Category: compulsory sterilization

The ‘Minimum Wage’ as a way to make ‘defectives stand out’ for possible eugenic selection, 1913

Henry R. Seager, “The Minimum Wage as Part of a Program for Social Reform.” 1913. [SOURCE] As the enumeration of these benefits suggests, important reform to accompany minimum wage be comprehensive provision for industrial and trade education vocational guidance. Starvation wages are due frequently to exploitation, frequently to physical, mental and moral defects in the …

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Foster Kennedy: Euthanasia for “Nature’s Mistakes” up to the age of 5

Kennedy’s address at the 97th annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1941 encapsulates well how the acceptance of evolution and utilitarian thinking are tied into arguments for eugenics (and euthanasia), which is ironic, of course, since many advocates for euthanasia deny such connections and modern proponents of evolution become apoplectic at the insinuation …

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Sterilization May Lead to Sexual Promiscuity, Frank C. Richmond, 1934

Frank C. Richmond, Sterilization in Wisconsin, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 25, Issue 4 (November-December), Winter, 1934.  Page: 593. Human surgical sterilization may lead to sexual promiscuity and incidentally to spread of venereal disease. Voluntary sterilization tends to promote social evils in this way and answers why sterilization should be practiced only on …

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The Minimum Wage As Means to Exterminate Defectives: Taussig, 1911

SOURCE: Frank Taussig, Principles of Economics, Volume II, 1911.  Pages 299-300. As with legislation on hours, factory conditions, and the like, a compulsory minimum wages rate might serve simply to regulate the plane of competition. All employers would be affected alike; no one could undersell the others by cutting below the established rate. There would …

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Sterilization Like Vaccination!

The argument that compulsory sterilization was justified on the same grounds as compulsory vaccination was common, and eventually won Supreme Court Sanction in Buck vs. Bell. Source: “Sterilization: A Progressive Measure?”  In Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring of 1960,  wisconsin-sterilization-progressives-21585 As Dr. T.W. Williams of Milwaukee wrote, the fate of the present [compulsory sterilization] bill …

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Objections to Compulsory Sterilization “are essentially sentimental.”

While eugenics today is castigated as ‘pseudoscience,’ the eugenicists themselves might say that the chief difference between progressives then versus now, is the latter is hindered by ‘sentimentality.’ E.A. Ross, Letter to Charles McCarthy, January 30, 1907.  (As found in Rudolph J. Vecoli’s “Sterilization: A Progressive Measure” in Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1960.  LINK: wisconsin-sterilization-progressives-21585 …

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The Jaffe Memo and Eugenics

After World War 2, it became unwise to advocate for eugenics openly.  However, since eugenicists believed that they were only extending scientific principles, and felt that they stood on the bedrock of Darwinian truth, they could not just abandon the program.  They explicitly took to covert means of advancing their agenda, and, deprived of coercive …

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The Human Betterment Eugenics Society Hides Its Identity

One of the reasons why people fail to understand how much of what the are dealing with today is actually derived from eugenics principles (if not from eugenics organizations, directly!) is because the eugenicists that got things started changed the names of their organizations in a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from the atrocities of …

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Julian Huxley: Population Control, Eugenics, and Birth Control all part of the same Program

Contemporary advocates for birth control exhibit no awareness whatsoever that birth control was always conceived in the context of ‘eliminating the unfit,’ ie., eugenics.  Eugenics, in turn, was considered a straight-forward logical extension of Darwinism.  Eugenics was seen as human control of human evolution, and was always tied into discussions on ‘population control.’  These are …

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Defective Genes are Like Pathogenic bacteria and viruses the Law Must Control

As quoted in The New Diagnostics by Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence Tancredi, 1989 (pg 13-14) Although the old eugenic generalizations have been cast off, the logic behind them persists, refueled from diagnostic tests and justified in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and cost.  Thus some geneticists suggest the social importance of improving the “gene pool.”  For …

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