non invasive prenatal screening tests can be wrong. Almost 50 of the time, according to a recent study by New England Journal of Medicine. And mothers D. N. A. Can even alter these results. Life and death decisions are made on these results. We are missing so many miracles as my colleague, Representative Bradford says, these are not individuals with special needs. These are individuals with special abilities. nine states have already prohibited abortions motivated by a child's disability. Every single child bears the unmistakable imprint of our creator and is worthy of protection and support. I'll be happy to answer any questions but mr Speaker, could we get the other primaries to say a few words first? What purpose does the gentleman from? Mecklenburg represented? Bradford? Rise to speak on the bill. Gentlemen has the floor. Thank you. Mr Speaker members of the House. Um My comments will be probably repetitive for those of you that were in the committees that this bill has traveled, but for the others, I think it's worth noting that a few weeks ago uh the sixth U. S. Circuit Court Court of Appeals actually reversed a prior decision regarding a piece of legislation in the state of Ohio. Um that's uh basically similar to the piece of legislation were speaking about today. And the court released a statement on the ruling and they basically said that um that they thought Ohio's interest in passing the law as I would respectfully submit to use the same here for us in north Carolina. Was to protect the Down syndrome community from the stigma that it suffers from the practice of Down syndrome selective abortions. And it went on further to say to protect women who suspect Down syndrome from coerced abortions and to protect the medical community from an unethical doctors they wrote. So a few comments, my interest in this bill is unique to most certainly the Down syndrome community. Next Tuesday, I will have my fourth employee here is a legislator of an individual Down syndrome. His name is Matthew, you will see him with me, hopefully a lot of the time. Um, I have come to know individuals with Down syndrome as uh, not having disabilities but having very special abilities, which is what represent McElrath was speaking about and these are very capable, competent individuals who are ready and willing to work in our society. And this bill, I understand abortion is a very heated and partisan topic. This bill is very narrowly tailored to the issue of allowing a termination of a pregnancy strictly because of these three items and Down syndrome being one of them. And to me, the idea of terminating uh birth of a baby that never had a chance just because it has Down syndrome. And that would assume that all the screenings were positive and inaccurate, which isn't always the case by the way. Um, to me, just as heartbreaking because these individuals have so much to give our society. Um, I understand abortion is legal in our country, and so outside of the confines of these three items were not waiting into that. Um, you know, that said, um, I would just further submit to all of you that, um, this issue, I I get a lot of emails about it already from both sides and it's impassioned, and I would just encourage all of us to maintain the decorum that I know we can have here today. Um, but I support the bill, um, wholeheartedly because people like Matthew deserve to live, they deserve to have a chance. Um, and um, and I found it noteworthy that one of the disability advocacy groups came out against the bill and I I welcome all perspectives. I always have, I think that's what makes us good lawmakers when we can put ourselves in the other shoes on the other side or the other party or the other perspective. And I think the day we lose sight of that, we probably should get out of these seats. Um and and my only counter to their um notion that someone that this takes away from the real issue which is fighting for those with disabilities. I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I think we can fight for people who are alive who have disabilities, and I think we can be the voice for the babies who have been diagnosed with a disability Down syndrome before they ever have a shot at life. And that is why I'm on this bill. So I encourage you to consider it and vote your conscience. Huh? Thank you. For what purpose does the Lady from weight represented Von Hafen rise to speak on the bill. Lady has the four. Thank you Mr Speaker members. This bill does not address the needs of people needs of people with Down syndrome, nor does it really intend to end racial discrimination in north Carolina. Instead, this bill would prevent someone from obtaining an abortion if their doctor supposes or speculates that the reason behind their decision is because of the fetus race or diagnosis of Down syndrome disability rights. North Carolina opposes restrictions on the bodily autonomy of any person, especially in the name of supporting people with disabilities, forcing someone to carry a pregnancy to term against their will. Does absolutely nothing to address discrimination. This bill masquerades as policies supportive of members of the disability community, But actually, but instead of actually providing support for people who are differently abled, like ensuring adequate funding for Medicaid innovation waivers slots which currently has a 15,000 person wait list. The bill exploits abortion stigma and the general public's lack of knowledge in both abortion and pregnancy. It uses inflammatory and manipulative language to further erode pregnant people's bodily autonomy and our medical system. It creates more stigma and shame or on abortion care. And it targets people seeking abortion and the people providing abortion as unworthy of support or compassion. If we were truly authentic and our concern for people with disabilities, we would not co op the mantle of disability rights, but would instead focus on the true priorities of people with disabilities and their families, including ensuring access to healthcare, education, employment and economic security, as well as the ability to parent with dignity. People with disabilities, including those with Down syndrome have fought for decades against laws restricting their bodily autonomy, their right to do what they choose, go where they want, make their own decisions and be who they want to be. We can and should accomplish all of those things without restricting anyone's right to make decisions about their own bodies. I hope you will take this into consideration and join me in voting no on this bill. What purpose does the lady from Wilson represented, Cooper Suggs rise To speak on the bill. Mr. Speaker Lady has a four. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this bill is built on the premise that women of color, particularly black women seek abortions. On the basis are the per soon race of the fetus. This is false. Oppressive narrative that women of color cannot be trusted to make our own decisions guarding reproductive out reproductive rights. It also forces people of color to justify their decision to have an abortion to their doctor. This bill is part of a national effort to drive an inflammatory, misleading narrative about women who obtain abortions and the doctors who provide them. The rhetoric surrounding this bill is disrespectful and disingenuous. This law would do nothing to address the very real structural racism that that black and brown parents and Children face every day. To make matters worse, the sponsors have invoked the term eugenics in their justification for this bill. The use of this term. This debate is incredibly offensive and inappropriate. The eugenics movement was and and is about reproductive coercion. Not only would this bill, not in the practice of eugenics, but it is in reality an extension of this form of oppression. This bill is keeping us from doing the real work to end race discrimination in north Carolina. The sponsors of this bill, are neither working to address the maternal health disparities that black women face. No. Are they working to improve the quality of the life of black Children while we waste time and taxpayer resources in an effort to control people's bodies and futures. Bills like the mom never act. Medicaid expansion and the healthy pregnancy act don't get the attention and votes that they deserve. I ask all of you to vote red on this bill. Thank you. What purpose jumper from Catawba represented Adams rise. Speak on the bill. Gentleman has the floor. This is eugenics. That's what it is. But just what you said and what I want you to do. I'd like to ask you to do this. Look up War against the week. Look on Amazon. It's a book. Edwin Black wrote it in 2012. It's about the eugenics movement at the turn of the century in the United States. It will set your hair on fire what we did. It was the science of the time that we would help, we would help you Darwin's theory along by using science to call the unfit from our society in north Carolina. The eugenics movement began in the early 19 thirties. Actually was established. The Eugenics Board was established in 1932 ruled unconstitutional. Reformed in 1933 and it continued on until 1973. That practice in north Carolina was after the eugenics movement, which was a global movement had discovered what Hitler was doing in Germany and they had cooled off. They had subsided, but not in north Carolina. We picked it up and we used it in north Carolina for 40 years. I can't I can't tell you how horrifying it is to hear the thought of calling the Unborn because they don't suit our desires. I hope youll look that book up because Edwin Black wrote the book War Against the Week because he wrote a previous book, which was IBM and the holocaust. And when he was doing the research for that book in europe, he kept finding periodical periodicals about eugenics movement in the United States. But he couldn't find those periodicals in the United States. There were in europe, he started doing deeper research and what he found was that the whole thing had been buried. It's part of our history, we just don't know anything about. And he was shocked what he found and you'll be shocked at what you read that he wrote. What purpose does the gentleman from both represent? Kidwell Rice? Speak on a bill. Gentleman has the floor. Thank you Mr Speaker. When we take into consideration, Children who are terminated in pregnancy due to Down syndrome or really any other reason uh, what I ask you to remember if if you are a God fearing God believing person is to look at many different versions of the bible where they all say the same thing before I formed you in the womb. I knew you before you were born. I set you apart. God created each and every one of us and put us in the wound. It continues to tell me in the bible that he knew who I would be before I was ever formed in the wound, each and every one of us. If you're not a God believing person, that's not gonna help us any here today. Because you feel that that child in the wound is not worth that much more than a deer out in the field that I go hunting for in the fall. Because you're willing to terminate that child when we do it due to Down syndrome many times. That's a misdiagnosis many, many times I've heard over and over in the 20 plus years that I have personally worked with crisis pregnancy centers where the woman was told that her child had Down syndrome. Sometimes they were right many times they were wrong. My own sister was told when she was pregnant with her daughter, that the child would not survive and it might even kill her, that she should have an abortion as soon as possible, that she had an ectopic pregnancy. Elizabeth Woolard. Today is 35 years old. Born, today is 35 years old, born perfectly healthy and the doctor said, you should have an abortion. Abortion is one of the plights of this world. We kill so many people every day and do it with so much impunity doesn't matter. It's just a chunk of flesh. Every child is worth everything. I hear so many times. If it saves one life, it's worth it. Why doesn't this apply when it comes to abortion? If it saves one life, it's worth it. The person who may have cured Covid within weeks may well have been aborted Somewhere in the last 50 years. The person to cure cancer, The person to do so many other things may have been summarily tossed in the trash because maybe they had down syndrome or maybe they weren't the sex, the right sex or it just wasn't a convenient time. Oftentimes you hear about the mother or the family, they can ill afford this child Right now, it's not the right time. It wasn't planned, they're not married. They have no means of support. Ladies and gentlemen, if we use that measure, jesus christ could have been terminated in an abortion because it wasn't the right time. They weren't married. That's a horrible thing. What we do, it is a sin. It is a blight on our society. I asked you to vote green on this bill for the purpose of the uh lady from weight represent Badcock Grass To debate the bill. He has four. Thank you mr speaker. Um, it's very disturbing to me when I hear my physician colleagues called coercive and so that's going to be the main focus of my comments today about the bill, really about the chilling effect that this bill would have on the absolutely have on the patient physician relationship. My words from my own self really can improve on those of north Carolina physicians who have dedicated their professional lives to the care of women and women during pregnancy. So I'm going to read comments from a letter that was written on behalf of the north Carolina Abyan O B G. Y. In society. Their concerns are shared by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the north Carolina Medical Society. And I quote while we appreciate the genuine concern many legislators may have about protecting Children with Down syndrome. Our experience as clinicians is that women and families facing the difficult decisions that can come with a prenatal down syndrome diagnosis require a great deal of counseling and support from their health care providers, families, clergy and many other members of their community. Unfortunately, house Bill 453 would prevent women from having open and honest conversations with their doctor about their challenges and medical complications. It could prevent doctors from being able to share critical information that can help women and their families make reproductive health decisions with the privacy and the dignity they deserve based on our clinical experience. We believe government restrictions and mandates like those included in this bill will undoubtedly make the process of these patients and their families experience considerably more difficult. In addition, it would make providing the best and most appropriate care to these women much more complicated, if not impossible, as healthcare providers. This legislation would severely impact our ability to provide the standard of care for patients who would be subject to this bill. They go on to state. Furthermore. In our view, the restrictions and House Bill 4 53 I presume that the decisions women with a prenatal down syndrome diagnosis face are straightforward and uncomplicated. In fact, Down syndrome often occurs with other complications that can impact a woman's health care decisions. The reality is that each mother and family facing these difficult decisions is different and the decisions they have for continuing or ending a pregnancy after a fatal diagnosis is detected are myriad and they conclude by saying Regarding the prohibitions on race selection and house Bill 4 53, we are not aware of any patient who ended a pregnancy on the basis of race. Rather, the decisions women make regarding their pregnancies are based on a wide range of personal experiences, beliefs, and health care choices, imposing restrictions based on one or two specific criteria will simply make what are already complex decisions even more difficult for many of our patients to navigate. It's very upsetting and dangerous for us as a group of 100 and 20 and r 50 colleagues across the hall to think that we can interject ourselves into the exam room between physicians and patients and make decisions for them that only they are capable of making given their personal circumstances. I urge you both as a legislator, As a family nurse practitioner, as a mother of two to vote no on this bill. Thank you. What purpose does the lady from Colbert's represented baker rice To speak to the bill? I'm glad he has the four. Thank you MR speaker and thank you members. Um, I want to go back to um, the comment about eugenics um, from my friend and representative cooper Suggs. The definition of eugenics comes from greek and it has come into being. So, the use of this word for this discussion is highly appropriate eugenics as defined as a set of beliefs and practices intended to improve the genetic quality of a population. So once again, this terminology is extremely important to this discussion and this bill is very limited to particular issues. This is not a bill on abortion in general, and I want to make that clear. This is about non discrimination. And as a physician and child psychiatrist, I have spent my career dedicated to advocating for the most vulnerable and I believe that we as a society are going to be judged on how well we protect those who may not or cannot speak up for themselves. And I would like to think that none of us here would deny the right to life to someone based on their sex, their gender or their disability. And so I thank you for your consideration and urge you to vote yes on this bill. For what purpose does the lady from johnson represented White Rice To speak to the bill? Please. Lady has the four. Thank you. I am I am in support of this bill, because the greatest physician of all said for thou hast possessed my reins. Thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made marvelous are thy ways. My substance was not here hit from the when I was made in secret and curiously walked, wrought in the lowest parts of the earth that I asked to see my substance, yet being unp perfect. And in that book, all my members were written, which is in continuous where fashion. When the ship, there was one of them. I am a health professional. I have been. Um, I avoided uh, in the days when abortions were first developed in our country legally, um, I was asked to coach and educate women on that option. As a person of faith. I chose not to do that. My job was threatened and I continued to oppose and did not do that For those who feel that that is okay. That is their personal decision. I do not try to put my faith on anyone else, but when you are in the womb and you have a diagnosis and you are not able to defend yourself, that is what this bill to me is about. It is our position and my position to defend those Children, those infants that are in the womb and cannot fight for themselves. Thank you for what purpose does The gentleman from union represented our price to speak to the bill, Johnson has four House Bill 4 53 I wanted to sponsor because I believe in the principles of what this bill stands for. This bill prevents modern day eugenics that eliminates people before birth because of their race or disability from Down syndrome, overwhelming numbers of north Carolina citizens oppose abortion because the child will be born with Down syndrome, and that's the majority held across all demographics. The definition is given in the American Medical Association's journal Ethics and one of their articles says this eugenics defined here as practices and policies designed to promote the reproduction of people with desired attributes and thus avert the reproduction of people with undesirable attributes. For example, people with disabilities. The idea that the world and the people in it would be better off if everyone were born healthy that is without defect is the essential principle of eugenics, translated literally as well. Born from playing player Hood's own article um quoted and subject called Singer and eugenics, they define eugenics as eugenics is a theory of improving hereditary qualities by socially controlling human reproduction. With Margaret Sanger, North Carolina has sustained and horrible history in participating in eugenics. Why should we allow north Carolina to continue discriminatory eugenics that eliminates Children before birth because of race sex or Down syndrome? Haven't we learned how terrible it is for the state to participate or even allow modern day eugenics to eliminate people before birth because of their race and disability from Down syndrome. Reprehensible eugenics does not stop at the forced sterilization of women, but must also extend to the abortion of Children because they have down syndrome or of a certain race. We're here discussing this issue today because of the amazing advances we've had in recent years in the area of prenatal genetic testing. Because of these technological advances. It is possible through very simple blood test to tell the sex of a baby and whether the they might have Down syndrome. We must decide whether we should allow these results to be used in a way that's discriminatory to literally eliminate people on the basis of their sex, their race or disability. We do not want to be that kind of society that not only discriminates but disposes of Children because of the way they are created North Carolina citizens don't want to be that kind of society either. In fact, it was actually the youngest respondents in the recent poll, the millennials and Gen Z. S, who were the most likely to oppose the discriminatory down syndrome abortions. Even a majority of people who identified as pro choice were against Down syndrome abortions. And this time we are so divided as a society on so many other issues. We are in agreement on this because we all know it's wrong. We know discrimination is wrong. We know you can't use this technology to discriminate in this truly horrendous way. House Bill 4 53 prohibits the doctor from performing an abortion if the doctor knows that the woman's reason is that she does not want a child with Down syndrome. As what's discussed. There were several reasons for this at the interrelated, but I did want to speak to one particular one about the course of nations of this. It's indisputable that a number of medical professionals have advocated for Down syndrome abortions, As it states in the recent 6th circuit decision. Academic literature confirms such practices within the United States Medical Community, including examples of health professionals who gave family inaccurate and overly negative information, perceive obliquely intended to coerce a woman into a decision to terminate her pregnancy. If the foetus is diagnosed with Down syndrome, that's in the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, I will tell you that this issue his interest incredibly important because Down syndrome is a variable condition. The prognosis of people with the condition remains unclear. And this Journal of the American Medical Association Journal of accent, goes on to say this means that if a pregnant woman receives a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, quote, she is unlikely to receive information about the level of physical and cognitive impairment. A child would have diagnostic test even at their most accurate for conditions like Down syndrome. Only tell pregnant women if the fetus is does or does not have the specific chromosome marker, they do not tell women about the severity or the breath of impairments that may follow one fetus with a diagnosis of Down syndrome could not survive pregnancy, while another child born with with the condition could graduate from college. It is this complexity and variability interesting, which means that some people, including health professionals, can hold ambiguous views and express various anxieties about prenatal screening and testing for Down syndrome with some citing this uncertainty when claiming that screening could perhaps be considered eugenic practices end, quote ladies and gentlemen, we can't escape the fact that when the a woman's choice to abort her child because they know the child has Down syndrome or suspected to have down strom Rome, it eliminates the child in a discriminatory way. Our laws on discrimination prevent that. I ask for your support on passing this bill. What purposely from weight represented Badcock rights to debate the bill a second time. Glad He has four. Thank you. I just cannot sit here and here. My physician colleagues called coercive to be told that they make judgments about their patients and their patients healthcare decisions when that is not their job and that is not their calling. I want to share with you some additional comments from the letter that was sent to all of us from physicians who do this for a living. This bill would discourage patients from communicating fully with us about their health care needs and priorities. A physician's role is to provide the information or patients need to make informed decisions, not whether you like that information, not whether you even wish to say it, but because that patient deserves it. Those were my words. A prenatal fetal diagnosis can have a range of effects, and it is important for families to have all questions answered to the extent possible, not just the ones the doctor wishes to answer, not just the ones the patient may think to ask, but all questions should be answered. Doctors have the responsibility to provide information. Women need to make informed decisions, including all the options available to her family, then support her and what she decides is best for herself based on her values, creed, belief system and assessment of the best course for her family. HB453 would require physicians as providers to attempt to discern the basis for our patients health care choices to determine whether those decisions are consistent with the provisions of this legislation and to determine whether we as healthcare providers should or can recommend a particular course of treatment. And in closing, I would just like to say that even though some of the folks who have spoken today have said this issue is not about a abortion in its total in its totality, it's only about these certain things when you start going in and nipping and tucking about the right of a woman to have a safe and legal procedure, which is what abortion is. You are going to the heart of the matter of abortion. Thank you. What purpose the gentleman from national isn't Galya address to debate the bill. Gentlemen has before. Thank you. Mr. Speaker. Ladies and gentlemen of the House when I was first elected got a handwritten note from someone that was formerly in the General Assembly has also served as secretary of Commerce. And he said, man, congratulations on your election. One of the best things about being in the General Assembly of the People you're gonna meet, you're gonna meet some of the finest people. There'll be life long friends. He was right. People I caucused with the people that I talked with already considered them lifelong friends. And then he said the worst part of being in General Assembly is it every once in a while you're going to have that conscious vote. You're gonna have that vote that you're gonna have to vote for. And you know, the bill stinks. But your conscience won't let you vote. No, that's the bill I'm looking at right now. I'm looking at this bill. That's just a bad bill. But my conscience as a pastor won't let me vote against it. But it's a bad bill. First of all, it is the height of insensitivity to label it eugenics, the the doctrine that nazis used to justify slaughtering jews. And you want to label a bill that eugenics, the very practice that's used not to keep women, not to abort babies, but the practice that's used to keep african american women from even having Children. Your solution to poverty sterilization. Oh, and by the way, I think this is the same legislature that suddenly is talking about history, the history of eugenics, the history of what we've done in north Carolina, the history that has happened relative to race in our country. And yet the same legislature says, oh, let us not dare teach kids that history. What hypocrisy. What a height of insensitivity to people of color. That this brings us back to the human Betterment League at that moment. You remember that my history buffs the human Betterment League where black people were called morons, where poor people were told they were not worthy of being able to be a parent. This bill is bad first of all because of the titling of it. Eugenics, life is precious. Every single person in this chamber I believe believes life is precious. An abortion is tragic. And I don't think there's anyone on this chamber floor that doesn't think abortion is tragic. What must a woman be struggling with to go through that moment of choice to be able to end of life? And it seems like no matter how long we're here every session, the dashboard is gonna light up like a christmas tree at christmas time with new legislation. That's not really about good legislation. It's about power. It's about politics. It's about manipulation. It's about division. And here we are. Another one of those bills as a pastor. I've held babies a month old while they took their last breath. I've counseled couples in the ICU while the doctor excavated their child and while they had to breathe for the child because they knew the child wasn't gonna breathe anymore. I've watched doctors who are heroic, who do everything possible that technology allows them to do to be able to keep a baby alive. And then every once in a while in the midst of that moment, the doctor has to look at those parents and say that maybe just maybe comfort and compassion is going to be best for your child. And the problem with these abortion bills, every single one of them is that we assume every situation is the same and every situation is not the same. So to be clear, this is not about life, this is not about racial equity. This is not about disability rights. This is a divide and conquer bill, that this is a bill of desperation. This is a bill that says the only chance we've got to hold on to power is to divide people after all, isn't that the playbook? Let's divide everybody pro life, pro choice. Let's divide everybody. Black and white. Let's divide everybody. Black lives. Blue lives. Let's divide everybody. Conservative, Liberal patriot, progressive. So here we are playing out the playbook labels divide us. And this is the irony of this bill. The irony of this bill is that most of the people who think this is a good bill wouldn't even wear a mask to protect people's lives. This is the irony of this bill. The irony of this bill is that most of the people who will vote for this bill, most of them I have no value representing the gentleman, will refrain from disparaging other members of this Assembly of the gentleman will yield before. Yes, Mr Speaker. Every time we protect life in the womb and failed to pass legislation that protects life in the world, then we are failing the life in the womb embedded in this bill. Somewhere is a baby. This baby somewhere is in this bill, and eventually this baby will leave the wound. And this baby, according to this bill, will wind up in the world. And when this baby winds up in the world, if it's a girl, guess what? She's gonna wind up living in a state that won't even pass an equal rights amendment, this baby that's embedded in this bill when she is finally born, When she finally winds up going to school, guess what? She's going to go to a segregated school, you know why? Because we have economic segregation in our public school systems. And then, as Speaker pointed out what purpose of gentleman from Wayne represented Bell Rice. Gentlemen, keep his remarks on the build at hand. Not hypothetically situations that Mr Mr Speaker, the builders about life if the baby's gonna live, they're going to have a life. So chair is going to rule on this. Now. This is um this is a bill having to do with ah when abortion abortion is allowed or not allowed. It doesn't have to do with other things the chairs, given the given the gentleman a good bit of leeway, but has to bring in about the bill, how to try to avoid other things. I know the gentleman's emotional about this, but let's try to bring it in about the bill, please. There is a link mr Speaker. There is a link between abortion and poverty. When this child is born, they're going to join the ranks of the one in five Children that are already living in poverty. I'm a whole life democrat. I value every life life in the womb, a child that is an immigrant person on death row, a pregnant woman, a veteran trying to get medication. Every member of the LGBTQ community. At what point do we say As a general assembly? We value every human life according to this bill, we see a black baby, that's a full human life. But when this black baby becomes a black man that's chased by a cop, it no longer has a full human life. This baby is gonna grow. Mr. Speaker point represented Gallion this the gentleman will retain his remarks to the to the issue at hand, or or the chair will take the floor from the gentleman's. Every human life deserves to be treated with dignity. What I would hope that we will find a way to legislate to protect the right of women to choose and the right of unborn fetuses. We need to do everything we can to offer real choices to women, adoption, financial support, better health care. My colleagues have quoted the bible, I'm somewhat trained to do that is God pro choice or pro life. Do that around me. Chapter 30. Place before you, life and death choose life. The reality of it is we should not be wondering if God is on our side, we should be seeking to be on God's side. Something is nothing is wrong. We're protecting unborn lives, but something is wrong with not fixing our healthcare system. Something is wrong with ignoring systemic racism. Something is wrong with denying economic empowerment to all families. So this is a bad bill and I hope eventually we can protect all lives for what purpose does the chair's got was gonna allow represented Michael raft, who's the bill's sponsor to speak as a final speaker. So chair does not intend to recognize anybody else unless I see a light right now. All right with that lady from carteret represent Macau after is recognized to speak on the bill a second time. Then we're gonna vote. Oh, sorry, huh? That's exhausting. I just want you to know that I love all of you. There is no racism in my heart are no search for power. I do this where people like Jaden Jane's a nine year old was that each of our committing meetings and yesterday in Judiciary one, she says while she listened to the debate on both sides and she wrote out a note which I would like to close with today to read to you and let you know this is what this is about. This is about these special Children who brings so much joy to their families, to the community, to their classmates. This is about giving them a chance to live to the 60 years. They can live to please listen to Jaden. My name is Jaden and I have Down syndrome and I know in my heart that I am God's child and I love my life. I'd like to tell people about what I can do. I could draw play piano and I can do all the things you can do. I like math, reading, spelling and grammar. I like swimming and my favorite stroke is first stroke. Thank you. This is what this is about. Question for the Houses. The passage of House Bill 4 53 on its second reading. Those in favor will vote, aye. Those opposed to vote no. The cork will open the vote. Representative movement on the floor Corker Lock Machine record the votes 67 having voted in the affirmative and 42 the negative. House Bill 4 53 passes at second reading without objection will be read a third time General Similar nor Climate Act. Question for the House passage of House Bill 4 53 on third reading. Those in favor will say hi, I suppose now. Yes. Abbott, House Bill 4 53 having passed third reading will be sent to the Senate.

Read the rest here:

House OKs bill to prevent abortion in cases of Down syndrome :: WRAL.com - WRAL.com

The Volunteer State wants an appeals panel to reinstate two abortion restrictions, including a ban on the procedure when a woman is seeking it because of the gender or race of the child.

CINCINNATI (CN) The constitutionality of two Tennessee abortion regulations was debated before an appeals panel on Thursday, as the state seeks to reimpose a ban on selective abortions and those performed after the detection of a fetal heartbeat.

The restrictions, passed as part of House Bill 2263 in June 2020 and signed into law a month later, impose criminal penalties on doctors who perform abortions when the woman seeks the procedure based on the unborn childs gender or race, or when the fetus has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. Physicians also faced Class C felony charges for performing abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat under the statute.

The Memphis Center for Reproductive Health and Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, among others, sued Tennessee and won a preliminary injunction to prevent enforcement of the laws in July 2020.

U.S. District Judge William Campbell Jr., an appointee of Donald Trump, cited the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and the decisions of several appeals courts across the country in his opinion, ruling that states cannot ban pre-viability abortions.

Campbell struck down the portion of the law regarding abortions in cases where the womans decision is based one of several characteristics of the unborn child. He said the language regarding a physicians knowledge of the reasoning behind a womans choice is imprecise, and ruled that when a law threatens criminal sanctions, such vague provisions and potential varied interpretations cannot stand.

The district judge also referenced an Ohio law that banned abortions in cases where the woman knows her unborn child has Down syndrome. While a federal judge initially struck it down as unconstitutional, the full Sixth Circuit recently reinstated the ban in Preterm-Cleveland v. McCloud.

In its brief to the Cincinnati-based appeals court, Tennessee called the lower courts analysis deeply flawed, and claimed the provisions act to prevent abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.

By prohibiting physicians from knowingly participating in eugenic abortions, it said, the law directly furthers the states interests in protecting unborn life, promoting human dignity, safeguarding the integrity of the medical profession, and preventing discrimination.

The Volunteer State accused the lower court of concocting hypothetical scenarios to render the antidiscrimination portion of the law void for vagueness, arguing the speculative danger of arbitrary enforcement cannot be used to strike down a law as unconstitutional.

Conversely, the abortion providers commended the district judge on his decision, and claimed in their brief to the Sixth Circuit that H.B. 2263 is an attempt to criminalize nearly all abortions in Tennessee. They accused the state of using rhetorical gymnastics to defend the law, and reminded the appeals court that every ban on pre-viability abortions has been struck down as unconstitutional by various courts throughout the country.

Attorney Sarah Campbell argued on behalf of Tennessee on Thursday and told the three-judge panel the courts decision in Preterm-Cleveland forecloses plaintiffs argument.

Campbell said the district court egregiously misapplied the void-for-vagueness doctrine when it determined the terms knowledge and because of were not properly defined in the statute, and said the meaning of those words are well-settled in Tennessee law.

U.S. Circuit Judge Karen Moore, an appointee of Bill Clinton, asked why a ban on abortions after the detection of a heartbeat does not constitute a substantial burden on women seeking abortions.

The states attorney cited a growing consensus in the medical community that unborn children can begin to sense and experience pain at 15 weeks, and pointed out that over 90% of abortions performed in Tennessee are done before that point in a fetuss development.

Attorney Rabia Muqaddam argued on behalf of the abortion providers and told the panel decades of Supreme Court precedent requires it to uphold the lower courts decision. She called the Tennessee law unique because it fails to provide doctors with clearly defined parameters to avoid criminal prosecution.

Under the language of the statute, the attorney said, a physician could be prosecuted under a wide array of circumstances.

Muqaddam disputed her colleagues statement regarding fetal pain and told the judges her clients provided rebuttal testimony before the lower court. In her conclusion, she reiterated that no state interest can justify a ban on pre-viability abortions.

Moore was joined on the panel by Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Martha Daughtrey, also a Clinton appointee, and U.S. Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, a Trump appointee. No timetable has been set for the courts decision.

The Sixth Circuit has grappled with numerous abortion restrictions from various states over the past several years, and Thursdays case wont be the last time Tennessees abortion laws are debated before the court.

The court recently granted the states motion for an initial en banc hearing of Planned Parenthoods challenge to a law that requires a 48-hour waiting period before a woman can get an abortion, although those arguments have not yet been scheduled.

Although a federal judge temporarily halted enforcement of the law, a recent order from the appeals court stayed that injunction and expedited scheduling for the arguments.

Like Loading...

See the rest here:

Tennessee Fights to Reimpose Ban on Selective Abortions - Courthouse News Service

Joe Donahue: The "Invention of Miracles" is a biography of Alexander Graham Bell, a revisionist biography, if you will. While best known for inventing the telephone, Bell's central work was in Deaf Education. In fact, he considered his true life's mission to be teaching the deaf to speak. However, by the end of his life, he had become the American Deaf community's most powerful enemy, as he positioned himself at the forefront of the oralist movement. They oralist movement's aim was to teach the deaf to speak and extinguish the use of American Sign Language in the face of growing evidence that focusing on speaking orally often came at the additional expense of all other education, causing serious harm to brain development. Katie Booth is the author of the new book, "The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness."

She teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and we welcome her to The Roundtable this morning. Katie, thank you very much for being with us.

Katie Booth: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Joe Donahue: As the the subtitle says: "language, power, and Alexander Graham Bell's quest to end deafness," what brought you to that?

Katie Booth: Well, I was raised in a mixed hearing deaf family, my my grandparents and great aunts and uncles and great grandparents were all deaf. And so, in the deaf world, Bell is widely known for his work in deaf education. So I sort of grew up knowing about Bell, and really very angry with him for his impact on that -- on deaf people.

Joe Donahue : Where does the anger come from? And give us a sense of, of where it began, in our history in our society and culture?

Katie Booth: Sure, yeah. So Alexander Graham Bell, in the mid 19th century, the mid 1800s, he promoted this method of Deaf Education called oralism. Before he came on the scene, deaf education was delivered through sign language, which was a language that all deaf children, for the most part, are in the right environment, it was an accessible language. And when Bell came o n the scene, he started promoting a competing form of education, which taught deaf children to speak and lip read. And ultimately, not just discouraged, but punished and shamed the use of sign language. So my grandparents my whole family was, they all communicated by sign, although they also all, almost all of them came up through the oralist education. And as you can imagine, that being told that your language is shameful and being punished for using it while at the same time. being forced to engage with an inaccessible language was really traumatizing. But also a lot of deaf kids didn't have access to sign language. And when they went to these oralist schools, where they were not allowed access to sign language, they often struggled so much to pick up English to learn to speak and lip read, that they went through their education with no language at all, which was incredibly damaging as you can imagine.

Joe Donahue: It is almost unimaginable because one of the things that this book brought to me which I had no idea about was was how hard that that movement and Bell was working to extinguish the use of American Sign Language, even though science and the education that had come said, this is really causing this oralist movement is causing issues. But the the work that they were doing against American Sign Language is really staggering.

Katie Booth: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was it he doubled down so hard on on discouraging the use of sign language in Deaf Education. It is astonishing. It's especially astonishing because the evidence was before him, not at the beginning. But, you know, within his lifetime within his efforts, he was confronted over and over and over again, with the experiences of deaf people with observations of deaf children. And then in his own school, where he had total control over methods. He was again seeing his methods fail, but he, he just didn't back down.

Joe Donahue: We are talking to Katie Booth. The name of the new book is "The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness." Let's talk about Alexander Graham Bell, of course, he's known as the telephone guy. So how did that fit into this and to that, yes, the quest to end deafness.

Katie Booth: He came into deaf education through both his mother and his father, who was an elocutionist - which is kind of like a speech pathologist, sort of. He sort of helped people speak better. And he, Bell, ended up sort of taking the influence of his mother, who was a deaf woman who sort of lived in the hearing world, and his father, who was promoting speech and started teaching deaf kids to speak. And the invention of the telephone actually came out of those efforts, it started by him, sort of trying to find a device that would make speech visible. Well, that would essentially take the vibrations of speech and turn them into something that a deaf child could potentially read. He was looking at things like the manometric capsule, and other inventions that you would speak into kind of like, they kind of had a receiver where you would speak and it would be attached to a diaphragm that would vibrate very subtly in reaction to speech, and would either through change the appearance of a flame, or would sort of be connected to a needle, which would crawl on smoked glass, so that you've got something almost that looked like a sound wave. And, and through those devices, he started thinking about the telegraph and then the telephone.

Joe Donahue: And in no defense of the man whatsoever, but but he did think he was helping the deaf, right.

Katie Booth: Yeah, yeah, he really did. And I, you know, he had the best intentions, I suppose. And early on, he was sort of - he was in more in communication with deaf people, and really trying to do what what he thought was best for the deaf child. However, as his work went on, he turned away from the deaf community more and more and more, he stopped listening to what they were observing and what their experiences were, and started to really, really cut them off. And that's where that's where he really that was his fatal flaw, I think.

Joe Donahue: So, with that comes his views on immigration, deaf education, which we talked about and eugenics which all overlap and intertwine, as you write.

Katie Booth: Yeah, Bell was right at -- he got into eugenics ... the same year as the word eugenics was coined - he started promoting eugenic ideas. His specific idea was that -- and it was tied to oralism -- it was the idea that deaf people shouldn't marry each other. Because if they married each other, he feared a quote unquote: deaf race of people. He thought that deaf people who married each other, especially deaf people, with other deaf people in their family, or even hearing people with deaf people in their family, that they would have deaf babies, and they would sort of continue a lineage of deafness, which he believed to be undesirable, even though within his time, there were people who were pushing back against that idea, very vocally in the deaf community. But then also, even outside of that community, I mean, eugenics is sometimes framed as just an idea of its time, but that is to erase many, many voices that spoke up against it.

Joe Donahue: Probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I'm curious because his work - his work, also was in concert with the work of his father too, right. I mean, he picked up a mantle in some way.

Katie Booth: Yeah, his grandfather and his father and uncles, his two. They were all elocutionists. They were all focused on teaching people how to speak very well. They worked with actors and politicians, immigrants of means -- and they were famous for it. In fact, in the in the play and movie, "My Fair Lady." The character of Henry Higgins is based on the Bell, the character who teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak.

Joe Donahue: That is, so they took this horrible thing and it became a musical? That's. I mean, not that that's uncommon, like that happened, but...

Katie Booth: Basically! Yeah.

Joe Donahue: Uh huh. ... To me the the other part major part of the story, though, is how the deaf community works against oralism - and overthrows it to adopt American Sign Language, which is also a fascinating element of the story.

Katie Booth: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to overstate the victory, there's still a real struggle to get sign language access to deaf children today. And the effort was, so I mean, the access to power and privilege and money was so imbalanced in that fight. But yeah, deaf people organized, they had a conflict, they created a sort of national organization that became the National Association of the Deaf. Ultimately, there was even a task force of sorts that was tasked with talking to Bell, like there was a whole committee just to like, deal with this man. Try to talk some sense into him. That's how big of a threat he was. And, yeah, they I mean, the the fight goes on it extended through the 20th century. You had the Deaf President Now protests. And then, but even today, even today that this fight continues to ensure sign language access, or just accessible language to deaf children.

Joe Donahue: So that access is it's a fight, but it's a different fight than then the then oralism. And, and that being a another way of communicating and learning.

Katie Booth: I mean, the fight I think this kind of gets muddled a lot. But the fight is not again, for the most part. I mean, there's many, many people in the deaf community, a whole range of views. I'm a hearing person, I'm speaking from my perspective. But the fight for a lot of people is not about like saying that deaf people shouldn't speak. Or the deaf people shouldn't learn English. I mean, even in sign language dominated schools, kids were learning English, they were just learning written English. The fight is to have language access available to these deaf children and that the most, the easiest way to assure that is to make sure they have access to sign language. If kids don't have language access, at a very young age, they become language deprived, it has neurological effects that we almost never see in the hearing world, but which abound in the deaf world. Just today on Twitter, I saw a woman who was posting about having seen two deaf children over the course of the week who were arriving at elementary school with no language at all. And it continues today, it is an epidemic in the deaf community and the best way to ensure that deaf kids pick up on language at an early age that they have that language foundation in their minds, is to just provide them access to sign language.

Joe Donahue: So you you talk about this to have the representation that we see of the Deaf, even a mainstream representation and television and film, which is not good. We also see it that the we look at the echoes of this legacy. And it as you say, it's playing out in the classroom, but it's also playing out in our media representation as well.

Katie Booth: Yeah, well, definitely. Yes. Yeah. I mean, you often have hearing people or playing deaf roles on film. You have hearing scientists working on language. Well, they're working on studies related to hearing, which often carry a lot of hearing biases. And I, myself am a hearing person who wrote a book on deafness. I'm trying to examine my own role, and my own in between role because I inherited a lot of deaf cultural stories from my family. But I am also living in the hearing world I have, I have to confront my own hearing this, which is also something that I try to do in this book.

Joe Donahue: Where do you think this, this idea of the invention of miracles do you think? Is that possible?

Katie Booth: Well, I mean, the way, the title of the book, I, what I've tried to essentially do is to sort of break the idea of the miracle. Deaf children, who learn to speak has been seen as miraculous, since the very first record of teaching a deaf child to speak in America. It's framed as a miracle. Even you see this in the story about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller titled "The Miracle Worker," you see it in the framing of cochlear implant activation videos, which are often talked about as being miraculous, even though that's those videos are really problematic. I think what I well what I wanted to do was sort of challenge that idea of the miracle, and show that a miracle, the things we frame as miracles are often framed that way, because the labor involved to get in getting to that point has been erased. The deaf child who can speak has done years and years and years and years of labor to make that happen. And to call it a miracle is to erase all of that. And to frame it in a way that is deceptive. And so I wanted to take that word, miracle and question and talk that sort of help people think of it as something that is created something that is made quite deliberately, something that is essentially invented.

Joe Donahue: Katie Booth's book is "The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power in Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness" it is published by Simon and Schuster.

Read more here:

"The Invention Of Miracles" By Katie Booth - WAMC

RSVP

May 20 • 5:00 pm

The year 1924 was a watershed in American immigration. A victory for the eugenics movement, the Johnson-Reed Act established race-based quotas that succeeded in limiting the entry of Jews and Catholics from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as strengthening restrictions already in place barring the entry of Asians and Africans. It would take an extraordinary political window following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to overhaul the quota system through the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. By giving preference to family reunification and skilled workers, the legislation changed the demographics of the country, making it less European and less white. At the same time, it imposed the first numerical cap on Western Hemisphere immigration, making the U.S. less accessible for people coming from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

What lessons can we draw from these two historic shifts in American immigration? Has the United States ever been the nation of immigrants that it purports to be? And in our polarized times, can we fashion a new national identity that embraces immigrants and their families?

New York Timesnational editorJia Lynn Yang,winner of the 11th annual Zcalo Public Square Book Prize for her debut book,One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, visits Zcalo to discuss how immigration laws have changed the American population, our communities, and the countrys sense of itself.

Yang will be interviewed by Stanford University sociologist Toms Jimnez.

Photo credit: Lorin Klaris

Read the original here:

Does America Really Want to Be a Nation of Immigrants? - KCRW

The president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Alexis McGill Johnson, has used The New York Times as a confessional to fess up to the racist history of Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger.

"We must reckon with Margaret Sanger's association with white supremacist groups and eugenics," she writes.

Sanger's involvement with the notoriously racist eugenics movement in the 1920s, and her population-control motivations to limit the procreation of "undesirables," is something pro-lifers, particularly black pro-lifers, have been writing about for years.

But Planned Parenthood has always been in denial about these very ugly truths.

Now, apparently, the power and pressure of "wokeness" is even getting the leadership of the nation's largest abortion provider to step forward and unburden themselves from their sins.

But coming to terms with sin means knowing what sin is. And here, unfortunately, Planned Parenthood's president totally misses the point.

The problem today is not what was but what is. The "sin" of Planned Parenthood is its horrible work in leading the nation in the destruction of human life.

Per its annual report, in fiscal year 2019-2020, Planned Parenthood performed 354,871 abortions. This is roughly one-third of all abortions performed in the country.

Get our Daily Headlines

Sent right to your inbox.

The recognition we need from Planned Parenthood is the recognition of the sanctity of life, not public confession of the racist history of its founder.

Regarding racism, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 34% of abortions performed in the U.S. in 2018 were on Black women. Given that Black women constitute 13% of the female population, the incidence of abortion among Black women is out of proportion by almost a factor of three.

It is reasonable to assume that this is representative of the disproportionate number of Black women on whom Planned Parenthood performs abortions.

As part of Planned Parenthood's great cleansing, Johnson notes that "Planned Parenthood of Greater New York renamed its Manhattan health center in 2020," which apparently bore Sanger's name.

The Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley wrote in 2018, "In New York City, thousands more Black babies are aborted than born alive each year, and the abortion rate among Black mothers is more than three times higher than it is for white mothers."

The problem is the wholesale termination of Black unborn babies, not the name of the center in Manhattan where Planned Parenthood performs these abortions. New York City is one of the abortion capitals of the nation, and Planned Parenthood wants to take the edge off by renaming its abortion center.

Does Planned Parenthood target Black women for abortions? Why is the incidence of abortion so high among Black women?

A 2012 study by Protecting Black Life found that 79% of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities were within walking distance of minority neighborhoods.

Abortion rates tend to be higher among unmarried women because of a higher likelihood of unwanted pregnancy. The culture of abortion, aggressively promoted by Planned Parenthood, has disproportionately affected black marriage rates.

In 1970, three years before the Roe v. Wade decision, 76% of white adults age 25 and older were married, compared with 60% of blacks. By 2014, the rate dropped to 60% for whites, but it dropped to 35% for blacks.

Johnson takes one step further into the moral abyss, noting that Planned Parenthood is remiss for having "excluded trans and nonbinary people" from its programs.

She writes that Planned Parenthood pledges "to fight the many types of dehumanization we are seeing right now."

Dehumanization has one cause, of which Planned Parenthood is among the guiltiest in the nation: lack of respect for the sanctity of life.

Confessing what we all know -- that Margaret Sanger was a racist -- does not solve this problem.

Reverence for the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of life in the womb solves it.

This is what we are looking for from Planned Parenthood. Nothing less.

Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.

More here:

Sin of Planned Parenthood is abortion, not Margaret Sanger - Southeast Missourian

Photo: Statue of Alfred Russel Wallace, by George Beccaloni / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0).

In my previous post I noted that Jeffrey OConnell and Michael Ruses new book, Social Darwinism, has many references to Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) 35 in all! The thrust of their comments is to diminish Wallaces importance in the history of evolutionary theory specifically and science generally. Showing their own adherence to the secular religion of Darwinism, OConnell and Ruse make frequent references to Wallaces apostasy for straying from Darwins hidebound materialism in suggesting a spiritual dimension to humankind and an overt teleology in the cosmological and biological worlds. They emphasize that Wallace was something of a neer-do-well whom they caricature as a wacky spiritualist who received for his efforts only the horror and scorn of his fellow scientists (32).

This cartoon version of Wallace hardly comports with the facts of his life. Not surprisingly, it is derived from their sole source on this famed naturalist, Michael Shermers In Darwins Shadow (2002), perhaps the worst biography ever written on Wallace. The fact is, in his lifetime Wallace was well known and respected.Citation analysis shows that Wallaces writings have been more frequently referenced than those of Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), or Richard Owen (1804-1892) (Smith, 30). In addition, Wallaces lecture tour in America from October 23, 1886, through August 8, 1887, was immensely successful. The eminent American philosophers William James (1842-1910) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) rejected the reductionist scientific naturalism common with Darwinists and praised Wallaces evolutionary teleology. It is fair to say that the eclipse of Wallace occurred after his death, surely not during his lifetime. But that eclipse has never been complete and I have outlined numerous scientific figures (some quite eminent like the Nobel laureate neuroscientist John C. Eccles [1903-1997] and famed astronomer/cosmologist Fred Hoyle [1915-2001]) from the 20th and 21st centuries who have suggested that Wallaces views on teleology still have considerable merit (Natures Prophet, 140-156). In general, OConnell and Ruses handling is extremely superficial and infused with their naturalistic biases.

More importantly, however, their treatment is subject to false equivalency and presumption. For example, they state, Even if Darwin had never existed, by 1941 the science would have been around for the Nazis to use. After all, Alfred Russel Wallace discovered the ideas in 1858 and Herbert Spencer nearly ten years before that. It would be ludicrous to finger Wallace for Auschwitz (52-53). Here a number of missteps are made. First the science (presumably natural selection) would not, at least in the case of Wallace, have been around for the Nazis to use because Wallaces understanding and presentation of natural selection was different in many important respects from Darwins. For one thing, Wallace always rejected Darwins artificial selection examples of domestic breeding as applicable to natural selection, and eventually he completely rejected Darwins insistence that animals and humans were different in degree but not kind. Additionally, it was Darwin, not Wallace, who saw human history locked in a competitive struggle of racial hierarchies. Without these three key elements the conflating of artificial and natural selection, the explicit abandonment of human exceptionalism, and the adherence to racial and ethnic struggle its hard to see how the Nazis could have translated their racial hygiene into any kind of systematic eugenics program modeled around a Wallacean natural selection. In contrast, Richard Weikart has convincingly demonstrated how Hitler was able to turn his pernicious ethic into an official Nazi policy committed to social Darwinism based upon Darwinian concepts of selection (see his Hitlers Ethic).

It certainly would be ludicrous to finger Wallace for Auschwitz because he openly and ferociously opposed any and every kind of eugenic proposal. Wallace, who knew all too well that the dark and dismal science of eugenics was gaining ground in England late in his life, was quite clear: Segregation of the unfit is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have enough of this kind of tyranny already. the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft.

This, of course, is not to suggest that Darwin was in any sense a Nazi or even sympathetic with those ideas. But his cousin, Francis Galton, himself a devoted Darwinist, laid the foundation in his biometrics for the eugenic perspectives that would form an appreciable link with the German infatuation with racial hygiene and their terror of so-called mental defectives and the unfit. Was Darwin a Nazi? Of course not. But did his ideas form a causal nexus via Galton to ideas that would be integrated into Nazi policy? Yes. Such a link is entirely absent even vehemently opposed with Wallace.

And this reveals the dramatically different Wallace factor. A factor that shows how two men intimately associated with the same idea natural selection could come to very different conclusions and have very different consequences (for exactly how different, see Intelligent Evolution). Ideas do indeed have consequences, but not all ideas play out the same way or weave their way in the history of ideas toward the same destination. Its an enduring lesson that OConnell and Ruse seem to have forgotten.

Read more here:

Social Darwinism: The Wallace Factor - Discovery Institute

Florida could ban abortions based on a diagnosis of a disability. The proposal recently cleared the House following emotional testimony. But its fate is unclear in the Senate.

Suppose a physician knows or should know their patient is ending a pregnancy on the sole basis of a disability, and the physician goes through with the abortion. In that case, the physician could face a third-degree felony under the bill. Rep. Nicholas Duran (D-Miami) says the measure will create a divide between patient and doctor.

"They now have to cover their behinds. They have to make sure that they're not going to get thrown into court or get their license thrown into some sort of issue because they should have known and what that means. And then that really what I think does is pit that physician with their patient. It pits them against each other in some ways," Duran says.

Duran is concerned doctors may start asking patients questions about their abortion, which he says could possibly violate someone's right to privacy. But Republicans have a counterpoint.

"Members, it's a common practice for this legislature to place a variety of requirements on medical practitioners." Rep. Tyler Sirois (R-Merritt Island) says.

He voiced his support of the bill during a recent debate on the House floor.

"The concept of ending a pregnancy on the basis of a disability is modern-day eugenics," Sirois says.

Democrats like Rep. Allison Tant (D-Tallahassee) say there are many reasons why people choose to end pregnancies. Tant has a son with a cognitive disability and told her story to lawmakers on the floor.

"When I was pregnant with him, my doctor threw up his handsI don't know what's wrong, there's something wrong with this fetus I can't tell what it isI can't figure it outyou're going to have to go see a specialist and you may need to consider termination. The termination I considered was the termination of my doctor," Tant says.

Tant says complications with her pregnancy caused her to be on bed rest, and she lost 12 weeks' worth of work, which she says a lot of women can't afford to do. Her baby also had to have open-heart surgery at 23-months old.

"And costwe got a bill for $106,000 for that 20 years ago," Tant says.

Tant says she continues to pay out-of-pocket expenses to help her son and notes not every family can do that.

"Everybody knows what their other children can manage. Everybody knows what their marriage can survive. Every family knows what they can do. We're not there. We're not in that doctor's office. We're not at that family kitchen table when they're thinking about their other children. When they're thinking about how they're going to manage, I just can't vote for this bill because I think that every family must have the right to make their own decisions," Tant says.

In her close, bill sponsor Rep. Erin Grall (R-Vero Beach) dismissed Democratic concerns about the costs of caring for and raising kids with disabilities.

"I think the message that we're sending to our children, that someone may be too expensive and inconvenient, and therefore we can terminate them is the wrong message," Grall says.

Grall's bill would still allow physicians to perform an abortion to save the mother's life or if a fetus has a condition that would lead to its death or within a month of birth. That condition could not be a disability under Grall's bill. The Senate companion has not passed through any of its committees this session. Meanwhile, the House bill has been sent to a Senate Rules Committee. But no Senate committees have been scheduled for the last week of session.

See the article here:

Fate Of "Disability Abortions" Proposal Unclear As Legislative Session Winds Down - WUWF

In January 1936, San Francisco heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt shocked the nation when she claimed that, in order to deprive her of her inheritance, her mother, Maryon, had her declared "feebleminded" and then sterilized without her knowledge. Ann explained that her father, legendary inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt, had bequeathed two-thirds of his $4 million dollar estate to her and one-third to her mother, but his will provided that her share went to Maryon if she died childless. Knowing this, and presuming she would outlive her daughter, who had bronchial trouble, Maryon had taken steps to see that Ann never became a mother. A mere months before Ann's 21stbirthday, she conspired with two doctors to have Ann's fallopian tubes removed during a scheduled appendectomy.

In addition to suing her mother for half a million dollars, Ann demanded a full accounting of her mother's spending. She claimed Maryon had squandered much of her trust fund at gambling resorts across the world.

It wasn't long before San Francisco prosecutors learned of the case, filing criminal mayhem charges against Maryon and the physicians. But before authorities could get to Maryon's penthouse, she'd fled for the East Coast. She left behind an affidavit explaining herself: She was merely protecting society from the effects of Ann becoming pregnant. Ann had been deemed a "moron." (Indeed, prior to surgery, a psychologist had peppered the heiress with civics questions that she refused to answer.) Ann also had "erotic tendencies." She had been addicted to masturbation as a child, the affidavit claimed, and was now attracted to "men in uniform," including "Negroes." She'd once tried to elope with the chauffeur, to whom she'd written long letters containing her pubic hairs.

For the next six months, the two women riveted the public with their claims against each other. It wasn't merely the salacious nature of the feud that raised eyebrows, but also the unusualness of Ann's case. The heiress hardly resembled the typical victim of eugenics; she was educated, wealthyand white. This raised the question: Could any woman deemed"sexually deviant" be plucked off the street and operated upon?

She could, for the simple reason that she threatened to amalgamate the races. As Ann's mother and the doctors' attorneys managed to persuade the public, "adrift" women constituted a grave danger to white society, which only surgery could ameliorate.

Long after Ann's death and the eventual repeal of sterilization laws, the heiress's story and that of eugenics, more broadly, remain instructive. Together, they reveal how narrowly whiteness is conceived and how readily the very institution that confers a person's privilege can become her undoing. They reveal a truth that scholars and activists are only now beginning to make mainstream: White peoplecan be collateral victims of white supremacy.

* * *

Eugenics was a movement to protect the purity of the white race. It took hold in America precisely at a moment when the nation's racial makeup was transforming. In the early 20th century, Eastern Europeans were emigrating in record numbers, andAfrican Americans were migrating from the rural South to the industrial North. In order to protect the white race from "undesirables," eugenicists weredetermined, among other measures, to eliminate the "waste humanity" from their own ranks. Conflating mental, moraland physical defects, they targeted poor, disabled, substance-dependentand sexually transgressive white peopleperceived to threaten the vitality of the gene pool, either by virtue of their heritable traits or their seeming likelihood to cross the color line.

Ann's mother exploited these realities, making much of Ann's flirting with an African American train porter. In telling of Ann's preference for "the help," she also stoked fears of low-class men bringing out women's baser instincts. According to psychologists at the time, it was household workers who tended to introduce perversion into respectable homes, corrupting wellborn individuals like Ann.

Intuiting the racial dynamics at play, Ann re-asserted her whiteness and cast her mother as the real threat. She had experts attest to her fluency in French and Italian, as well as her high-brow literary tastes. One physician noted that she read books on Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Marie Antoinette, in addition to Charles Dickens' works. If Ann had any defects, her defense claimed, they were due to her having been neglected by a mother who led a riotous life; it was Maryon who drank herself stupid and threw herself at workingmen.

Ann's advocates never questioned the ethics of sterilization, either in the civil case or the criminal one, in which the two doctors stood trial in August, while Maryon remained on the East Coast convalescing from a suicide attempt. Focused on establishing the unlawfulness of Ann's surgery, these witnesses simply tried to prove her undeserving of sterilization.

It was no use. The judge dismissed the case against the doctors, finding that they and Ann's mother had acted lawfully. The public seemed to accept this outcome. There were no protests or riots; and for the rest of her life, the heiress was lambasted by the press.

The case faded into obscurity, but not before helping eugenicists to rebrand their movement in ways that would enable involuntary sterilization practices to endure well into the 20th century. As Wendy Kline first recounted in her book, "Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom," the case abetted eugenicists to shift focus from heredity to environment exactly at a moment when scientists were exposing the flaws of eugenicists' claims about inheritance. It also authorized the use of sterilization in private practice. These changes paved the way for thousands of individuals the majorityof color to be operated upon without consent. In California, the heiress' tragedy would reverberate in the many instances of Mexican Americans sterilized on the grounds that they were "hyper-breeders" whose children would inevitably drain public resources.

Yet, for all its impact on people of color, the case also reminds us of the great tragedies endured by white peoplethought to imperil the racial hierarchy. Still today, poor, disabled, transgenderand norm-breaking whites face an increasedrisk of state violence, including police brutality and forced sterilization. Many in white evangelical circles report trauma from the rituals of "purity culture," whose racial animus is documented in a slew of recent books.

Scholar-activists like Jonathan M. Metzl and Heather McGhee have also called attention to the harms whites experience as a result of the dismantling of public programs, brought on by a "politics of racial resentment." Their respective bestsellers, "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland" and "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together," contend that whitesgreatly suffer from a culture that casts government dependents as menaces to society. As in the early 20th century, when eugenics first flourished, the pervasive contempt for such dependents cannot be disentangled from fears of non-whites gaining dominance. Yet, far from rooting out racism, many marginalized whites fall for the myth that dark-skinned people are to blame for their woes, supporting the very austerity measures responsible for growing poverty.

Before her death from cancer at 41, Ann fell into similar patterns of thinking. She often appealed to her wealth and lineage to disparage other women, including one whose husband she stole. She never seemed to realize how such classism had contributed to her tragedy.

But she did show great compassion to at least one outcast woman: her mother. When Maryon died in 1939, never having fully recovered from suicide attempt, Ann travelled east to mourn her. Perhaps, having been excoriated for her the same crime (maternal unfitness), she recognized her parent for the hurting woman she'd become. At Maryon's graveside, she may have fleetingly realized what Metzl, McGhee, and others have: Our well-being is intimately bound up with others' and no one will be truly free until all are.

Follow this link:

Eugenics, racism and the forced sterilization of heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt - Salon

Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson called out the organization's founder in a New York Times op-ed, saying she had ties to "white supremacist groups and eugenics."

Margaret Sanger, founder of the reproductive healthcare nonprofit organization, is known for having devoted her entire life to expanding access to birth control. Since her death, some historians and biographers have been characterizing her as a proponent of the eugenics movement, meant to control populations for "desirable" characteristics while weeding out so-called undesirable ones.

"Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder's actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate 'product of her time,'" Johnson wrote in the op-ed.

"Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated," she continued.

Sanger once spoke to the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey to hype up birth control , noted Johnson while pointing out examples of her shamed history. She also "endorsed" a Supreme Court decision that led to state-controlled sterilization attempts, Johnson said. This decision allowed the government to sterilize people it deemed "unfit" to have kids, usually without their consent or knowledge.

Germany also established a forced sterilization program in the 1930s, which Sanger supported.

"I admire the courage of a government that takes a stand on sterilization of the unfit and second, my admiration is subject to the interpretation of the word 'unfit,'" Sanger said in praise of the program. "If by 'unfit' is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an admirable gesture, but if 'unfit' refers to races or religions, then that is another matter, which I frankly deplore."

Johnson's comments mark the latest in a broad push to distance Planned Parenthood from Sanger's legacy.

Last year, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, located in Manhattan, announced it would drop Sanger's name from its building "as a public commitment to reckon with its founder's harmful connections to the eugenics movement."

Have a news tip? Reach this reporter at ydzhanova@insider.com

Continued here:

Planned Parenthood CEO calls out founder for her 'association with white supremacist groups and eugenics' - Business Insider

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of AmericaBy Daniel Okrent | Scribner528 pages $30Langans Book Mark: 4/4 stars

Until recently, the US has had a Republican administration anxious to keep certain peoples that it deems undesirable from immigrating into the country. If you thought this was a new impulse, Dan Okrents The Guarded Gate shows that it is a repulsive American policy with a recurring history.

Okrent is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and first public editor of The New York Times, former editor at Large at Time, and managing editor of Life Magazine.

Part of the story of The Guarded Gate is one of scientists, who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing an intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers many of them progressives who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenics arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.

Readers may find it hard to believe, but this policy is, relatively speaking, very old. Okrent, who took five years to write this important book documents the history of this plan that began in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. (Slightly earlier, 1891, Lodge wrote a piece for the North American entitled The Restriction of Immigration.) By 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that biological laws had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans and the restrictive law was enacted three years later.

This proof is something that fair-minded people find repugnant: a combination of the rise of eugenics, Nazism, and a repeat of Know Nothing political party beliefs that began in the 1850s, that were xenophobic and hostile to immigration.

Beliefs werent very different in the United Kingdom, where it was thought that the falling birthrate would soon lead to a national deterioration while the country fell to the Irish and the Jews and this was after Parliaments adoption of the Aliens Act of 1905, which had already cut the numbers of Jewish immigration into the UK by two thirds. About this alleged deterioration The Times of London asked in 1912: whether any of us are really wise enough to know how a human society ought to be constituted.

Okrent begins the story with Ellis Island, 1925. There youll remember, on the base of the nearby Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazaruss famous poem invited the world to Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The author tells us that at that time, many Americans still found a certain nobility, a confirmation of the nations promise, in Lazaruss word and image they evoked.

However, even then he warns, It was likely that even more citizens perceived evidence of menace, and threat, and an inevitable national decline.

Why so, we ask?

Henry Curran, commissioner of immigration for the Port of New York at the time, signaled the change. He was a former republican who lost a run for New York mayor in 1921. Curran told his visitors to Ellis Island in 1925, The immigrants of today are of a better kind than those of two decades earlier. They are better by reason of our new immigration law; the cause and effect are direct.

Currans reasoning was specious but widely held. Some examples of it: a major national figure had written four years earlier Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The editors of the nations most popular magazine had said continued immigration from southern and Eastern Europe would compel America to join the lowly ranks of mongrel races.

This was an idea, Okrent says, that had been gaining traction for years. Some of the nations leading scientific institutions, amplified by political activists, political exigencies and long-standing hatreds, had assured that a version of the Immigration Act of 1924 would pass. Sound familiar?

Who started this resurgence?

Credit Charles Benedict Davenport, a scientist beset with a nervous temperament, as our author describes it. Margaret Sanger recalled Davenport expostulating, And with his hands upraised as thought in supplication, quivered emotionally as he breathed, Protoplasm. We want more protoplasm.

In reality Davenport was a slim, van dyke bearded biologist at Harvard in the 1890s. He was a pure geneticist who published 439 scientific papers, sat on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals and maintained memberships in sixty-four scientific and social organizations. His work eventually changed the face of the nation to its detriment. Eventually, Okrent notes, Davenports ambitions distorted his work, leading him dangerously past the edge of reason. Perhaps over the edge at the time, he expostulated, I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.

Couple the efforts of Davenport with Sir Francis Galtons (1862 1911), an English Victorian statistician and eugenicist known for stressing psychological differences between people, the inheritability of talent, rather than their common traits, and you get an influential set of scientists who favored retrogressive social policies that eliminated Italians (gross little aliens and Eastern European Jews furtive, reeking, snarling Yacoob(s).

Other major figures in Americana pitched in to make the case for exclusion. They included Henry Cabot Lodges friend, Theodore Roosevelt, Darwins relative Francis Galton, Madison Grant, who founded the Bronx Zoo, and his pal, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, as well as Max Perkins, the editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Perhaps a disappointment, but not a surprise, that all came to the same regrettable conclusion of exclusion being protective of a country built upon open access.

On an April Sunday in the spring of 1924 the New York Times announced the profound change in an eight column headline. It read, atop an article that stretched across a full page: AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO AN END.

All a great shame, documented fairly and carefully by scholar-writer Okrent.

(An important aside: discredit both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, DC for not finding an equitable immigration policy for the past twenty years.)

President Biden offers more than nominal hope for a change to a better immigration program.

Michael D. Langan is the NBC-2.com Culture Critic. Dr. Langan has written for the BBC, The Dublin Review of Books, Boston Globe, Buffalo News and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, among other publications. This is a slightly revised review of a book that should be required reading in an America that continues to exclude so many from its shores.

Here is the original post:

Review: The Guarded Gate - NBC2 News