Category Archives: Eugenics

Sir Francis Galton first defined the term eugenics in 1883, eventually describing it as the "the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race" as well as those that "develop them to the utmost advantage." In the early twentieth century, eugenics movements thrived across the globe, in dozens of countries as diverse as Argentina, Japan, India, and Germany. Although the scope of eugenics differed from place to place, its proponents shared the belief that directing reproduction and biological selection could better, even perfect, society.

California was home to an extensive eugenics movement in the twentieth century. Convinced that ideas of better breeding and genetic selection were central to settling the Pacific West, many European American migrants to California supported practices such as involuntary sterilization, immigration restriction, and racially-biased IQ testing. Indeed, 1/3 or 20,000 of the 60,000 sterilizations performed in the United States from 1900 to 1980 occurred in California under the aegis of the state government.

See the original post here:

Eugenics in California - CSHPE - CSUS

Suffer The Little Children: A Peek into the History of Eugenics and Child Abuse by the State - Pennsylvania Pennhurst. (Full Documentary) The ground-breaking 1968 NBC10 Expose on Pennhurst State School by Bill Baldini. Haunting Similarities to current horrors of CPS Shelters + Group Homes (abuse, money benefits contractors, children worse off). Once called the shame of the nation, Pennhurst was the epicenter of a civil and human rights movement that changed the way the world saw people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The atrocities of neglect at Pennhurst resulted in Supreme Court litigation that sounded the death knell for institutionalization worldwide. Pennhurst was the battleground in a monumental struggle to secure basic human rights for the last group of Americans to attain privileges assumed to be the natural freedoms of all persons. Pennhurst's historic and beautiful campus is, like Valley Forge and Independence Mall to the east, hallowed ground in the struggle for dignity and self-determination, a western anchor to a freedom corridor, that, though stretching but a few miles, reaches all the way around the world. Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance seeks to ensure that those achievements won at Pennhurst are neither lost nor forgotten. http://www.preservepennhurst.com/defa...

PA & EUGENICS - In 1913, the legislature appointed a Commission for the Care of the Feeble-Minded which stated that the disabled were unfit for citizenship and posed a menace to the peace, and thus recommended a program of custodial care. The Commission desired to prevent the intermixing of the genes of those imprisoned w the general population. In the Biennial Report to the Legislature submitted by the Board of Trustees, Pennhurst's Chief Physician quoted Henry H. Goddard, a leading eugenicist:- "Every feeble-minded person is a potential criminal. The general public, although more convinced today than ever before that it is a good thing to segregate the idiot or the distinct imbecile, they have not as yet been convinced as to the proper treatment of the defective delinquent, which is the brighter and more dangerous individual."

More on Eugenics in Pennsylvania - -- In 1857 the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision while it held session at Bedford Springs in Bedford, Pennsylvania. Dred Scott and his family walked into the Supreme Court as free people and walked out as slaves. Transferring authority from the parent to the state produced profound subservience and slavery into the entire culture. Millions of American families are now experiencing the very same fate as the Dred Scott family, as "family courts" and bureaucratic slave-makers are committing the very same atrocities in eugenics "kangaroo courts." http://bedfordsprings.blogspot.com/ -- Eugenics in America, Began in Bedford, Pennsylvania and Continues to Destroy through CPS Fraud, Abuse, False Accusations. http://robertscourt.blogspot.com/2009...

--- Cases --- PENNHURST STATE SCHOOL V. HALDERMAN, 465 U. S. 89 (1984). The Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that the MH/MR Act required the State to adopt the "least restrictive environment" approach for the care of the mentally retarded, and rejecting petitioners' argument that the Eleventh Amendment barred a federal court from considering this pendent state law claim. The court reasoned that, since that Amendment did not bar a federal court from granting prospective injunctive relief against state officials on the basis of federal claims, citing Ex parte Young, 209 U. S. 123, the same result obtained with respect to a pendent state law claim. HELD: Eleventh Amendment prohibited the District Court from ordering state officials to conform their conduct to state law. Pp. 465 U. S. 97-124. (a) The principle of sovereign immunity is a constitutional limitation on the federal judicial power established in Art. III of the Constitution. The Eleventh Amendment bars a suit against state officials when the State is the real, substantial party in interest, regardless of whether the suit seeks damages or injunctive relief. The Court in Ex parte Young, supra, recognized an important exception to this general rule: a suit challenging the federal constitutionality of a state official's action is not one against the State. Pp. 465 U. S. 97-103. http://supreme.justia.com/us/465/89/

EX PARTE YOUNG, 209 U.S. 123 (1908), Whether a state statute is unconstitutional because the penalties for its violation are so enormous that persons affected thereby are prevented from resorting to the courts for the purpose of determining the validity of the statute, and are thereby denied the equal protection of the law, and their property rendered liable to be taken without due process of law, is a Federal question and gives the Circuit Court jurisdiction. http://supreme.justia.com/us/209/123/...

Continued here:

Suffer The Little Children, Pennhurst State Home: Eugenics ...

The Negro Project Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Plan for Black Americans By Tanya L. Green posted at Concerned Women of America

May 10, 2001

'Civil rights' doesn't mean anything without a right to life! declared Hunter. He and the other marchers were protesting the disproportionately high number of abortions in the black community. The high number is no accident. Many Americansblack and whiteare unaware of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's Negro Project. Sanger created this program in 1939, after the organization changed its name from the American Birth Control League (ABCL) to the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA).1

The aim of the program was to restrictmany believe exterminatethe black population. Under the pretense of better health and family planning, Sanger cleverly implemented her plan. What's more shocking is Sanger's beguilement of black America's crme de la crmethose prominent, well educated and well-to-dointo executing her scheme. Some within the black elite saw birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites.

The Negro Project has had lasting repercussions in the black community: We have become victims of genocide by our own hands, cried Hunter at the Say So march.

Margaret Sanger aligned herself with the eugenicists whose ideology prevailed in the early 20th century. Eugenicists strongly espoused racial supremacy and purity, particularly of the Aryan race. Eugenicists hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the race by encouraging the fit to reproduce and the unfit to restrict their reproduction. They sought to contain the inferior races through segregation, sterilization, birth control and abortion.

Sanger embraced Malthusian eugenics. Thomas Robert Malthus, a 19th-century cleric and professor of political economy, believed a population time bomb threatened the existence of the human race.2 He viewed social problems such as poverty, deprivation and hunger as evidence of this population crisis. According to writer George Grant, Malthus condemned charities and other forms of benevolence, because he believed they only exacerbated the problems. His answer was to restrict population growth of certain groups of people.3 His theories of population growth and economic stability became the basis for national and international social policy. Grant quotes from Malthus' magnum opus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in six editions from 1798 to 1826:

Malthus' disciples believed if Western civilization were to survive, the physically unfit, the materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to be suppressed and isolatedor even, perhaps, eliminated. His disciples felt the subtler and more scientific approaches of education, contraception, sterilization and abortion were more practical and acceptable ways to ease the pressures of the alleged overpopulation.5

Critics of Malthusianism said the group produced a new vocabulary of mumbo-jumbo. It was all hard-headed, scientific and relentless. Further, historical facts have proved the Malthusian mathematical scheme regarding overpopulation to be inaccurate, though many still believe them.6

Despite the falsehoods of Malthus' overpopulation claims, Sanger nonetheless immersed herself in Malthusian eugenics. Grant wrote she argued for birth control using the scientifically verified threat of poverty, sickness, racial tension and overpopulation as its background. Sanger's publication, The Birth Control Review (founded in 1917) regularly published pro-eugenic articles from eugenicists, such as Ernst Rudin.7 Although Sanger ceased editing The Birth Control Review in 1929, the ABCL continued to use it as a platform for eugenic ideas.

Sanger built the work of the ABCL, and, ultimately, Planned Parenthood, on the ideas and resources of the eugenics movement. Grant reported that virtually all of the organization's board members were eugenicists. Eugenicists financed the early projects, from the opening of birth control clinics to the publishing of revolutionary literature. Eugenicists comprised the speakers at conferences, authors of literature and the providers of services almost without exception. And Planned Parenthood's international work was originally housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society. The two organizations were intertwined for years.8

The ABCL became a legal entity on April 22, 1922, in New York. Before that, Sanger illegally operated a birth control clinic in October 1916, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, which eventually closed. The clinic serviced the poor immigrants who heavily populated the areathose deemed unfit to reproduce.9

Sanger's early writings clearly reflected Malthus' influence. She writes:

In another passage, she decries the burden of human waste on society:

She concluded,

The Review printed an excerpt of an address Sanger gave in 1926. In it she said:

Sanger said a bonus would be wise and profitable and the salvation of American civilization.14 She presented her ideas to Mr. C. Harold Smith (of the New York Evening World) on the welfare committee in New York City. She said, people must be helped to help themselves. Any plan or program that would make them dependent upon doles and charities is paternalistic and would not be of any permanent value. She included an essay (what she called a program of public welfare,) entitled We Must Breed a Race of Thoroughbreds.15

In it she argued that birth control clinics, or bureaus, should be established in which men and women will be taught the science of parenthood and the science of breeding. For this was the way to breed out of the race the scourges of transmissible disease, mental defect, poverty, lawlessness, crime ... since these classes would be decreasing in number instead of breeding like weeds [emphasis added].16

Her program called for women to receive birth control advice in various situations, including where:

Sanger said such a plan would ... reduce the birthrate among the diseased, the sickly, the poverty stricken and anti-social classes, elements unable to provide for themselves, and the burden of which we are all forced to carry.17

Sanger had openly embraced Malthusian eugenics, and it shaped her actions in the ensuing years.

In 1929, 10 years before Sanger created the Negro Project, the ABCL laid the groundwork for a clinic in Harlem, a largely black section of New York City. It was the dawn of the Great Depression, and for blacks that meant double the misery. Blacks faced harsher conditions of desperation and privation because of widespread racial prejudice and discrimination. From the ABCL's perspective, Harlem was the ideal place for this experimental clinic, which officially opened on November 21, 1930. Many blacks looked to escape their adverse circumstances and therefore did not recognize the eugenic undercurrent of the clinic. The clinic relied on the generosity of private foundations to remain in business.18 In addition to being thought of as inferior and disproportionately represented in the underclass, according to the clinic's own files used to justify its work, blacks in Harlem:

Although the clinic served whites as well as blacks, it was established for the benefit of the colored people. Sanger wrote this in a letter to Dr. W. E. Burghardt DuBois,20 one of the day's most influential blacks. A sociologist and author, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 to improve the living conditions of black Americans.

That blacks endured extreme prejudice and discrimination, which contributed greatly to their plight, seemed to further justify restricting their numbers. Many believed the solution lay in reducing reproduction. Sanger suggested the answer to poverty and degradation lay in smaller numbers of blacks. She convinced black civic groups in Harlem of the benefits of birth control, under the cloak of better health (i.e., reduction of maternal and infant death; child spacing) and family planning. So with their cooperation, and the endorsement of The Amsterdam News (a prominent black newspaper), Sanger established the Harlem branch of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.21 The ABCL told the community birth control was the answer to their predicament.

Sanger shrewdly used the influence of prominent blacks to reach the masses with this message. She invited DuBois and a host of Harlem's leading blacks, including physicians, social workers, ministers and journalists, to form an advisory council to help direct the clinic so that our work in birth control will be a constructive force in the community.22 She knew the importance of having black professionals on the advisory board and in the clinic; she knew blacks would instinctively suspect whites of wanting to decrease their numbers. She would later use this knowledge to implement the Negro Project.

Sanger convinced the community so well that Harlem's largest black church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, held a mass meeting featuring Sanger as the speaker.23 But that event received criticism. At least one very prominent minister of a denomination other than Baptist spoke out against Sanger. Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of Abyssinian Baptist, received adverse criticism from the (unnamed) minister who was surprised that he'd allow that awful woman in his church.24

Grace Congregational Church hosted a debate on birth control. Proponents argued birth control was necessary to regulate births in proportion to the family's income; spacing births would help mothers recover physically and fathers financially; physically strong and mentally sound babies would result; and incidences of communicable diseases would decrease.

Opponents contended that as a minority group blacks needed to increase rather than decrease and that they needed an equal distribution of wealth to improve their status. In the end, the debate judges decided the proponents were more persuasive: Birth control would improve the status of blacks.25 Still, there were others who equated birth control with abortion and therefore considered it immoral.

Eventually, the Urban League took control of the clinic,26 an indication the black community had become ensnared in Sanger's labyrinth.

The Harlem clinic and ensuing birth control debate opened dialogue among blacks about how best to improve their disadvantageous position. Some viewed birth control as a viable solution: High reproduction, they believed, meant prolonged poverty and degradation. Desperate for change, others began to accept the rationale of birth control. A few embraced eugenics. The June 1932 edition of The Birth Control Review, called The Negro Number, featured a series of articles written by blacks on the virtues of birth control.

The editorial posed this question: Shall they go in for quantity or quality in children? Shall they bring children into the world to enrich the undertakers, the physicians and furnish work for social workers and jailers, or shall they produce children who are going to be an asset to the group and American society? The answer: Most [blacks], especially women, would choose quality ... if they only knew how.27

DuBois, in his article Black Folk and Birth Control, noted the inevitable clash of ideals between those Negroes who were striving to improve their economic position and those whose religious faith made the limitation of children a sin.28 He criticized the mass of ignorant Negroes who bred carelessly and disastrously so that the increase among [them] ... is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.29

DuBois called for a more liberal attitude among black churches. He said they were open to intelligent propaganda of any sort, and the American Birth Control League and other agencies ought to get their speakers before church congregations and their arguments in the Negro newspapers [emphasis added].30

Charles S. Johnson, Fisk University's first black president, wrote eugenic discrimination was necessary for blacks.31 He said the high maternal and infant mortality rates, along with diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria and venereal infection, made it difficult for large families to adequately sustain themselves.

Further, the status of Negroes as marginal workers, their confinement to the lowest paid branches of industry, the necessity for the labors of mothers, as well as children, to balance meager budgets, are factors [that] emphasize the need for lessening the burden not only for themselves, but of society, which must provide the supplementary support in the form of relief.32 Johnson later served on the National Advisory Council to the BCFA, becoming integral to the Negro Project.

Writer Walter A. Terpenning described bringing a black child into a hostile world as pathetic. In his article God's Chillun, he wrote:

Terpenning considered birth control for blacks as the more humane provision and more eugenic than among whites. He felt birth control information should have first been disseminated among blacks rather than the white upper crust.34 He failed to look at the problematic attitudes and behavior of society and how they suppressed blacks. He offered no solutions to the injustice and vile racism that blacks endured.

Sadly, DuBois' words of black churches being open to intelligent propaganda proved prophetic. Black pastors invited Sanger to speak to their congregations. Black publications, like The Afro-American and The Chicago Defender, featured her writings. Rather than attacking the root causes of maternal and infant deaths, diseases, poverty, unemployment and a host of other social illsnot the least of which was racismSanger pushed birth control. To many, it was better for blacks not to be born rather than endure such a harsh existence.

Against this setting, Sanger charmed the black community's most distinguished leaders into accepting her plan, which was designed to their own detriment. She peddled her wares wrapped in pretty packages labeled better health and family planning. No one could deny the benefits of better health, being financially ready to raise children, or spacing one's children. However, the solution to the real issues affecting blacks did not lay in reducing their numbers. It lay in attacking the forces in society that hindered their progress. Most importantly, one had to discern Sanger's motive behind her push for birth control in the community. It was not an altruistic one.

Prior to 1939, Sanger's outreach to the black community was largely limited to her Harlem clinic and speaking at black churches.35 Her vision for the reproductive practices of black Americans expanded after the January 1939 merger of the Clinical Research Bureau and the American Birth Control League to form the Birth Control Federation of America. She selected Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, of the soap-manufacturing company Procter and Gamble, to be the BCFA regional director of the South.

Gamble wrote a memorandum in November 1939 entitled Suggestions for the Negro Project, in which he recognized that black leaders might regard birth control as an extermination plot. He suggested black leaders be placed in positions where it would appear they were in charge.36 Yet Sanger's reply reflects Gamble's ambivalence about having blacks in authoritative positions:

Another project director lamented:

Sanger knew blacks were a religious peopleand how useful ministers would be to her project. She wrote in the same letter:

Sanger's cohorts within the BCFA sought to attract black leadership. They succeeded. The list of black leaders who made up BCFA's National Advisory Council reads like a who's who among black Americans. To name a few:40

Even with this impressive list, Sanger ran into resistance when she tried to present a birth control exhibit at the 1940 American Negro Exposition, a fair that traces the progress blacks have made since the Emancipation Proclamation, in Chicago. After inviting the BCFA to display its exhibit, the Exposition's board later cancelled, citing last minute changes in floor space.41

Sanger did not buy this and issued a statement urging public protest. This has come as a complete surprise, said Sanger, since the Federation undertook preparation of the exhibit upon an express invitation from a member of the Exposition board.42 She said the cancellation resulted from concerted action on the part of representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. She even accused the church of threatening officials with the withholding of promised federal and state funds needed to hold the Exposition.43

Her statement mentioned BCFA prepared the exhibit in consultation with its National (Negro) Advisory Council, and it illustrated the need for birth control as a public health measure.44 She said the objective was to demonstrate how birth control would improve the welfare of the Negro population, noting the maternal death rate among black mothers was nearly 50 percent higher, and the child death rate was more than one-third greater than the white community.45

At Sanger's urging, protesters of the cancellation sent letters to Attorney Wendall E. Green, vice chairman of the Afra-Merican Emancipation Exposition Commission (sponsor of the Exposition), requesting he investigate. Green denied there was any threat or pressure to withhold funds needed to finance the Exposition. Further, he said the Exposition commission (of Illinois) unanimously passed a resolution, which read in part: That in the promotion, conduct and accomplishment of the objectives (of the Exposition) there must be an abiding spirit to create goodwill toward all people.46 He added that since the funds for the Exposition came from citizens of all races and creeds, any exhibit in conflict with the known convictions of any religious group contravenes the spirit of the resolution,47 which seemed to support Catholic opposition. The commission upheld the ban on the exhibit.

The propaganda of the Negro Project was that birth control meant better health. So on this premise, the BCFA designed two southern Negro Project demonstration programs to show how medically-supervised birth control integrated into existing public health services could improve the general welfare of Negroes, and to initiate a nationwide educational program.48

The BCFA opened the first clinic at the Bethlehem Center in urban Nashville, Tennessee (where blacks constituted only 25 percent of the population), on February 13, 1940. They extended the work to the Social Services Center of Fisk University (a historically black college) on July 23, 1940. This location was especially significant because of its proximity to Meharry Medical School, which trained more than 50 percent of black physicians in the United States.49

An analysis of the income of the Nashville group revealed that no family, regardless of size, had an income over $15 a week. The service obviously reached the income group for which it was designed,50 indicating the project's target. The report claimed to have brought to light serious diseases and making possible their treatment, ... [and] that 55 percent [354 of the 638] of the patients prescribed birth control methods used it consistently and successfully.51 However, the report presented no definite figures ... to demonstrate the extent of community improvement.52

The BCFA opened the second clinic on May 1, 1940, in rural Berkeley County, South Carolina, under the supervision of Dr. Robert E. Seibels, chairman of the Committee on Maternal Welfare of the South Carolina Medical Association.53 BCFA chose this site in part because leaders in the state were particularly receptive to the experiment. South Carolina had been the second state to make child spacing a part of its state public health program after a survey of the state's maternal deaths showed that 25 percent occurred among mothers known to be physically unfit for pregnancy.54 Again, the message went out: Birth controlnot better prenatal carereduced maternal and infant mortality.

Although Berkeley County's population was 70 percent black, the clinic received criticism that members of this group were overwhelmingly in the majority.55 Seibels assured Claude Barnett that this was not the case. We have ... simply given our help to those who were willing to receive it, and these usually are Negroes, he said.56

While religious convictions significantly influenced the Nashville patients' view of birth control, people in Berkeley County had no religious prejudice against birth control. But the attitude that treatment of any disease was 'against nature' was in the air.57 Comparing the results of the two sites, it is seen that the immediate receptivity to the demonstration was at the outset higher in the rural area.58 However, the final total success was lower [in the rural area]. However, in Berkeley, stark poverty was even more in evidence, and bad roads, bad weather and ignorance proved powerful counter forces [to the contraceptive programs]. After 18 months, the Berkeley program closed.59

The report indicated that, contrary to expectations, the lives of black patients serviced by the clinics did not improve dramatically from birth control. Two beliefs stood in the way: Some blacks likened birth control to abortion and others regarded it as inherently immoral.60 However, when thrown against the total pictures of the awareness on the part of Negro leaders of the improved conditions, ... and their opportunities to even better conditions under Planned Parenthood, ... the obstacles to the program are greatly outweighed, said Dr. Dorothy Ferebee.61

A hint of eugenic flavor seasoned Ferebee's speech: The future program [of Planned Parenthood] should center around more education in the field through the work of a professional Negro worker, because those of us who believe that the benefits of Planned Parenthood as a vital key to the elimination of human waste must reach the entire population [emphasis added].62 She peppered her speech with the importance of Negro professionals, fully integrated into the staff, ... who could interpret the program and objectives to [other blacks] in the normal course of day-to-day contacts; could break down fallacious attitudes and beliefs and elements of distrust; could inspire the confidence of the group; and would not be suspect of the intent to eliminate the race [emphasis added].63

Sanger even managed to lure the prominentbut hesitantblack minister J. T. Braun, editor in chief of the National Baptist Convention's Sunday School Publishing Board in Nashville, Tennessee, into her deceptive web. Braun confessed to Sanger that the very idea of such a thing [birth control] has always held the greatest hatred and contempt in my mind. ... I am hesitant to give my full endorsement of this idea, until you send me, perhaps, some more convincing literature on the subject.64 Sanger happily complied. She sent Braun the Federal Council of Churches' Marriage and Home Committee pamphlet praised by Bishop Sims (another member of the National Advisory Council), assuring him that: There are some people who believe that birth control is an attempt to dictate to families how many children to have. Nothing could be further from the truth.65

Sanger's assistants gave Braun more pro-birth control literature and a copy of her autobiography, which he gave to his wife to read. Sanger's message of preventing maternal and infant mortality stirred Braun's wife. Now convinced of this need, Braun permitted a group of women to use his chapel for a birth-control talk.66 [I was] moved by the number of prominent [black] Christians backing the proposition, Braun wrote in a letter to Sanger.67 At first glance I had a horrible shock to the proposition because it seemed to me to be allied to abortion, but after thought and prayer, I have concluded that especially among many women, it is necessary both to save the lives of mothers and children [emphasis added].68

By 1949, Sanger had hoodwinked black America's best and brightest into believing birth control's life-saving benefits. In a monumental feat, she bewitched virtually an entire network of black social, professional and academic organizations69 into endorsing Planned Parenthood's eugenic program.70

Sanger's successful duplicity does not in any way suggest blacks were gullible. They certainly wanted to decrease maternal and infant mortality and improve the community's overall health. They wholly accepted her message because it seemed to promise prosperity and social acceptance. Sanger used their vulnerabilities and their ignorance (of her deliberately hidden agenda) to her advantage. Aside from birth control, she offered no other medical or social solutions to their adversity. Surely, blacks would not have been such willing accomplices had they perceived her true intentions. Considering the role eugenics played in the early birth control movementand Sanger's embracing of that ideologythe notion of birth control as seemingly the only solution to the problems that plagued blacks should have been much more closely scrutinized.

Planned Parenthood has gone to great lengths to repudiate the organization's eugenic origins.71 It adamantly denies Sanger was a eugenicist or racist, despite evidence to the contrary. Because Sanger stopped editing The Birth Control Review in 1929, the organization tries to disassociate her from the eugenic and racist-oriented articles published after that date. However, a summary of an address Sanger gave in 1932, which appeared in the Review that year, revealed her continuing bent toward eugenics.

In A Plan for Peace, Sanger suggested Congress set up a special department to study population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population. One of the main objectives of the Population Congress would be to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population. This would be accomplished by applying a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation [in addition to tightening immigration laws] to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.72

It's reasonable to conclude that as the leader of Planned Parenthoodeven after 1929Sanger would not allow publication of ideas she didn't support.

Sanger's defenders argue she only wanted to educate blacks about birth control's health benefits. However, she counted the very people she wanted to educate among the unfit, whose numbers needed to be restricted.

Grant presents other arguments Sanger's supporters use to refute her racist roots:73

These justifications also fail because of what Grant calls scientific racism. This form of racism is based on genes, rather than skin color or language. The issue is not 'color of skin' or 'dialect of tongue,' Grant writes, but 'quality of genes [emphasis added].'74 Therefore, as long as blacks, Jews and Hispanics demonstrate 'a good quality gene pool'as long as they 'act white and think white'then they are esteemed equally with Aryans. As long as they are, as Margaret Sanger said, 'the best of their race,' then they can be [counted] as valuable citizens [emphasis added]. By the same token, individual whites who show dysgenic traits must also have their fertility curbed right along with the other 'inferiors and undesirables.'75

In short, writes Grant, Scientific racism is an equal opportunity discriminator [emphasis added]. Anyone with a 'defective gene pool' is suspect. And anyone who shows promise may be admitted to the ranks of the elite.76

The eugenic undertone is hard to miss. As Grant rightly comments, The bottom line is that Planned Parenthood was self-consciously organized, in part, to promote and enforce White Supremacy. ... It has been from its inception implicitly and explicitly racist.77

There is no way to escape the implications, argues William L. Davis, a black financial analyst Grant quotes. When an organization has a history of racism, when its literature is openly racist, when its goals are self-consciously racial, and when its programs invariably revolve around race, it doesn't take an expert to realize that the organization is indeed racist.78

It is impossible to sever Planned Parenthood's past from its present. Its legacy of lies and propaganda continues to infiltrate the black community. The poison is even more venomous because, in addition to birth control, Planned Parenthood touts abortion as a solution to the economic and social problems that plague the community. In its wake is the loss of more than 12 million lives within the black community alone. Planned Parenthood's own records reflect this. For example, a 1992 report revealed that 23.2 percent of women who obtained abortions at its affiliates were black79although blacks represent no more than 13 percent of the total population. In 1996, Planned Parenthood's research arm reported: Blacks, who make up 14 percent of all childbearing women, have 31 percent of all abortions and whites, who account for 81 percent of women of childbearing age, have 61 percent.80

Abortion is the number-one killer of blacks in America, says Rev. Hunter of LEARN. We're losing our people at the rate of 1,452 a day. That's just pure genocide. There's no other word for it. [Sanger's] influence and the whole mindset that Planned Parenthood has brought into the black community ... say it's okay to destroy your people. We bought into the lie; we bought into the propaganda.81

Some blacks have even made abortion rights synonymous with civil rights.

We're destroying the destiny and purpose of others who should be here, Hunter laments. Who knows the musicians we've lost? Who knows the great leaders the black community has really lost? Who knows what great minds of economic power people have lost? What great teachers? He recites an old African proverb: No one knows whose womb holds the chief.82

Hunter has personally observed the vestiges of Planned Parenthood's eugenic past in the black community today. When I travel around the country ... I can only think of one abortion clinic [I've seen] in a predominantly white neighborhood. The majority of clinics are in black neighborhoods.83

Hunter noted the controversy that occurred two years ago in Louisiana involving school-based health clinics. The racist undertone could not have been more evident. In the Baton Rouge district, officials were debating placing clinics in the high schools. Black state representative Sharon Weston Broome initially supported the idea. She later expressed concern about clinics providing contraceptives and abortion counseling. Clinics should promote abstinence, she said.84 Upon learning officials wanted to put the clinics in black schools only, Hunter urged her to suggest they be placed in white schools as well. At Broome's suggestion, however, proposals for the school clinics were dropped immediately, reported Hunter.

Grant observed the same game plan 20 years ago. During the 1980s when Planned Parenthood shifted its focus from community-based clinics to school-based clinics, it again targeted inner-city minority neighborhoods, he writes.85 Of the more than 100 school-based clinics that have opened nationwide in the last decade [1980s], none has been at substantially all-white schools, he adds. None has been at suburban middle-class schools. All have been at black, minority or ethnic schools.86

In 1987, a group of black ministers, parents and educators filed suit against the Chicago Board of Education. They charged the city's school-based clinics with not only violating the state's fornication laws, but also with discrimination against blacks. The clinics were a calculated, pernicious effort to destroy the very fabric of family life [between] black parents and their children, the suit alleged.87

One of the parents in the group was shocked when her daughter came home from school with Planned Parenthood material. I never realized how racist those people were until I read the [information my daughter received] at the school clinic, she said. [They are worse than] the Klan ... because they're so slick and sophisticated. Their bigotry is all dolled up with statistics and surveys, but just beneath the surface it's as ugly as apartheid.88

A more recent account uncovered a Planned Parenthood affiliate giving condoms to residents of a poor black neighborhood in Akron, Ohio.89 The residents received a promotional bag containing, among other things: literature on sexually transmitted disease prevention, gynecology exams and contraception, a condom-case key chain containing a bright-green condom, and a coupon. The coupon was redeemable at three Ohio county clinics for a dozen condoms and a $5 McDonald's gift certificate. All the items were printed with Planned Parenthood phone numbers.

The affiliate might say they're targeting high-pregnancy areas, but their response presumes destructive behavior on the part of the targeted group. Planned Parenthood has always been reluctant to promote, or encourage, abstinence as the only safeguard against teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, calling it unrealistic.

Rev. Richard Welch, president of Human Life International in Front Royal, Virginia, blasted the affiliate for targeting low-income, minority neighborhoods with the bags. He said the incident revealed the racism inherent in promoting abortion and contraception in primarily minority neighborhoods.90

He then criticized Planned Parenthood: Having sprung from the racist dreams of a woman determined to apply abortion and contraception to eugenics and ethnic cleansing, Planned Parenthood remains true to the same strategy today.91

Black leaders have been silent about Margaret Sanger's evil machination against their community far too long. They've been silent about abortion's devastating effects in their communitydespite their pro-life inclination. The majority of [blacks] are more pro-life than anything else, said Hunter.92 Blacks were never taught to destroy their children; even in slavery they tried to hold onto their children.

Blacks are not quiet about the issue because they do not care, but rather because the truth has been kept from them. The issue is ... to educate our people, said former Planned Parenthood board member LaVerne Tolbert.93

Today, a growing number of black pro-lifers are untangling the deceptive web spun by Sanger. They are using truth to shed light on the lies. The Say So march is just one example of their burgeoning pro-life activism. As the marchers laid 1,452 roses at the courthouse stepsto commemorate the number of black babies aborted dailyspokesman Damon Owens said, This calls national attention to the problem [of abortion]. This is an opportunity for blacks to speak to other blacks. This doesn't solve all of our problems. But we will not solve our other problems with abortion.

Black pro-lifers are also linking arms with their white pro-life brethren. Black Americans for Life (BAL) is an outreach group of the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), a Washington, D.C.-based grassroots organization. NRLC encourages networking between black and white pro-lifers. Our goal is to bring people togetherfrom all races, colors, and religionsto work on pro-life issues, said NRLC Director of Outreach Ernest Ohlhoff.94 Black Americans for Life is not a parallel group; we want to help African-Americans integrate communicational and functionally into the pro-life movement.

Mrs. Beverly LaHaye, founder and chairman of Concerned Women for America, echoes the sentiment. Our mission is to protect the right to life of all members of the human race. CWA welcomes like-minded women and men, from all walks of life, to join us in this fight.

Concerned Women for America has a long history of fighting Planned Parenthood's evil agenda. The Negro Project is an obscure angle, but one that must come to light. Margaret Sanger sold black Americans an illusion. Now with the veil of deception removed, they can choose life ... that [their] descendants may live.

Read more here:

The Negro Project and Margaret Sanger

Abortion clinics were originally set up with the intention of slowing the population growth of Afro-Americans and others racial groups considered mentally or otherwise inferior.

Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood is the major force behind the abortion and pro-choice/abortion movement in America. If you are proud of being pro-choice, you should know more about the most responsible person for the pro-abortion-rights movement and abortion industry in the 20th century.

"Lothrop Stoddard was on the board of directors (of Margaret Sanger's Population Association of America) for years.... He had an interview with Adolf Hitler and was very impressed. His book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, was written while he served on Sanger's board. Havelock Ellis, one of Sanger's extra-marital lovers, reviewed this..book favorably in The Birth Control Review".

At a March,1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.

Margaret Sanger's beliefs about social works of charity are revealing: She criticized the success-- not failure-- of charity... She called for the halt to the medical care being given to slum mothers, and decried the expense to the taxpayers of monies being spent on the deaf, blind and dependent. She condemned foreign missionaries for reducing the infant mortality rates in developing countries, and declared charity to be more evil than for the assistance it provided to the poor and needy. Sanger's thinking moved to fascism in an elitist attitude that presumes to judge who is worthy to live and to die.

"Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in America. 78% of their clinics are in minority communities. Blacks make up 12% of the population, but 35% of the abortions in America. Are they being targeted? Isn't that genocide? We are the only minority in America that is on the decline in population. If the current trend continues, by 2038 the black vote will be insignificant. Did you know that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a devout racist who created the Negro Project designed to sterilize unknowing black women and others she deemed as undesirables of society? The founder of Planned Parenthood said, "Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated." Is her vision being fulfilled today?" quoted from blackgenocide.org

Adolf Hitler - Fuehrer of Nazi Germany "The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring. . . represents the most humane act of mankind." Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. 10 from Hitler and Eugenics

Margaret Sanger - Founder of Planned Parenthood ". . .we prefer the policy of immediate sterilizarion, of making sure that parenthood is ' absolutely prohibited ' to the feeble-minded." The Pivot of Civilization, p102

"Can two walk together, except they be agreed?" Amos 3:3

Now: The preborn child is often targeted for death if tests show that it may have a physical or mental handicap. The American eugenics program has no central sponsor but does have several large advocacy groups, including Planned Parenthood, NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) and the National Abortion Federation.

"In the past few years there has been a frantic effort on the part of Planned Parenthood ideologues to revise their own history. Much of the effort has been waged in an attempt to distance the organization and it's founder, Margaret Sanger, from charges of radical racial bigotry. Mike Richmond draws from a selection of authors to demonstrate that Sanger and Planned Parenthood are rooted in eugenics, and have earned a despised place in history along with Adolf Hitler and the German Third Reich were." from "Life Advocate, Jan.-Feb., 1998, Vol. XII, Number 10,

Another link between Margaret Sanger, American Eugenicist and Adolf Hitler, Eugenics practitioner: "The leaders in the German sterilization movement state repeatedly that their legislation was formulated after careful study of the California experiment as reported by Mr. Gosney and Dr. [Paul] Popenoe. It would have been impossible, they say, to undertake such a venture involving some 1 million people without drawing heavily upon previous experience elsewhere." Who is Dr. Paul Popenoe? He was a leader in the U.S. eugenics movement and wrote (1933) the article 'Eugenic Sterilization' in the journal (BCR) that Margaret Sanger started. How many Americans did Dr. Popenoe estimate should be subjected to sterilization? Between five million and ten million Americans. "The situation [in the U.S.A] will grow worse instead of better if steps are not taken to control the reproduction of mentally handicapped. Eugenic sterilization represents one such step that is practicable, humanitarian, and certain in its results."

from

First, put into action President Wilson's fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918.

Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of individuals. The main objects of the Population Congress would be:

a. to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.

b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.

c. to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.

d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

e. to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.

f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their ( another Pro-Choice) choice of segregation or sterilization.

g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons (sounds like a return to the plantation for a life of slavery) where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.

The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.

The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.

Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense---defending the unborn against their own disabilities.

The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers' health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives---thus reducing maternal mortality.

The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.

With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates (Sanger was known for her attitudes on free sex, adultery and abortion. Under this provision, Ms. Sanger's sexual profligacy and pro-abortion - murder of the unborn- would have placed Sanger, herself, into this category) segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.

There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system.

In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace.

"Summary of address before the New History Society", January 17th, New York City

Highlights in red inserted by website author.

Margaret Sanger, Sterilization, and the Swastika by Mike Richmond Good assessment of Sanger's beliefs and the affect of her influence

See the article here:

THE Margaret Sanger

Photograph of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. [1.1] Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell

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. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Writing for the majority in the Supreme Courts affirmative decision of the Buck v. Bell landmark case, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described Charlottesville native Carrie Buck as the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted stating that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.

Current scholarship shows that Carrie Bucks sterilization relied on a false diagnosis premised on the now discredited science of eugenics. It is likely that Carries mother, Emma Buck, was committed to a state institution because she was considered sexually promiscuous, that the same diagnosis was made about Carrie when she became an unwed mother at the age of 17 due to being raped, and that her daughter Vivian was diagnosed as not quite normal at the age of six months largely in support of the legal effort to sterilize Carrie.

2004 Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

Read the original post:

Eugenics in Virginia: Buck v. Bell and Forced ...

Number of victims

In total, 7325 individuals were sterilized in Virginia under its sterilization law. Of those sterilized about half were deemed mentally ill and the other half deemed mentally deficient. Approximately 62% of total individuals sterilized were female. Some estimate the total number of sterilizations as high as 8,300 individuals (Dorr 2006, p. 382).

Period during which sterilization occurred

Sterilization in Virginia occurred under state law between 1924 and 1979. It thus appeared to have continued such sterilizations longer than any other state (Landman 1932, pp. 83-4; Largent 2008, p. 80). There are known instances of eugenic sterilization before 1924 (Dorr 2008, p. 116).

Temporal pattern of sterilization and rate of sterilization

Although Virginia formally adopted a sterilization law in 1924, sterilization was not practiced widely until after the United State Supreme Court ruling against Carrie Buck in 1927. This ruling set a precedent on the legality of sterilization not only in Virginia but also throughout the nation. During the 1930s, immediately after this Supreme Court ruling, sterilization in Virginia occurred at its highest rate with approximately 13 sterilizations per 100,000 state residents. A 1938 report stated that 632 of the first 1,000 patients sterilized had been paroled, and that 812 of the same group were from impoverished families (Trent 1994, 217). After the 1930s prior to, during, and following WWII sterilization initially decreased and thereafter maintained a fairly constant rate. After this, sterilization rates dropped dramatically until the practice faded out and then was subsequently forced out of practice with the repeal of the 1924 act in 1974 and the additional removal of all mention of eugenic sterilization to prevent hereditary forms of mental illness that are recurrent from being passed on from Virginia code in 1979 (Dorr 2008, p. 221, Lombardo 2008b, p. 250). Compulsory sterilizations for non-eugenic purposes continue today, but under very strict regulations. A compulsory sterilization patient must be unable to give informed consent, in need of contraception, unable to use any other form of contraception, and permanently unable to raise a child (Lombardo 2008b, p. 267).

More here:

Virginia Eugenics - University of Vermont

On March 20, 1924 the Virginia General Assembly passed two laws that had arisen out of contemporary concerns about eugenics and race: SB 219, titled "The Racial Integrity Act[1]" and SB 281, "An ACT to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases", henceforth referred to as "The Sterilization Act". The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was one of a series of laws designed to prevent inter racial relationships.

The Racial Integrity Act required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth and divided society into only two classifications: white and colored (essentially all other, which included numerous American Indians). It defined race by the "one-drop rule", defining as "colored" persons with any African or Native American ancestry. It also expanded the scope of Virginia's ban on interracial marriage (anti-miscegenation law) by criminalizing all marriages between white persons and non-white persons. In 1967 the law was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in its ruling on Loving v. Virginia.

The Sterilization Act provided for compulsory sterilization of persons deemed to be "feebleminded," including the "insane, idiotic, imbecile, or epileptic."[2]

These two laws were Virginia's implementation of Harry Laughlin's "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law",[3] published two years earlier in 1922. The Sterilization Act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200 (1927). This had appealed the order for compulsory sterilization of Carrie Buck, who was an inmate in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, and her daughter and mother.

Together these laws implemented the practice of "scientific eugenics" in Virginia.

In the 1920s, Virginia's registrar of statistics, Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, was allied with the newly founded Anglo-Saxon Club of America in persuading the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Racial Integrity Law of 1924.[4] The club was founded in Virginia by John Powell of Richmond in the fall of 1922; within a year the club for white males had more than 400 members and 31 posts in the state.[5]

In 1923, the Anglo-Saxon Club founded two posts in Charlottesville, one for the town and one for students at the University of Virginia. It sought (and was successful in gaining) passage of legislation to classify all persons as belonging either to the "white" or "Negro" races. A major goal was to end "amalgamation" by racial intermarriage. Members claimed also to support Anglo-Saxon ideas of fair play. Later that fall, a state convention of club members was to be held in Richmond.[6]

The Virginia assembly's 21st-century explanation for the laws summarizes their development:

The now-discredited pseudo-science of eugenics was based on theories first propounded in England by Francis Galton, the cousin and disciple of famed biologist Charles Darwin. The goal of the "science" of eugenics was to improve the human race by eliminating what the movement's supporters considered hereditary disorders or flaws through selective breeding and social engineering. The eugenics movement proved popular in the United States, with Indiana enacting the nation's first eugenics-based sterilization law in 1907.[7]

In the following five decades, other states followed Indiana's example by implementing the eugenic laws. Wisconsin was the first State to enact legislation that required the medical certification of persons who applied for marriage licenses. The law that was enacted in 1913 generated attempts at similar legislation in other states.

The rest is here:

Racial Integrity Act of 1924 - Wikipedia, the free ...

Eugenics, the social movement claiming to improve the genetic features of human populations through selective breeding and sterilization,[1] based on the idea that it is possible to distinguish between superior and inferior elements of society,[2] played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States prior to its involvement in World War II.[3]

Eugenics was practised in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany[4] and U.S. programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter.[5][6][7] Stefan Khl has documented the consensus between Nazi race policies and those of eugenicists in other countries, including the United States, and points out that eugenicists understood Nazi policies and measures as the realization of their goals and demands.[5]

During the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th century, eugenics was considered[by whom?] a method of preserving and improving the dominant groups in the population; it is now generally associated with racist and nativist elements[citation needed] (as the movement was to some extent a reaction to a change in emigration from Europe) rather than scientific genetics.

The American eugenics movement was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton, which originated in the 1880s. Galton studied the upper classes of Britain, and arrived at the conclusion that their social positions were due to a superior genetic makeup.[8] Early proponents of eugenics believed that, through selective breeding, the human species should direct its own evolution. They tended to believe in the genetic superiority of Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples; supported strict immigration and anti-miscegenation laws; and supported the forcible sterilization of the poor, disabled and "immoral".[9] Eugenics was also supported by African Americans intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Wyatt Turner, and many academics at Tuskegee University, Howard University, and Hampton University; however they believed the best blacks were as good as the best whites and The Talented Tenth" of all races should mix.[10] W. E. B. Du Bois believed only fit blacks should procreate to eradicate the races heritage of moral iniquity."[10][11]

The American eugenics movement received extensive funding from various corporate foundations including the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune.[6] In 1906 J.H. Kellogg provided funding to help found the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan.[8] The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was founded in Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1911 by the renowned biologist Charles B. Davenport, using money from both the Harriman railroad fortune and the Carnegie Institution. As late as the 1920s, the ERO was one of the leading organizations in the American eugenics movement.[8][12] In years to come, the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, the psychologist Henry H. Goddard, Harry H. Laughlin, and the conservationist Madison Grant (all well respected in their time) began to lobby for various solutions to the problem of the "unfit". Davenport favored immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods; Goddard favored segregation in his The Kallikak Family; Grant favored all of the above and more, even entertaining the idea of extermination.[13] The Eugenics Record Office later became the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Eugenics was widely accepted in the U.S. academic community.[6] By 1928 there were 376 separate university courses in some of the United States' leading schools, enrolling more than 20,000 students, which included eugenics in the curriculum.[14] It did, however, have scientific detractors (notably, Thomas Hunt Morgan, one of the few Mendelians to explicitly criticize eugenics), though most of these focused more on what they considered the crude methodology of eugenicists, and the characterization of almost every human characteristic as being hereditary, rather than the idea of eugenics itself.[15]

By 1910, there was a large and dynamic network of scientists, reformers and professionals engaged in national eugenics projects and actively promoting eugenic legislation. The American Breeders Association was the first eugenic body in the U.S., established in 1906 under the direction of biologist Charles B. Davenport. The ABA was formed specifically to investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood." Membership included Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford president David Starr Jordan and Luther Burbank.[16][17] The American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality was one of the first organizations to begin investigating infant mortality rates in terms of eugenics.[18] They promoted government intervention in attempts to promote the health of future citizens.[19][verification needed]

Several feminist reformers advocated an agenda of eugenic legal reform. The National Federation of Womens Clubs, the Womans Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters were among the variety of state and local feminist organization that at some point lobbied for eugenic reforms.[20]

One of the most prominent feminists to champion the eugenic agenda was Margaret Sanger, the leader of the American birth control movement. Margaret Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent unwanted children from being born into a disadvantaged life, and incorporated the language of eugenics to advance the movement.[21][22] Sanger also sought to discourage the reproduction of persons who, it was believed, would pass on mental disease or serious physical defect. She advocated sterilization in cases where the subject was unable to use birth control.[21] Unlike other eugenicists, she rejected euthanasia.[23] For Sanger, it was individual women and not the state who should determine whether or not to have a child.[24][25]

In the Deep South, womens associations played an important role in rallying support for eugenic legal reform. Eugenicists recognized the political and social influence of southern clubwomen in their communities, and used them to help implement eugenics across the region.[26] Between 1915 and 1920, federated womens clubs in every state of the Deep South had a critical role in establishing public eugenic institutions that were segregated by sex.[27] For example, the Legislative Committee of the Florida State Federation of Womens Clubs successfully lobbied to institute a eugenic institution for the mentally retarded that was segregated by sex.[28] Their aim was to separate mentally retarded men and women to prevent them from breeding more feebleminded" individuals.

See the original post:

Eugenics in the United States - Wikipedia, the free ...