Posted
5/16/2005 05:29:00 PM
by Douglas
I'm not quite sure why this story of American eugenics
is surfacing again. The last instance of this happened over 30 years ago.
From the early 1900s to the 1970s, some 65,000 men and women were sterilized in this country, many without their knowledge, as part of a government eugenics program to keep so-called undesirables from reproducing.
"The procedures that were done here were done to poor folks," said Steven Selden, professor at the University of Maryland. "They were thought to be poor because they had bad genes or bad inheritance, if you will. And so they would be the focus of the sterilization."
I've weighed in on this one
before, and it's really too disgusting to research any further. But for Google's sake, every time I post the word "eugenics", I will post the words "Margaret Sanger." The maven of the 20th century feminist movement that advocated the mass sterilization of "indigents, imbeciles, and blacks." Presumably, those were three different groups, but you never can tell with Ms. Sanger, may she long rot.