Who advocated “sterilizing imbeciles”?

posted at 8:39 am on July 15, 2009 by Pundette
[ Abortion ]    regular view

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. See below.

I was slow to mention the statement from Justice Ginsburg on abortion as a eugenics tool. I found it ambiguous and could hardly believe she would espouse such beliefs, privately or openly. But after reading Jonah Goldberg on this subject it’s clear that Justice Ginsburg absolutely must explain what she meant in this NYT interview:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

Is she one of the “we” she speaks of?

From Jonah’s column:

Left unclear is whether Ginsburg endorses the eugenic motivation she ascribed to the passage of Roe vs. Wade or whether she was merely objectively describing it. One senses that if Antonin Scalia had offered such a comment, a Times interviewer would have sought more clarity, particularly on the racial characteristics of these supposedly unwanted populations.

Regardless, Ginsburg’s certainly right that abortion has very deep roots in the historic effort to “weed out” undesired groups. For instance, Margaret Sanger, the revered feminist and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a racist eugenicist of the first order. Even more perplexing: She’s become a champion of “reproductive freedom” even though she proposed a “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” under which “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit.” (Poor blacks would have had a particularly hard time getting such licenses from Sanger.)

If Ginsburg does see eugenic culling as a compelling state interest, she’d be in fine company on the court. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a passionate believer in such things. In 1915, Holmes wrote in the Illinois Law Review that the “starting point for an ideal for the law” should be the “coordinated human effort … to build a race.”

In 1927, he wrote a letter to his friend, Harold Laski, telling him, “I … delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day — and felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform.” That was the year he wrote the majority opinion in Buck vs. Bell (joined by Louis Brandeis) holding that forcibly sterilizing lower-class women was constitutional. In recent years, openly discussing the notion of eugenic aspects of abortion has become taboo. But as Ginsburg’s comments suggest, the taboo hasn’t eliminated the idea; it’s merely sent it underground.

You may argue that this is all from an earlier, less progressive era. But what follows is of more recent vintage and strictly relevant to contemporary culture:

In 1992, Ron Weddington, co-counsel in the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court case, wrote a letter to President-elect Clinton, imploring him to rush RU-486 — a.k.a. “the abortion pill” — to market as quickly as possible.

“[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country,” Weddington insisted. All the president had to do was make abortion cheap and easy for the populations we don’t want. “It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it. … Think of all the poverty, crime and misery … and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don’t have a lot of time left.”

Read the whole column.

And while we’re on the subject of forced sterilization, let’s take a closer look at John Holdren, Obama’s science ‘czar.’ His book (browse through it here) includes a section on “population control measures,” among them: spiking the food and water supply with sterilizing drugs, forcing sterilization and abortions on the ‘unfit,’ empowering the government to take babies from young or single women, and creating a global army to control intimate human behavior and the world economy.

The Ehrlichs, who co-authored Ecoscience, try to clarify:

“We were not then, never have been, and are not now ‘advocates’ of the Draconian measures for population limitation described — but not recommended — in the book’s 60-plus small-type pages cataloging the full spectrum of population policies that, at the time, had either been tried in some country or analyzed by some commentator.”

Describing “Ecoscience” as a “textbook,” they said its descriptions can be “misrepresented as endorsement.”

We’d need the book to provide the context. It’s possible that they weren’t endorsing these horrors but were using them to frighten students into adopting the pernicious and false ZPG agenda. Fear is a favorite and extremely effective tool of those who wish to control the masses. *See update below.

This just in: Obama’s ‘science czar’ does not support coercive population control.

From Holdren’s spokesman: It’s all just a crazy misunderstanding. First of all, the book is really old:

In Tuesday e-mails to CNA, Rick Weiss, the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Director of Strategic Communications, said the material at issue was from “a three-decade-old, three-author textbook used in colleges to teach energy policy.”He could “easily dismiss” fears that Dr. Holdren favors government control over population growth.

“He made that quite clear in his confirmation hearing,” Weiss said.

He then quoted a section of the confirmation transcript in which Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) asked Holdren whether he thinks “determining optimal population is a proper role of government.”

“No, Senator, I do not,” was Holdren’s reply, according to Weiss and a transcript of the proceedings.

Phew. But he still seems to promote the old and far from harmless over-population scam:

In other remarks at the confirmation hearing, not cited by Weiss, Holdren told Sen. Vitter he no longer thinks it is “productive” to focus on the “optimum population” for the United States. “I don’t think any of us know what the right answer is.”

That’s not hugely comforting.

According to Weiss, Holdren “made clear that he did not believe in coercive means of population control” and is not an advocate for measures expressed in the book “and they are certainly not endorsed by this administration in any way.”

Fast forward thirty years and it’s clear that population control is being achieved without force. The growth of the acceptance of self-sterilization and destruction of one’s own children as a good in itself as well as “good for the planet” has eliminated the need for coercive measures. There’s no point in killing off cultures that are willing to commit suicide.

*Update: The plot thickens. I’ve been too easy on Holdren. Michelle Malkin writes this morning that Holdren’s self-avowed greatest influence was himself a avowed eugenicist. I hate to ruin your breakfast, but this quote is for real:

Harrison Brown’s book — the book that inspired Obama science czar John Holdren — also infamously likened the world’s growing population to “a pulsating mass of maggots.”

Sickening. But we need to know the enemy. Read Michelle’s whole column. She’s all over this.

There really are two kinds of people: those who see human beings as “maggots,” “imbeciles,” and “monsters” and those who see human life as precious and sacred. There’s no common ground here. And these are the people we’re going to put in charge of life and death health care decisions?

Cross-posted here.

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