By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of this article with footnotes, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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“If any single age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after are the patients of that power, slaves to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners. If man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be” — C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.
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Eugenics was a well-established and respected science from the late 1800s until World War II, when it fell out of favor due to well-publicized Nazi atrocities. Distinguished scientists and professors published dozens of textbooks on the topic, and many of the leading thinkers of the day studied human heredity in order to “preserve the purity and the health of the White race.”
At the time, this was considered mainstream thinking among the elite, although there is ample evidence that most average people did not subscribe to the eugenics philosophy, which has always been deeply and terminally racist. Books with titles like The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, Christianity and the Race Problem, Parenthood and Race Culture, and Racial Hygiene: A Practical Discussion of Eugenics and Race Culture crowded bookstore shelves and achieved a great popular appeal, selling millions of copies to both scholars and people from all walks of life.
In fact, it was possible in some nations to undergo a lengthy and rigorous course of study leading to a doctorate in eugenics.
Some of the more honest pro-abortion theorists have observed that it is always wealthy white people who drive the movement to exterminate those they consider imperfect — and many times, dark skin is considered an “imperfection.” The “lineup” of the most famous eugenicists in America and Great Britain shows that almost every single one was — or is — white and wealthy.
Two of these are well-known to the pro-life movement: Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League (later the International Planned Parenthood Federation), and Marie Carmichael Stopes, founder of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, and for whom the population control organization Marie Stopes International is named.
As radical feminist Ninia Baehr has observed, “Historically, white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class men and women in the population control, birth control, eugenics, and abortion rights movements have not respected the choices of people who were different from them.”
Another primary motivation behind early 20th-century eugenics was efficiency in the form of cost-cutting. This was always carried out at the expense of the poor and disadvantaged. Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated famously that “we have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives [in warfare]. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices….Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Due to its deservedly filthy reputation, eugenics has now been rebranded as “human genetics.” Eugenics organizations that existed during the Nazi horror have renamed themselves (for example, the American Eugenics Society is now known as the Society for the Study of Social Biology). However, no matter how much camouflage is applied, eugenics lives on, and its principles thrive — in more socially acceptable, if still lethal, forms.
The majority of followers of what we call the “Culture of Death” indeed disavow the word “eugenics,” but not its philosophies and practices. They fight for population control under the guise of “reproductive choice,” sex-selection abortions, prenatal testing followed by the abortion or passive infanticide of handicapped preborn children and newborns, in vitro fertilization, and all kinds of other assisted reproduction techniques, fetal experimentation, and organ harvesting, cloning, euthanasia, and even transhumanism.
They also support the deliberate building of high-volume abortion mills in minority neighborhoods, the spreading scourge of euthanasia directed at the elderly and handicapped, and “developed” nations directing the majority of their population control spending toward Africa.
All of these practices are eugenic in nature, because they “select out” weaker or those the elite consider less desirable through artificial selection, and strive to improve the human race far beyond what God intended.
In summary, the theory of eugenics is the purest distillation of anti-life thinking. The practice of eugenics is simply the practical aspects of the various anti-life movements in action. The theory and practice of eugenics covers the entire spectrum of the “slippery slope,” from contraception to abortion to euthanasia to genocide, and encompasses many other evils as well.
Eugenicists still tirelessly research the most efficient methods for eliminating the “unwanted” and unfit. Both on the individual and personal scales, prenatal diagnosis and abortion are the ideal tools for eliminating the less than perfect.
In China, India, and other Asian countries, this lethal combination has led to the deaths of tens of millions of preborn babies — not because they were handicapped, but because they were female.
In the United States, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found that parents abort more than 95 percent of all preborn babies who are found “defective” by prenatal genetic tests.
In summary, eugenics is the foundation for “scientific racism”; it is the driving force behind abortion, euthanasia, embryo and fetal research, the global population policy, and a galaxy of other evils so bizarre they would have been unimaginable to even the most inventive science fiction writer in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, the eugenics philosophy is also ingrained in all of the social sciences, to include anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Since it is so pervasive, it is certainly worth studying and understanding.
Evil Refined. Until the mid-1980s in North America and Europe, eugenics practice limited itself to dictating that we, not God, will determine who will be born into this world (through the widespread practice of abortion). We are now at the point where eugenics may very well determine who will remain here (through the growing practices of infanticide, euthanasia, “medicide,” and “senicide”).
Eugenics certainly did not die with the Third Reich. The eugenics “movement” flourished long before Hitler came to power, and it is certainly alive and well today. In fact, it is stronger now than it ever has been. And, since its adherents have learned their lessons regarding the value of the tactics of stealth, deception, incrementalism, and propaganda from long experience, the eugenics movement is far deadlier.
Definitions
In order to be able to understand and discuss the eugenics mentality and its goals, it is necessary to define the general categories of eugenics practice.
Eugenics in general is the planned or directed breeding of human beings, with the objective of eventually altering the genetic makeup of future generations. The word “eugenics” (well-born) is derived from the Greek eu, (“good” or “well”) and genos (“race” or “stock”).
Positive eugenics is the preferential breeding of “superior” individuals in order to improve the genetic stock of the human race. The most famous example of positive eugenics is the Nazi Lebensborn (“Fount of Life”) program, with the objective of breeding a blond, blue-eyed master race.
Since negative eugenics is much simpler to employ and is much easier to cover up than positive eugenics, it comprises the overwhelming majority of current eugenics practice. It consists of the discouragement or the legal prohibition of reproduction of individuals carrying genes leading to disease or disability. This can be achieved by genetic counseling or by sterilization, either voluntary or enforced. Of course, abortion and euthanasia are also popular means of eliminating the “defective.”
One bizarre practice that has recently cropped up might be referred to as “reverse eugenics” — the act of deliberately undergoing genetic testing in order to bear children who have specific birth defects, such as profound deafness. Perhaps this could be referred to as “kakosgenics,” or “bad birth,” from the Greek.
“Reverse eugenics” is perhaps the ultimate expression of the reduction of children to a product or possession that may be created with certain specifications. Thankfully, this practice is still rare.
The most notorious example is the case of deaf lesbians Candace A. McCullough and Sharon M. Duchesneau, who used the “services” of a deaf sperm donor to have a son, Gauvin, who is also deaf, in 2001. Duchesneau enthused that “a hearing baby would be a blessing. A deaf baby would be a special blessing.” We wonder what Gauvin, who is now a teenager, thinks of all of this as he faces unnecessarily inflicted struggles in life just because his narcissistic “parents” wanted him to be like them.
This practice may not remain rare, as new “rights” are invented out of thin air on nearly a daily basis. As C.S. Lewis observed, we are indeed becoming “raw material” to be molded into an image is believed to be perfect — but far from God.
In general, then, “eugenics” is the study and employment of methods designed to improve the genetic characteristics of the human race by controlling the reproduction of individuals.
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