Tag: sterilization

Governor John A. Mead

2,290 words

A tempest in a teapot started brewing nearly two years ago at Vermont’s Middlebury College which perfectly exemplifies the weak tea that the conservative movement has been serving these past several decades. College President Laurie Patton effected a clandestine name change of a century-old building on campus. Mead Memorial Chapel was to be renamed (or “de-named”) Middlebury Chapel. The chapel’s name had originally honored John A. Mead, a physician who served as Vermont’s Governor from 1910 to 1912. Both an alumnus and trustee of the college, Mead had contributed most of the money for the chapel’s construction in 1916. (more…)

3,641 words

Daniel Kevles
In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985

It is young men like you, Bertie, who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair. Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone. Bertie, it is imperative that you marry. — P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) (more…)

Karl Pearson

2,653 words

To provide the analytical backbone for the much-needed revitalization of the study and practice of eugenics, one need only present a clear and stark dichotomy: If not eugenics, then dysgenics.

There is no stasis; there is no in-between. It truly is black and white. The fitness of human populations is a zero-sum game: the more eugenic one is, the less dysgenic it is, and vice versa. Because all human populations are finite in number, and because all people are born and eventually die, eugenics and dysgenics cannot both rise or sink with the tide within a single population. (more…)

9,200 words

Adam Cohen
Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
New York: Penguin, 2016

The unfairly neglected American modernist composer Carl Ruggles once scolded an audience member who was loudly expressing his disapproval during a performance of a piece of music by Charles Ives by standing up, turning to him, and telling him to “shut up and listen like a man.”[1] (more…)

Charles West Cope, A Life Well Spent

675 words

Even though I believe in eugenics, I really have no idea how it should be implemented. It seems so complicated, and it could be abused. What would a model eugenics program even look like?

When we envision launching a new eugenics program in the West, we need to consider what is effective, what is morally right, and what will be accepted by the public. We can make great strides towards helping future generations with no Draconian measures whatsoever, just a combination of incentives and disincentives. (more…)

824 words

In the British Medical Journal (# 7108, September 6, 1997, p. 563) there’s an article entitled “Thousands of women sterilized in Sweden without consent.” The Swedish government is investigating why thousands of women were forcibly sterilized on eugenic grounds from the 1930s to the 1970s. (more…)

3,450 words

Question: What does the recent uproar in the controlled press about the sterilization of mental defectives in Virginia hospitals have to do with the behavior of the American hostages in Iran?

Answer: They both reflect the essentially infantile, arrested state of personality development which has become the norm for Americans and other Westerners. (more…)