Eugenics - California History in the News

Never forget what a all powerful caring state can do when the population is asleep.
The progressives of the time.

I have never heard about this before. I've heard about the Nazis sterilizing people many times.

War on the Weak: Eugenics in America

Early attempts at fixing stupid was a massive fail.
DHS Inc have much more effective measures coming
to the country very soon.
Regardless how you vote in Nov will in no way
detour what is already in motion.

Not forced or autistic but

http://washingtonexaminer.com/califo...rticle/2532752

California prison doctors sterilized almost 150 women over a four-year period because they didn’t want the state to have to provide welfare funding to any children they might have in the future, one of the top doctors admitted this week.

California taxpayers spent $147,460 on the procedures between 1997 and 2010. ”Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money,” Dr. James Heinrich, the OB-GYN at Valley State Prison for Women, told the Center for Investigative Reporting, “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children – as they procreated more.”

Heinrich’s argument recalls progressive Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who declared “three generations of imbeciles are enough” in the opinion he wrote for the majority in Buck vs Bell (1927), in which the Supreme Court ruled that women could be forcibly sterilized.

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives,” Holmes wrote. “It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.”

Unlike Carrie Buck, these women agreed to the sterilizations, but only because they felt pressured by the doctors. ”I figured that’s just what happens in prison – that that’s the best kind of doctor you’re going get,” a former inmate told CIR.
The doctors flouted a regulation requiring state approval for each procedure, as the prison medical manager told CIR she signed off on the sterilizations as long as Heinrich “document[ed] it as a medical emergency.”

The allegations echo those made nearly a half-century ago, when forced sterilizations of prisoners, the mentally ill and the poor were commonplace in California. State lawmakers officially banned such practices in 1979.

http://cironline.org/reports/female-...-approval-4917

Coincidentally, I watched the documentary 'Nazi Medicine' on Netflix this past weekend, it was quite illuminating on the subject of eugenics.

On the morning of Tuesday, July 9 I received an email from the production manager of Magnum Veritas Productions with the following inquiry:
“We are in the production stage of a PBS program called Human Weeds on the rise of earth’s population and whether we need to purge or protect the human surplus. We want you to share about the resurgence of modern eugenics, your opinion of the significance and implications of Earth’s growing population, your solutions for ensuring a good life for everyone, and what is in the works behind the scenes to accomplish this.”

The email directed me to the film’s website at humanweeds.com and I also visited the company’s website at www.magnumveritasvp.com. Suffice to say I rejected the request to participate.Purportedly the documentary will address “whether we need to purge or protect the human surplus.” What human surplus? That suggests there are humans on the planet who are in excess of what some genius thinks is the right number. How does anyone even ask if any portion of the human race should be protected or purged?The Nazis thought that Jews were “life unfit for life” and in need of extermination. They managed to kill six million along with another five million “enemies of the state” that included homosexuals, Seventh Day Adventists, Catholic clergy, gypsies, the mentally challenged, and a long list of others.

It has long been a popular progressive notion that the Earth is over-populated and something should be done about it.
I placed a call to Magnum Veritas Productions and had a conversation with the production manager who sent the email. “Human Weeds” is the “working title” of the documentary. She told me that it is not funded by PBS and, indeed, MVP is currently seeking funding, but that a producer at PBS had “green lighted” the project to air sometime in 2014. Calls to the PBS corporate public relations office went unanswered.

I Googled “PBS and Eugenics” and found a page from “A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries titled “Eugenics movement reaches its height—1923.” Eugenics was the alleged “science” of heredity that traces its beginning to around 1883. It evolved into a social theory about the human race. The text notes that “Even in its day, many people saw that eugenics was a dubious discipline, riddled with inconsistencies.” In 1923, the American Eugenics Society was founded and “quickly grew to 29 chapters around the country.”
“The eugenics craze was already fading when the horrors of institutionalized eugenics revealed in Nazi Germany during World War II doused it entirely as a movement.”
Well, not entirely.

At DiscoverTheNetworks.org its report on“Eugenics and the Progressive Movement”, notes that the movement had many famous advocates in the first half of the last century. They included author H.G. Wells, NAACP founder W.E.B. Dubois, economist John Maynard Keynes, playwright George Bernard Shaw, World Wildlife Fund founder, Julian Huxley, sex theorist Havelock Ellis, and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.
Sanger took issue with the position of the Catholic Church on the sanctity of life, saying, “Assuming that God does want an increasing number of worshippers of the Catholic faith, does he also want an increasing number of feeble-minded, insane, criminal, and diseased worshippers?” She also saw on-demand abortion as a way to reduce the African-American population.

As I noted in May regarding the Supreme Court’s decision, Roe v. Wade, “It has been just over forty years since the Court’s decision. In 2012 The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) released a report that estimated the number of abortions at 54,559,615 based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute. According to the CDC, in 2010 there were 3,999,386 births in the U.S., a rate of 13 per 1,000 of the population. Of these, 40.8% were born to unwed women.”
There is little to be learned about Magnum Veritas Productions which reportedly was established in 2011 and incorporated in Indiana. Its principal executive is Robert N. Blair, but a Google search did not reveal any further information and the MVP website curiously does not cite him by name though it does report on MVP’s—presumably Blair’s—“history and experience.”

There are in my view some serious moral and ethical questions that must be asked about the decision of a PBS producer to approve this documentary for airing. He apparently had no qualms about a documentary that will ask if portions of the Earth’s population should be “purged.”
I would like to see Congress exercise some oversight regarding PBS and this project.

The very name, “Human Weeds”, should be a cause for concern.
© Alan Caruba, 2013

https://www.yahoo.com/news/historian...170441960.html

November 17, 2016.

(Reuters Health) - Hundreds of Californians who were forcibly sterilized based on eugenics laws in the last century might still be alive and deserve an apology and financial reparations, a new study concludes.

In a Sacramento government office, historian and lead author Alexandra Minna Stern stumbled across a filing cabinet containing about 20,000 recommendations for eugenics-motivated sterilizations dating from 1919 through 1952.

Stern, a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and her colleagues used the documents and actuarial tables to calculate that as many as 831 men, women and children slated for sterilization could still be alive and would be on average almost 88 years old.

Many of the typewritten and signed sterilization recommendations were for children, the youngest 7 years old, Stern said in a phone interview.

One was for Rose Zaballos. Today she would be 93. But she died in 1939, when she was just 16, on the operating table at the Sonoma State Home during surgery to prevent her from conceiving, according to her niece, Barbara Swarr of Hayward, California. In a phone interview, Swarr described her aunt as “mentally retarded.”

California had the right to sterilize Rose Zaballos under a 1909 state law authorizing reproductive surgery on patients committed to homes or hospitals and judged to have a “mental disease which may have been inherited” and was “likely to be transmitted to descendants,” Stern's team writes in the American Journal of Public Health.

The California statute provided the legal framework for the most active sterilization program in the U.S., the study says. The law remained on the books until 1979.

“This was one of these dramatic and significant episodes in the state’s history that shouldn’t be forgotten,” Stern said. “Each of these 20,000 people was their own individual, with their own life story, loves, passions.

“They are people who should have been treated with dignity,” she said.

In 2003, then-Governor Gray Davis publicly apologized for the state-mandated sterilizations. But Stern believes the Californians who were rendered incapable of conceiving children as a result of the government program deserve more than just an apology.

“The state could never completely right this wrong,” she said. In the name of social justice, though, she believes California should follow the lead of North Carolina and Virginia and offer financial compensation to those who were forcibly sterilized and are still alive.

North Carolina has offered $20,000 to each of its sterilization victims and Virginia offered $25,000, according to Stern’s report.

Attorney and historian Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, has written extensively about compulsory sterilization. He praised the new study for filling in details that could help locate people who could be eligible for reparations.

In 2003, when Davis apologized, only one person who had been forcibly sterilized – a man living in a car in Stockton – could be located, Lombardo said in a phone interview.

“You had a population of people who didn’t exactly want to put ‘sterilized’ on their resumes,” he said.

The study describes one sterilization recommendation for a woman admitted to the Sonoma State Home in 1926. She had an IQ of 56, which led a doctor to categorize her as “low moron.” The physician deemed her “sly, profane, obstinate, . . . dangerous to public health” and recommended that she be sterilized.

Stern and her team do not know which of the people recommended for sterilization actually had the surgery, she said.

California passed the third eugenics law in the U.S. and performed one-third of all the nation’s estimated 60,000 forced sterilizations, the study says. Following a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of Virginia’s sterilization law, sterilization rates climbed.

Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the majority opinion in the case, Buck v. Bell. He compared the state’s duty to sterilize patient Carrie Buck to the need to protect the public against smallpox with compulsory vaccinations.

Holmes concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Lombardo would like to see California’s surviving sterilization victims financially compensated.

“In the name of doing something that is simply about justice,” he said, “it seems to me the states can afford this.”

Hmm, early twentieth century progressives.

Originally Posted by Dennis Hultman

https://www.yahoo.com/news/historian...170441960.html

November 17, 2016.




Hmm, early twentieth century progressives.

"I prefer the word "progressive," which has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century. I consider myself a modern progressive" Hillary Clinton