Do They Really Believe in Eugenics?

“While denouncing the eugenics movement, one must also recognize that its repudiation by the progressive mainstream signals the rise of a self-centered ethos that is destructive in its own right.”

Access to abortion and birth control today is justified almost exclusively through the rhetoric of equal rights. Amnesty International insists that “being able to make our own decisions about our health, body, and sexual life is a basic human right.” The United Nations Human Rights Committee concurs. MSI Reproductive Choices, a United Kingdom-based organization that operates abortion clinics in 37 countries, declares itself “motivated by the belief that everyone should have the right to determine their own future.”

Such protestations of egalitarian virtue would have been incomprehensible to the eugenicists who pioneered modern contraceptive methods. As described by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, “birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced.” Rather, “[it] means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extirpation of defective stocks…”

Francis Galton, who first coined the term “eugenics,” urged “the improvement of the [white] race by furthering the productivity of the fit by early marriages and the healthful rearing of children.” While women of Anglo-Saxon Protestant extraction were to form large families, their procuring birth control labeled “racial suicide,” the unfit population had to be kept in check. In her 1922 essay “The Pivot of Civilization,” Sanger called for cutting down the “notorious fecundity of feeble-minded women,” lest American society “be faced with the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that fertile parent of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism.”