Reply #14: +1 And not only as we know it today. Women of all races aborted long before eugenics. [View All]

[No Elephants]

Or tried their best so to do. And practiced birth control, starting I would imagine, with abstention.

And for many of the same reasons as they do so today, reasons having absolutely nothing to do with limiting their offspring to blue-eyed, blond white babies. See the wiki entitled history of abortion.


Hell, women probably practised birth control and aborted before any human had seen a blue eyed, blond white baby (if you believe Wells and the conclusions of the DNA project).


Every now and again, I come across a post that makes my jaw drop. Reply #10 did that twice, once after reading that birth control was always a private form of eugenics and again after reading that eugenicss had been "demonized" (as opposed to, say, "discredited").

Actually, a third time, too, because I'm pretty sure eugenics had begun to fall into disfavor during the 1930's or early 1940's, because of Hitler, although I can't say that for sure without researching. However, a woman I know once interviewed the widower of a gynecologist who had, in the 1930's, been doing artificial insemination of women with sterile husbands and try to test the "nature v. nurture" theory via the semen donors.

The widower explained to the interviewer that his wife's work in the nature v. nurture area had stopped as a result of public outcry from two sources: (1) the Catholic Church had objected to giving children to families that God hadn't seen fit to bless with children and (2) the resemblance of her work to Hitler's theories. (This must have been especially poignant for the late gynecologist as she was Jewish.)