In the latest edition of Psychiatric Services, a senior staff attorney for the Center for Public Representation, Newton, Massachusetts points to a connection between eugenics laws of the 1920’s and our current abortion law.
In reviewing a book by Paul Lombardo about the sterilization of Carrie Buck and the now infamous Supreme Court decision of Buck v. Bell where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the sterilization of Carrie Buck and others like her with the infamous sentence, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The ruling was the codification of eugenics in America and led to the sterilization of hundreds of thousands of poor and disabled women.
She said eventually many states passed legislation protecting people with disabilities from sterilization. But then Roe came along.
But Roe v. Wade was used to overturn protective state legislation banning sterilization of people with mental retardation and enabling guardians to impose sterilization on their wards. Thus each case has been used to support sterilization of people with mental disabilities. Our continuing social ambivalence about these issues makes Lombardo’s book starkly relevant today, when women are using the rights they gained under Roe v. Wade to abort fetuses found to have Down’s syndrome and the Supreme Court protects hospitals that follow parents’ direction to provide only palliative care to infants born disabled when those infants could have been treated and lived (3). Is it hypocritical to criticize the statement that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” when individuals today decide that even one generation is too many?
So anyone who tries to say that abortion laws and eugenics don’t coincide neatly, are just not facing the facts.
Roe, in many ways, is the continuation of Buck v. Bell – which is almost unanimously seen as one of the most tragic decisions of the Supreme Court. We should pray that one day this country can look back on Roe the same way.
June 4, 2009 at 5:46 am
Sorry, forced sterilization and the freedom to choose are not the same thing.
June 4, 2009 at 5:53 am
In your previous post, you praised Ms. Elder for not having an abortion yet she provided only "palliative care" to her daughter Angela.
What gives?
June 4, 2009 at 6:26 am
Also, nobody managed to force her to have an abortion.
Did she have to wear a flak jacket and have a cadre of escorts help her get into the hospital where she was able to give birth?
June 4, 2009 at 6:40 am
Freedom to choose… unless you're the one being killed, right?
June 4, 2009 at 1:43 pm
"Sorry, forced sterilization and the freedom to choose are not the same thing."
You are correct sir! One does not involve killing an innocent unborn child.
June 4, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Craig's right. Forced sterilization and abortion are not the same thing. As repugnant as the former is, the murder of a defenseless human being is much more heinous. Congrats on getting one right for a change.
June 4, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Donald beat me to the punch.
June 4, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Where was the woman's choice in those forced sterilizations and how much emotional harm did it cause them? Craig, how do we know if none of those women weren't pregnant when they had forced sterilization? I'm pretty certain that if society looked down upon those people in the first place, doing an abortion on them against their will/knowledge was common practice just not published. I wouldn't put it past the idiots like Sanger and other anti-life people to do something evil like that.
June 4, 2009 at 5:40 pm
The motivations are the same, Craig.
The idea that some people are "genetically superior" to others underlies both.
Somehow, we're supposed to feel sorry for eugenicist parents who say, "I couldn't bear to watch my child with [X] suffer and die, so I aborted him instead." We're supposed to think that statement as an example of the *parents'* compassion.
Yeah, right.
Those sentiments are possible for those who think themselves genetically superior, or those who don't know how to cope.
Don't tell me there's "freedom to choose," where I have people in every direction telling me that I'm "cruel" to reproduce, that I have no right to reproduce, etc.
June 4, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Okay… for the n-th time:
Crain wrote: Sorry, forced sterilization and the freedom to choose are not the same thing.
Please elucidate: the freedom to choose what? "Choose" is a transitive verb, at least implicitly; it needs a direct object… and I've found that abortion-tolerant people are notoriously reluctant to complete their sentences, on this point. Care to break the trend, and fill in the blank?
June 4, 2009 at 8:24 pm
to Craig @ 12:53:
Diane Elder did not refuse available treatment for her daughter. Sometimes palliative care is all there is. That is very different from refusing or denying available treatment solely because the person to be treated has a disability. Terentia
June 5, 2009 at 3:47 am
Anon,
There is more than palliative care available for trisomy 18.
Look it up:
http://www.trisomy18.org/site/PageServer
paladin,
The freedom to choose to carry a fetus to term.
JCH,
To prevent pain and suffering is compassionate.
And who the heck says it is cruel to reproduce?
ddw,
I think forced sterilization is horrible.
Donald and Paul,
You are somehow more agreeable to women being forcibly sterilized than allowing them the ability to determine if they should reproduce.
As I suspected, you think women are chattel.
Foxfier,
I refuse to pass judgement on parents who have to make these excrutiatingly painful choices.
June 5, 2009 at 3:53 am
Craig-
I am perfectly willing to point out that if you kill your child, the child never gets to make a choice. I refuse to be cowed by those claiming basic statements of fact are "blaming" anyone.
June 5, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Foxfier,
Nobody is trying to "cow" you.
June 6, 2009 at 3:43 am
You are somehow more agreeable to women being forcibly sterilized than allowing them the ability to determine if they should reproduce.
Craig, you are the greatest representation of what George Orwell was writing about. By putting it into terms of "determin[ing] if they should reproduce," you completely misrepresent what is happening here. Of course you're the same person who earlier in the thread was talking about the right "to choose." But choose what? To carry a fetus to term? No, evidently it is the right to murder a fetus in the womb.
As I suspected, you think women are chattel.
Craig, you're the one who wants women to have the right to kill her child. I wouldn't dare posit that perhaps part of your motivation is to free yourself from the burden of having to take responsibility for your actions after a one night stand, though for many young progressive males I tend to think that is what is motivating them. If anyone is treating women like chattel, it's the side that doesn't want to think of the consequences of treating women like sperm depositories.
June 6, 2009 at 6:23 pm
paul,
You said you find forced sterilization less heinous than giving a woman the right to determine what goes on inside her own body. Consider yourself lucky that you will never, ever have to deal with somebody else telling you what to with your body.
You have obviously been demonizing people who support a woman's right to choose for so long that you are starting to lose it… "Sperm depositories". Ugh!
June 6, 2009 at 6:45 pm
Craig-
basic biology: the fetus is *not* the woman's body.
The woman made her choice when she had sex; after that, she is trying to force someone else, with violence, to do as she wishes.
Hm, just like forced sterilization…..
June 6, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Foxfier,
I said what goes on inside of her own body.
And I believe a woman does not always get to choose when she has sex.
June 6, 2009 at 11:51 pm
You said:
Consider yourself lucky that you will never, ever have to deal with somebody else telling you what to with your body.
That is exactly what the dead children face.
For the very short time they have a body.
June 7, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Foxfier,
You said a pregnant woman "is trying to force someone else, with violence, to do as she wishes"
The only people I see trying to force someone else to do as they wish through violence are pro-lifers.
Pro-choicers don't feel the need to shoot OB/GYN's in the head or stage protests at their funerals.