| Eugenical sterilization was now the law of the land. The flood gates opened wide...
Infection
"The American masses were not rising up demanding to sterilize, institutionalize and dehumanize their neighbors and kinsfolk. Eugenics was a movement of the nation's elite thinkers and many of its most progressive reformers. As its ideology spread among the intelligentsia, eugenics cross-infected many completely separate health care movements..."
Margaret Sanger envisioned birth control as a necessary part of female liberation by freeing women from the biological connection between sex and childbearing. Women could be masters of their own destiny, free to choose lovers, careers, financial independence, and unfettered sexual freedom without consequences.
Sanger championed birth control as a eugenic solution for the ills of the poor, the hungry, the sick, the "teeming slums of lower Manhattan" where Sanger worked as a visiting nurse. She called the lower classes and the unfit "human waste," and advocated for mass sterilization of the defective, mass incarceration of the unfit, and strict immigration restrictions. Sanger vigorously opposed charitable efforts and argued that the cold and hungry be left without help so that eugenically superior strains could flourish without competition from the unfit. "Human weeds" were not worthy of assistance and should be "exterminated." |
Sanger's Birth Control Review encouraged more children from the fit, less from the unfit. Financially supported by the wealthy patrons, an article from the Birth Control Review, Dec. 1924, entitled, "Dangerous Human Pests," lamented that charity allowed "classes of degenerates to poison society with their unbridled prolific scum..." and compared unwanted human beings to "rodents, insects or other pests" It was common to read that "the lower classes were more dangerous than rats and bugs."
In 1928, there was discussion between merging Sanger's Birth Control Review with the American Eugenics Society's publication, Eugenics.
Blinded: Corruption of noble causes, another test case
A necessary component in the war against the procreation of defectives was to outlaw marriage among inferior populations. If marriage between carriers of hereditary blindness could be legally prevented, then other categories of the unfit, the feebleminded, epileptic, the poor, the undesirable, could be added to those denied marriage licenses.
Lucien Howe, the nineteenth century pioneer and champion of better eyesight, helped institute the bathing of newborns' eyes with silver nitrate drops to prevent infection. He wrote the standard texts of ophthalmology and was the president of the American Ophthalmologic Society and established the Howe Laboratory at Harvard.
Howe was also a member and later president, of the Eugenics Research Association (ERA). Howe "led the charge to segregate, sterilize and ban marriages for people suspected of other illnesses and handicaps."
Existing marriage laws were insufficient from a eugenics perspective. In 1915, a Eugenics Record Office (ERO) survey found that society wasn't ready yet for purely eugenic marriage legislation. The only way to get a law passed would have to be based on hygienic reasons. To promote this great cause, Eugenical News published numerous studies and articles on hereditary blindness. Howe got on a American Medical Association Section committee and advocated adding a geneticist and a sterilization practitioner to the panel. The AMA joined with the ERO to register family pedigrees of blind people.
Mongrelization and the corruption or misuse of government agencies for purposes other than they were designed
Henry Laughlin wanted the US Census Bureau to create a registry of citizens marked fit or unfit. To its credit, the Census Bureau refused.Laughlin then tried to get the states to adopt eugenic classifications such as German Jew, Mountain White, South Italian, or Polish ("Polack.")
The Virginia Registrar of Vital Statistics, Walter Plecker, wanted to codify everyone's racial heritage along eugenic lines. In order to prevent mongrelization, marriage would be banned between a certified white person and anyone with even "one drop" of non-Caucasian blood. Mandatory statewide registration led to passage of Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Plecker became a hero among raceologists and eugenicsists.
Part II
Eugenicide
Origins
Worldwide eugenic plan - 1923
American eugenicists sought to have a presence throughout the world to eliminate the unfit worldwide.Immigration was ruining America's biological quality, sterilization was only fighting a "rising tide" as waves of immigrants continued to swarm American shores. Laughlin wanted to rewrite existing laws against the immigration of "all idiots,
epileptics, insane persons" along eugenic classifications to exclude "all persons sexually fertile who cannot demonstrate their Eugenical fitness, mental physical and moral."
Eugenic Imperialism/Global Eugenics
"American eugenicists saw mankind as a biological cesspool." After America was purified and defective strains were prevented from immigrating, undesirables needed to be eliminated from the rest of the planet. Though initial plans were interrupted by war, the second International Congress of Eugenics was held in 1924.
Europeans complained about America's domination of the global congress.
Eugenicide: Gassing the Unwanted
Point 8 of Cutting off Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population, a preliminary report of the American Breeders Association, mentioned euthanasia as a possible solution. Euthanasia was not considered mercy killing of those in pain, but a "painless killing" of people deemed unworthy of life. The preferred method was a "lethal chamber."
"This solution for unwanted pets was almost immediately contemplated as a solution for unwanted humans - criminals, the feebleminded and other misfits." While eugenicists were debating use of the "lethal chamber" on the unfit, Caleb Saleeby, vigorously rejected "the lethal chamber, the permission of infant mortality, interference with [pre]-natal life, and all other synonyms for murder."
Greater acceptance of lethal chambers was noted in each revision of the Textbook on Mental Deficiency, from equivocation to "probable" to limited endorsement that communities resort to euthanasia as self-defense against imbeciles and idiots.
"But in America, while the debate began as argument about death with dignity for the terminally ill or those in excruciating pain, it soon became a palatable eugenic solution." Heredity and Human Progress described euthanasia as the "surest, simplest, kindest and most humane means for preventing reproduction among those who we deem unworthy, a gentle, painless death. In carbonic acid gas, we have an agent which would instantaneously fulfill the need." Science should conquer sentiment and elect to systematically kill the unfit.
Madison Grant, President of the Eugenics Research Association and the American Eugenics Society wrote in The Passing of the Great Race, "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race."
In Nov. 12, 1915, a case of eugenic euthanasia made headlines. A woman gave birth to a deformed baby suffering from extreme intestinal and rectal abnormalities, as well as other complications.
The baby was not considered to be worthy of saving and would be killed through denial of treatment. Dr. Harry Haiselden, chief of staff at German-American Hospital and an "ardent eugenicist," rejected pleas to operate on the infant by saying, "I'm afraid it might get well."
Haiselden defended his decision at an inquest, "I do not think this child would have grown up to be a mental defective. I know it."
An inquest ruled that an operation was the proper course of treatment but also that Haiselden was within his professional rights to deny treatment.
Haiselden continued to euthanize newborns either passively through lack of treatment, or directly by the injection of opiates. Another direct method was allowing an infant to bleed to death through an untied umbilical cord. He said, "Death is the Great and Lasting Disinfectant."
Haiselden also accused the Illinois Institution for the Feebleminded as also conducting passive eugenic euthanasia by its unsanitary conditions, neglect and abuse. Death rates for epileptic children and tubercular patients was very high. Asylums were the recipients of people deemed feebleminded.
"Haiselden became an overnight eugenic celebrity, known to the average person through newspaper articles, speaking tours, and his outrageous diatribes."
Haiselden starred in a Hollywood movie, The Black Stork, in 1917. In it he portrays a doctor who advises a eugenically mismatched couple against having children. A defective child is born to them, then left to die. |
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