The Promise of Race Culture, Abortion, and Every Child a Wanted Child

The Promise of Race Culture

by Caleb Williams Saleeby

Found in Readings in Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics, edited by Horatio Hackett Newman, Professor of Zoology in the University of Chicago, in 1921; Newman also gave testimony at the ‘Scopes Monkey’ trial.   Page 503.

Now no legislation conceivable will wholly cure this evil nor avert its consequences [bringing to term defective children].  At bottom it depends upon human nature, and you can cure it only by curing the defect of human nature.  This, in general, is of course beyond the immediate powers of man, but evidently we should gain the same end if only we could confine the advent of children to those parents who desired them–that is to say, those in whom human nature displayed the first, if not indeed almost the only, requisite for the happiness of childhood.  To this most beneficent and wholly moral end we shall come, notwithstanding the blind and pitiable guidance of most of our accredited moral teachers today.  By no other means than the realization of the ideal defined, that every new baby shall be loved and desired in anticipation–an ideal which is perfectly practicable–can the black stain of child murder and child torture and child neglect be removed from our civilization.

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Commentary

In this quote we see early evidence of the idea that abortion and the concept of ‘every child a wanted child’ is a eugenic ideal.