Who should know more about "eugenics" in the U.S. then....

[whistle]

...neo-conservatives and these folks are suggesting that the Terri Schiavo case is now about eugenics against the disabled and the handicapped. Well, here is an article that suggests that eugenics is really the right wing promoting long standing eugenic U.S. policies:

<snip>
Eugenics in America
An author discusses North Carolina's secretive program of state-ordered sterilization.
'Choice & Coercion': During the 20th century, roughly 70,000 Americans were sterilized by state order

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Rebecca Sinderbrand
Newsweek
Updated: 1:12 p.m. ET March 20, 2005

March 19 - The eugenics movement that emerged at the turn of the century offered a tempting vision: a future free of poverty, addiction and crime, thanks to the magic of science. To the eugenicist, most social blight could be traced back to genetic flaws, passed from generation to generation. By preventing people with these afflictions—especially the mentally ill—from having children, they could end these problems for good. At least 30 states embraced this theory and started their own eugenics programs; during the 20th century, roughly 70,000 Americans were sterilized by state order. The last of the programs ended in the mid-1970s.

Three decades later, and three years after Virginia became the first state to officially apologize for its program, the remaining survivors—no one knows how many there are—are still waiting for assistance. Fewer than a half-dozen states have followed Virginia's lead. Only one, North Carolina, has begun to consider providing victims with counseling or health care to address the effects of the operation, or some sort of compensation for their pain.

North Carolina’s eugenics program was among the most aggressive, with more than 7,000 state residents, some as young as 10 or 11 years old, sterilized or castrated over four decades for reasons that ranged from mental illness to allegations of promiscuity to simply running with the wrong crowd. Some of those affected suffered severe complications, a few died within days of the operation. The details of the program might still be locked away in the state archives if Johanna Schoen, author of “Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare” (out this month from The University of North Carolina Press) hadn’t uncovered them. NEWSWEEK's Rebecca Sinderbrand talked with Schoen about what she found.
<snip>
Did North Carolina’s program evolve over time?

It actually changed quite dramatically. In the 1930s and '40s, most of the people who were suggested for sterilization were white, since African-Americans didn’t really receive social services in the Jim Crow South. That begins to change in the '50s and '60s, as those programs begin to desegregate. As this happens, the face of those who get sterilized begins to change. There starts to be an emphasis much more on single mothers, especially younger women. And African-Americans become very disproportionately impacted. Another difference is that when you read these petitions, in the first couple of decades, a lot of them are for people who are really severely mentally ill, or mentally handicapped, where it’s clear that medicine can’t help them. And there’s this thought that, at least we can alleviate their suffering in this way. And then in the '50s, we start to have treatment for a lot of these conditions and psychiatrists begin to back off, and are no longer as interested in sterilizations. In the meantime, the number of sterilizations from outside of institutions, by social workers, begins to rise dramatically.

<more>
<link> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7242649/site/newsweek/page/2/

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Only if you expect her to bear children, and those children

can be expected to inherit her disability.

[unhappycamper]

2. Here's another eugenics book title

"War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race" by Edwin Black

I picked it up from the library after a segment on NPR.

[whistle]

3. Do you think there might be a conservative recessive gene....

...which somehow sets the human embryo from the beginning of brain stem cell development (the reptilian stage) which can be discovered early enough so as to allow identification of who will make republicans so that the red states can become totally red with no blue specks in them at all?

[unhappycamper]

5. wouldn't surprise me at all. but you would need an FOIA request to

get the study.

[Jack_DeLeon]

4. Eugenics is as American as Apple Pie...

fuck the Germans had to learn about it from us.

Pretty fucking sad eh.

[Solly Mack]

6. I see they left out C Boyden Gray's family

and you just can't do an article about Eugenics in America, especially concerning North Carolina's eugenic movement, without mentioning the Gray family.

They were behind the North Carolina movement. They funded it.

[Minstrel Boy]

7. Nazis were apt pupils of American eugenics

From http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3034092

...

But when we talk about the relationship between the Nazis and American institutions, we must talk about more than Project Paperclip. Because there's more going on here than the virtual co-founding of America's National Security State by thousands of Nazi scientists. Before the CIA existed, before the War, even before Hitler's rise to power, Anglo-American eugenics was informing and inspiring apt pupils in Germany, including the future architects of genocide.

The Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, JP Morgan and Averell Harriman can be counted among the head cheerleaders and principal financiers of the American eugenics movement, which found keen partners in great academies like Harvard and Yale and in numerous state and federal departments. Edwin Black writes in War Against the Weak that "they were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior." Sixty thousand Americans were sterilized in the process, many without their knowledge.

Black adds:

American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement — its institutions and leading scientists — renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics.

[QC]

8. Here's another essential book on the subject:

White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919
by Nicole Hahn Rafter

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1555530303/qid=1112185532/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-1628987-7129722?v=glance&s=books

[BiggJawn]

9. Prescott Bush was a big fan of Eugenics, too.

I think his friends called it the "Race Hygiene Movement" or some such shit.

Poppy bush said this in the early 70's:

"The per capita income gap between the developed and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain for millions of people--how should we tackle these problems?.... It is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s ... will be to curb the world's fertility."

Like Father, Like Son...