By Michael Cook Twitter may not be the best medium for explaining the science of eugenics to a suspicious public, as the sometime Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Richard Dawkins, discovered this week. Professor Dawkins, now aged 78, renowned as an evolutionary biologist and as the author …
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How the Eugenics Impulse Advances By John Stonestreet & Roberto Rivera Nicole Lee is one of Australia’s leading disability-rights advocates. A spinal cord injury when she was young left Nicole Lee dependent on a wheelchair for mobility. But, as she revealed in a recent article at Quartz.com, accessibility and discrimination aren’t the only challenges women …
Continue reading "When “Choice” and “Disability” Collide"
Editor’s note. My family and I will be on our vacation through August 27. I will occasionally add new items but for the most part we will repost “the best of the best” — the stories our readers have told us they especially liked. This appeared on the webpage of Indiana Right to Life. When …
Continue reading "Indiana’s 1907 eugenics program is a chapter of history we’d all like to forget, which is exactly why it is all the more important that we remember"
By Michael Cook Eugenics is not a word to be trifled with. It evokes the horror of Nazi atrocities during World War II as well as widespread human rights violations in the early part of the 20th Century in the United States, Canada and some European countries. But, contend the authors of a special issue …
Continue reading "Is killing the disabled ‘eugenics’, or just a merciful release"
Even today, some bioethicists insist that parents should ‘improve the stock’ By Christopher M. Reilly Advocates for abortion rights are claiming that a recent legal opinion of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, which described abortion as a tool of eugenics, is merely an incoherent “rant.” They argue that his well-researched, 20-page document conflates the free …
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By John Stonestreet with G. Shane Morris Eugenics is a bad idea, a bad idea that, like all bad ideas, has victims. Efforts to keep those deemed inferior from reproducing or even existing were a central part of the Nazi experiment in Germany, which upended the entire world and led to the extermination of millions …
Continue reading "Eugenics Is Still with Us: Death in the Name of ‘Best Interests’"
By Dave Andrusko About once a week my search for “Today in History” turns up a reminder, positive or negative, of something that pro-lifers should carefully ponder. Ninety two years ago today, in the infamous Buck v. Bell, the United States Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law that allowed the forced sterilization of people to …
Continue reading "Carrie Buck and the old eugenics, the new eugenics and Alfie Evans"
By Wesley J. Smith Here’s another example of that cultural inflation. Two of the world’s most influential bioethicists want health insurance to pay the cost of applying expensive biotechnologies to allow people to have their progeny engineered to possess “desirable” characteristics that will flow down the generations — a new form of eugenics. Let’s call …
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By Dave Andrusko A crucial step in Ohio’s efforts to ban abortions for the sole reason that the baby has Down syndrome took place in Cincinnati yesterday before a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals . Chief Judge R. Guy Cole, Judge Bernice Bouie Donald, and Judge Alice Batchelder were asked by …
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Dr. Hans Asperger consigned dozens of children in Nazi Vienna to certain death, claims new book. By Francis Phillips Editor’s note. The following is a book review of “Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna,” by Edith Sheffer. Norton & Company. Historian Michael Burleigh’s book, Death and Deliverance, a detailed indictment of the …
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By Wesley J. Smith We’ve seen it happen: A new assault on the sanctity of human life appears—say, infanticide being promoted in a major bioethics journal, or officials in Iceland bragging that no children with Down syndrome are born there, thanks to prenatal genetic screening—and some horrified opponents respond in horror, “That’s what the Nazis …
Continue reading "Eugenics’ Deadly Legacy"
By Dave Andrusko About once a week my search for “Today in History” turns up a reminder, positive or negative, of something that pro-lifers should carefully ponder. Ninety one years ago today, in Buck v. Bell, the United States Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law that allowed the forced sterilization of people to promote the …
Continue reading "Carrie Buck and the old eugenics, Alfie Evans and the new eugenics"