There are so many things to know about bringing home an older child, and I don’t know all of them. Adopting an older child of any background has its challenges. Adopting an older child from an orphanage in CHINA, includes more challenges that the average adoptive parent(s) may not be prepared for.
This is what I knew before I met him:
He has scars, he may need surgery. He may be bullied because of his appearance, no matter where he goes. He is sensitive about his scars.
He is an average student.
He does not make friends easily.
He makes his bed and does his own laundry.
He has a good sense of humor. He can be stubborn, and when he gets angry, he throws things. He usually takes verbal correction pretty well.
He has a musical instrument that he likes to play, it is some kind of wooden flute.
He likes to roller blade, and he does not know how to swim.
He also likes to read and to do art work.
He has been in the same orphanage for 11 years, had been abandoned at about the age of two. His birthday was decided to coincide with the day he was found. He does not remember anything about his biologic family.
He had non healing wounds on his head that were not finally healed until he was almost three years old, he had multiple surgeries.
THE ADOPTION…..THE BEGINNING OF OUR FAMILY
My son was adopted by me when he was 13.5 years old. He lived in the city in western China called Hami, in the district of Xianjing. We met on November 20, 2017 in Urumqi.
Think about this child. He was abandoned from apparent scald burns when he was about two years old. Since then, he has lived in an orphanage, never sure of what the next day would bring. He does not have much trust, yet seems to trust me, his new mom. Even after I incorrectly disciplined him enough to force him to run away from me twice, he still seems to trust me.
Does he really trust me, or does he understand that he has no choice but to act as if he does? Why should he? He and I met on November 20 for the first time. He had to leave his Auntie and the chef, who had accompanied him on the train from Hami to Urumqi. From that point forward, I was his mother, the foreign adult who had adopted him and with whom he would spend the rest of his childhood.
Here is what he knows:
He was abandoned at about the age of two years.
His biological family is unknown.
No one has ever inquired about him.
It is highly unlikely that he will ever know anything about his biological family.
He has lived in the orphanage since abandoned, until he was 13.5 years old.
The lights are never off, and there is always some kind of noise.
Everyone has a TV in their bedroom and it is always on.
Everyone speaks Mandarin.
Everyone lives in the city. Few people know how to drive, and few own a car.
His family includes his “Auntie” and the chef, both of whom have been there before he became a resident. They care for and about him, and he loves them.
About half of the children in the orphanage were placed there by the government. They have families, they know who their families are and they get visited by their families.
He attended public school, where the other children lived in traditional families and homes.
He is missing most of his hair and has mildly deforming scars on his face and hands, that other children do not have.
He had “friends” at school. They had a disagreement. They beat him up. Now he has no friends – he doesn’t want any.
There is a boy who works at the orphanage, and used to live there as an orphan. He is a “good aquaintance” of my son.
He was bullied in school. He will not use a bathroom at school.
One goes to school in the morning, home for lunch and rest, then back to school for a few more hours.
If he laughed in the classroom, the teacher would take off his belt and beat him.
Being the center of attention usually meant punishment.
School is bad.
The night staff at the orphanage could not be trusted.
If someone hugs or kisses another, that means they are having sex, all this stuff is disgusting.
Wetting his bed was a sure way to get punished. So he did his own laundry, made his own bed, and hid the fact that anything had gone wrong during the night.
The children decided when to go to bed, when to take a shower or if they wanted to brush their teeth.
Wash your hands before eating, do not touch food with your hands – but it is ok to retrieve food in a communal bowl with chop sticks you have already put in your mouth. Food on the table or counter is as toxic as if it fell on the floor.
Water from a tap cannot be consumed unless it is boiled.
China invented everything, including all the Disney stuff.
Staying in China after aging out at the age of 14 years is not likely to give him a good life. Because he is an orphan and has “deformities”, it is unlikely that he will be able to get a decent job if he stayed there.
His Auntie decided to let him go to America to be adopted.
Winter can be very cold, but you only get 1-2 inches of snow all winter.
Boots are for girls.
Being lied to is bad, and everyone lies.
If you are sick or even cut yourself, you will likely die.
TRAVELING AND HOME
The next week, we toured Urumqi, went to all of the official places we were required to go to, and learned a little bit about each other. My sister and my grandnephew had accompanied me on this journey. My son became very attached to my grandnephew – this is not a bad thing, but not necessarily good for our long term relationship. When we finally were driving home to our house in upper New York, I realized that I did not really know much about this boy. He and my grandnephew had bonded and had learned to communicate with other. I didn’t even know what to say or how to say it.
As time went along, we got over our uncertainty with each other and learned fairly quickly how to communicate. My son is very accomplished at pantomiming, and can get his message across without language most of the time. He learned more English words every day, and I learned a few Chinese words to pacify his need for me to embrace his language. Given the chance to do this over again, I would have been more serious about learning Mandarin. I had begun down this path, but was told that it would be better if I did not try to speak Mandarin, as this would slow down his English learning. In our case, I do not think that would have happened, and would have been very helpful.
At first, he would not participate with a web based translator. After a few weeks, he realized that his reluctance to use it was not helping us to understand each other. It is such a routine part of our communication now that neither of us hesitate to use this tool. Once we used it quite often through the day, now we use it once a day at most.
I had sent, via Lady Bugs, a small photo album of 10 photos to my son several months before the adoption. These included a view of my house, me, my two bio children, my guardian son, my siblings and their spouses, the school, and my dogs and cats. All had captions which were translated into Mandarin. This made his transition much easier, as he recognized each of us and knew our names, even the dogs.
HOME, SCHOOL AND THE FUTURE
He started out in his room, but now sleeps in my room. He told me he had a bad dream and wanted to be with someone in case it happened again. The next day, he cheerfully told me that he did NOT have a bad dream.
Did he have a bad dream, or did he think he needed an excuse to ask to sleep in the same room as me? I don’t really care. I co slept with my bio children and I understand that he needs this. I think it is helping his attachment.
He is doing far better in school than anyone expected. He is, I believe, brilliant. He used to think he was not very smart, but I think maybe his view is changing on that. He says he does not like praise, but you can tell he thrives on it. He says he does not like his picture taken or displayed, yet – he loves it. He would comment on the photos I had of my other children and family members. I can’t explain it, but he was wistful – there were no photos of him. I have changed that.
After visiting my alma mater, the University of Connecticut, where my sister also went for her Masters in Education, he has decided that school is good! That, plus I always tell him school is good, when he says it is bad. He is experiencing positive things in school – no bullying, teachers like him, he does not get punished even when he is late to school.
He is no longer quite as amazed that he can eat as much as he wants, especially chicken and bacon. He used to ask me every time if he could have something to eat. He still does that, but less often. Usually he announces that he is hungry and I just tell him to go ahead and get food.
He has grown taller, has gained weight, and has some muscles! His arms and legs were like sticks when he came to live with me. He was unable to lift his own suitcase. Recently he brought in two bags of groceries by himself!
There is a lot of work to do. He needs to be more proficient in English, so he can participate in his classes. Although, about a month ago, he was helping one of his classmates with a math problem in class! He needs to see a dentist and an eye doctor, he needs blood work done, and vaccines. He needs to learn to floss as well as brush, that daily bathing and changing of clothing are important. He needs to know that he will likely need to drive and to own a car. That education is important. That he will need to get a job in a couple of years, and eventually, be able to live on his own. That he may not be allowed to move back to China. To learn how to trust people and have real friends. Maybe even fall in love and get married! Right now, he doesn’t think about any of this. By this time, with my bio kids, we had talked about puberty, sex, marriage, children, working, education, tolerance, budgets, religion and a little politics.
NEW INSIGHTS
What I know now:
Most of what I was told is true, and I understand why. However, he has never played the instrument we purchased for him, he doesn’t read books – but is an excellent reader of Mandarin. He cannot, at this time, have surgery that will give him a full head of hair. He does have attachment issues, but really not that bad. I really hope that he can learn to trust and develop strong friendships. He is highly intelligent and very adaptable.
What he knows now:
School is maybe good. It is possible to live without a TV or radio on, some kind of noise, all the time. He even has discovered that one does not require a source of light at night! It is possible to own more than two sets of clothing. One can drink water from the tap. Getting enough sleep is important so that one can get to school on time and not fall asleep. One can have a family even if one’s bio family is not around. People can hug and kiss and it does not mean they are all having sex. Winter in New York usually means a lot more than two inches of snow. People take walks just for the heck of it. In America, one travels primarily by private car. Not all people live in the cities.
Eugenics. Why
concern yourself? I mean, that doesn’t happen anymore, right? Went the same way
as slavery, didn’t it? And genocide, racism, women’s rights, too. Oh, not that
stuff, we still have to work on those things, but surely – not eugenics?
(Who cares? As
long as it won’t affect us. We are white and intelligent, surely our genes are
sacrosanct, and therefore – our lives, our families – will never be in danger.
So why should we care if the less worthy are sterilized, deported or killed?
More room for us!) You did not hear that from me (wink).
EUGENICS: the term
was born in 1883, courtesy of Francis Galton, in INQUIRIES INTO HUMAN FACULTY
AND ITS DEVELOPMENT. Galton’s cousin was
none other than Darwin.
“ The term “eugenics” comes from
the Greek word meaning “well-born.” In the 20th century, it came to
mean something far more sinister: a scientific movement to create a more
perfect race.”
Mendel
had just studied and published the Mendelian patterns of hereditary traits in
the mid to late 1800’s. Darwin introduced the concept of evolution. This was
the age of industrialization, improvement, enlightenment and progress.
Davenport’s plan was to analyze the pedigree charts
for Mendelian patterns, and to identify the desirable traits human beings
might encourage through careful breeding––and the undesirable ones they could
breed out.
“Wouldn’t it be
a better world if we could wipe out poverty? Wouldn’t it be a better world if
we didn’t have criminals? Wouldn’t it be a better world if everyone behaved
themselves? And if the reason we have poverty, and crime is something that’s
determined by our genes, if we can change that and make it so that the people
who have those bad traits don’t pass them down wouldn’t that be a better
world?”
Among Americans of Charles Davenport’s class and
generation, there was perhaps no word that had more currency at the turn of the
century than improvement. There was impure water, and the schools were
awful, and the disease was rampant, and immigrants were pouring in.
People
were apprehensive about rapid change, about the kinds of people you saw on the
streets––slums, crime, alcoholism, prostitution. Native (?) white Protestants
felt that they were losing control of American society. We see the same thing
today. White people think they are the original Americans – some have proposed
that NATIVE AMERICANS SHOULD GO BACK TO WHERE THEY CAME FROM.
When the
public was told that they could keep their society the way they wanted it,
people embraced the eugenics movement. They all thought that they would never
be a target. White Americans thought they were so superior that allowing white
people from other countries would make our country less worthy!!
This notion of superiority was not lost on my grandmother. White
people love to boast about how many generations they can claim in the United
States, that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower, that they are
“Daughters of the Revolution.” My family has been here since the 1600’s, on
both sides, and have ancestors that fought in the Revolutionary war. My
grandmother said to brag about what our ancestors did or when they came here
was just plain stupid. What we do as individuals is far more important.
EUGENICS TODAY: DEPORTATION, IMMIGRATION, WALLS
AND PASSPORTS
“Cohen notes that the instinct to “demonize” people
who are different is still prevalent in the U.S. today, particularly in the
debate over immigration.” Cohen wrote the book “Imbeciles”.
“the 1924 immigration law … was enacted for eugenic reasons.
And this intentionally shut off immigration of Jews, Italians and Asians, who
were thought to be genetically less gifted, and prevented a lot of Jews from
fleeing Nazi Germany. “
Anne Frank and
her family were in hiding because they were Jewish in Hitler’s Germany. Hitler
modeled his eugenics program after the American program. Then a new law enacted
in 1924 prevented the family from coming to America, a eugenics law. Otto
Frank, her father, repeatedly wrote to the State Department begging for
admission for his family, but he was denied, along with thousands of other
people.
“So when we think about the fact that Anne Frank died in a
concentration camp, we’re often told that it was because the Nazis believed the
Jews were genetically inferior, that they were lesser than Aryans. That’s true,
but to some extent Anne Frank died in a concentration camp because the U.S.
Congress believed that as well.”
It’s impossible,
especially, to read “Imbeciles” without thinking of the current election cycle. Fears
of procreation and infiltration still have force, although they’re directed not
at “hopelessly vicious protoplasm” but at “anchor babies”; instead of the pure
blood of the Nordic races, we hear invocations of that other superior species,
the Winners.
The 2016 Presidential
campaign reverberated with appeals to strength and victory and virility and
contempt for weakness and failure and foreigners, hitting notes of blatant
ugliness that we’re not used to hearing in the public sphere.
They started swarming across America’s border, millions of
desperate families fleeing poverty or seeking political asylum.
But
many people were repelled by their presence. Some warned that the country was
facing a “genetic invasion” and that whites were “losing the
demographic game.” Another said, “There will no longer be an America
for Americans.”
One
leader even thought of a radical way to keep them out.
“Can
we build a wall high enough around this country so as to keep out these cheaper
races?” he asked.
That
scenario may sound familiar, but it’s actually a description of early 20th
century America.
Daily there are reports of
deportation. Military personnel who are not citizens, but are here legally – deported
after serving THIS country, often in dangerous places like Afghanistan.
Volunteered to be in the military, but not allowed to remain in the country
they risked their very lives for. After they were told they would be guaranteed
citizenship after serving the country they loved.
A woman from Guatemala was INVITED to
come here, to the US, to help her get treatment for a rare, fatal genetic
disorder. She has lived here since she was 7 years old, has a degree with
honors from a state university. She will die within weeks of being deported
back to her country of origin – a country she doesn’t remember.
A dairy farmer and
his entire family, has been deported to the Netherlands, after living in
Minnesota for 18 years. They arrived legally, purchased a dairy farm, and have
been successful in running it. They pay taxes, provide jobs, and do everything
an American farm family would do. They
have been unable to obtain citizenship, even after spending thousands of
dollars trying to. Their sons are being
deported as they are now 21 years old. The parents have no reason to stay.
It is not isolated
to our country. England: only there seems to be more hope there –
More than half of deportations from the UK are called off, The Independent can reveal –
raising concerns that thousands of people are being unfairly targeted for
forcible removal.
Figures obtained through
freedom of information law show that of the 24,674 removal directions issued
last year, 15,200 were cancelled. Of these, more than two-thirds were called
off within a week of the scheduled removal and 45 per cent within just one day.
MESTRE, Italy — For three years, Ratan Miah
had lived legally in Italy. He worked kitchen jobs, when he could find them. He
split rent with six others on a cheap apartment. He pursued his asylum case,
telling officials about extortion and political violence in Bangladesh and
saying, “I’m asking the Italian state for help.”
Then, in late June, Miah sat down with his lawyer and got Italy’s
response.
His last appeal for protection had been rejected. In seven
weeks, after his existing permit expired, he would become Europe’s latest
undocumented migrant….
Across the European Union, according to official data, hundreds
of thousands of migrants are being rejected in their bids for protection. But,
for a range of knotty logistical and geopolitical reasons, the migrants handed
orders to leave are overwhelmingly not being sent home.
Most rejected migrants tend to fall into a legal no man’s land —
one where they have no right to housing, no work permits and scant opportunity
to go elsewhere. The only option for many is to remain where they are and
scrape by furtively.
US citizens have
had their passports stripped from them, because the State Department does not
believe they are genuinely citizens. ICE officials raid homes and take
passports away. It should come as no
surprise that most of those targeted are Latino. If you speak any language
other than English, you risk being questioned, detained, and deported.
Fans of Trump will claim these measures (of stripping
passports and deportation) are just about sending people back to their
homelands, and therefore, getting people who did not belong in America out.
Well, what do you think the holocaust was about? Jews were not considered
citizens.
The problem is that the people being targeted are anything
but white. The vast majority have been living and working here in the United
States, doing nothing different than any average person would do. Most have
every legal right to be here, but their rights are being stripped and trampled.
These people are being sent back to “their own countries” that most of them
have never seen or don’t remember, have no relatives, no place to live, don’t
understand the language, and usually are sent without any money – that is taken
from them in detention centers. They are kicked out of this country to die, and
anyone who denies that has their head buried in the sand. They have no legal
identity, so they really have no place to call home. They are invisible.
The steps that lead up to genocide, besides stripping
minorities of their citizenship, are about “othering” a population enough that
the strife they experience is not seen as akin to anything we might experience.
It’s what allows people like Tucker Carlson to see children in
internment camps and say that anyone who is horrified is part of a “ruling
class” who “cares more about foreigners than their own people.” As if
five-year-olds are a terror that good Americans would fight against.
In order to practice eugenics, you had to have the
support of the people. This wasn’t very difficult – people then (turn of the
century 1900’s) were heavily invested in the great strides of industry in all
areas of life, in government ruling daily life, in science. Probably the vast
majority of the citizens didn’t see anything wrong with the idea of selective
breeding – after all, they all felt they were the epitome of breeding,
regardless of their social standing or wealth.
Davenport had finished his first wave of data
collection from prisons and mental institutions; he was ready to proceed to the
next step.
In October 1910, on a
80-acre plot adjacent to the Cold Spring Harbor campus, Charles Davenport
opened the doors of his new institute.
It was a modest structure built
for a grand purpose: to house hereditary information on American families and
use it to guide the reproductive choices of the nation.
They hired “experts,” including Laughlin,
a high school superintendent who was an avid poultry breeder. He wanted to go
beyond data collection, which was Davenport’s primary goal, to use the data for
selective breeding of humans.
Armed with the official “Trait Book,” which
assigned numerical codes to a broad spectrum of human characteristics, the
newly-minted researchers fanned out: to study delinquents in the Juvenile
Psychopathic Institute of Chicago, the insane at the New Jersey State Hospital
at Matawan, albinos in Massachusetts, circus families at Coney Island, the
Amish in Pennsylvania.
Year by year––as trainees rotated out of the
summer program and into positions at universities, hospitals and mental
institutions––Davenport’s assumptions and methods of fieldwork gained currency
all across the country.
“Just as we have strains of scholars, of
military men,” Davenport told the New York Times, “we have strains of
paupers, of sex offenders…strains with strong tendencies toward larceny, assault,
lying, running away…The cost to society of these strains is enormous.”
Theodore Roosevelt, currently President of USA, was a
proponent, and lamented that the public was not yet behind this incredible
advance in knowledge. He wanted to stop the breeding of undesirable people.
The Eugenics Record Office
recommended both widespread eugenic education and aggressive government
intervention: laws that would keep defectives out of the country, prohibit them
from marrying, and prevent them from becoming parents by segregating them in
asylums throughout their reproductive years.
Also recommended was a new and
somewhat controversial surgical procedure known as “sterilization.”
By cutting and sealing organs involved in reproduction, both men and women
could be made infertile. So far, the technique had been used primarily on
criminals––particularly sex offenders––and it was thought to have a curative
effect.
But there was a problem. Thomas Morgan was a
zoologist, working for the Eugenics Project. He studied the genetics of fruit
flies, and quickly realized that the genetic traits were not controlled by
single genes, unaffected by other genes, but rather several genes that
interacted with each other. Genetic
traits were incredibly complex, and the outcome was not easily predicted.
Morgan became convinced that the goal of selective breeding of humans was not
possible and that the risk was too great.
The philanthropist, Mrs. Harriman, who supported
this project financially, was the widow of a railroad magnate, who also dabbled
in race horses and breeding horses. I can’t help but wonder how, if she knew
anything at all about breeding horses, she thought it could work for humans. So
many breedings of top Thoroughbreds are duds, never making it to the race
track. That should have been evidence enough to realize that selective breeding
of humans was not going to work. But I suspect that these highly intelligent
people, perhaps with no sense of reality, were going forward with blinders on,
unwilling to see the truth of the matter, right in front of them.
Morgan decided to resign and step away from the
project, but he did it quietly. The public never knew who he was, what he
found, or that he was leaving because he no longer believed in the goal.
When the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition opened in San Francisco, on the morning of February
20th, 1915, one hundred thousand people streamed through its turnstiles. Over
the next nine months, the number would reach more than eighteen million.
Nowhere did the future look
brighter than from the Race Betterment Exhibit.
Housed in the Palace of Education,
the display featured imposing plaster casts of Atlas, Venus and Apollo; a
collection of medical instruments used to gauge human biological capacity; and
a welter of charts, graphs, and lists that outlined the way eugenics would
better the human race.
This was the pet project of Dr.
John Harvey Kellogg. He and his brother were both physicians, well known in the
country for their teachings on health. They also were the inventors of Kellogg
cereal, which they considered to be a nutritional breakthrough, a new way of
feeding people who were too stupid to feed themselves properly.
Here at the Exposition, a
Conference on Eugenics was held. Over 10000 people attended.
World War I (The Great War) broke
out. It was decided to classify all draftees and volunteers for intelligence,
based on seriously flawed tests. The results revealed that fully half of the
military were morons. The news rocked the country, convincing people that our
population was 50% moronic. Considering that they could “pass as normal”, this
was a huge problem. Of course, all those in favor of eugenics were completely
convinced that these new rules would not apply to them!!
This test was the prototype of the
IQ test. It swept the nation, and all were subjected to it. Employers utilized
it to determine if a candidate was worthy of employing. It was the current thought that the idiots,
the feeble minded, were rapidly reproducing, which meant they would soon
outstrip the “normal” people. Something had to be done.
In addition, refugees were
swarming the borders, trying to escape persecution and certain death from wars,
droughts and persecution. They were often not “normal” – which translated into
white people who spoke English and who were well educated.
That May, at Cold Spring Harbor,
Charles Davenport penned a letter to a friend: “Can we build a wall high enough
around this country,” he wondered, “so as to keep out these cheaper
races?”
Does this not sound rather
familiar to the reader, in this, the year of 2019? “Build a wall, no – higher,
higher. We will build a wall and keep them all out. And we will make Mexico pay
for it.” Nothing is said about our Canadian border, where most of the people
are still white.
Madison Grant could trace his family
back to the Puritans, and one of his ancestors signed the Declaration of
Independence. He was alarmed at the influx of foreigners whose skin color was
not white and they did not speak English.
He invents this race called
the Nordics, this tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed race. According to Grant, the
Nordics are the most recently evolved of all the races. That means their
genetic traits are still fragile. They’re not fully formed. And so if a
blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordic mates with a more primitive race, a
Mediterranean, a Jew, certainly a Negro or an Asiatic, the more primitive genes
of the inferior race will actually overwhelm the superior but not yet stable
genes of the Nordics.
Black people, or Negros, were not
permitted to marry anyone but another black person, by law. The other
immigrants, however, were a threat to white supremacy by diluting and polluting
the gene pool of the elites.
“We Americans must realize that
the altruistic ideals…and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America
‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial
abyss,” Grant declared. “This generation must completely repudiate
the proud boast of our fathers that they acknowledged no distinction in ‘race,
creed, or color,’ or else…turn the page of history and write ‘Finis
America.'”
Madison Grant takes eugenics,
which had hitherto been concerned only with survival of the fittest individual,
and he says we need to be concerned with the survival of the fittest race. We
need to preserve the Nordic race.
In 1921, Congress passed the
Emergency Quota Act of 1921, severely restricting immigration. Immigration was
reduced by 97%. This Quota stayed in effect for more than 40 years.
Margaret Sanger, who had fiercely
fought for birth control to give women more power, now joined the Eugenics
movement, in an effort to further her cause.
At fairs, eugenic displays were
everywhere. Families were encouraged to
be studied, and young couples were encouraged to be tested to see if they
should marry and produce children. There were competitions of Fitter Families
for Future Firesides.
Fitter Families
contestants came from miles around, often dressed in their Sunday best, and
submitted themselves to a rigorous three-hour inspection.
Straight, healthy teeth earned
them high marks––as did musical talent, or a family history of longevity.
Disease or disability––even a lame grandmother or an epileptic uncle––was a
demerit.
“While the stock judges are
testing the Holsteins, Jerseys, and Whitefaces in the stock pavilion,” one
contest organizer said, “we are judging the Joneses, Smiths, and the
Johnsons.”
…at the end of the state fair, the
eugenic winning family, the fitter family, would be driven down the midway and
wave to the people and show off their ribbons.
Medium family award 1927 Kansas
State Fair.
Even the black community took up
the cry of better genes, advocating for better brains, beauty, and efficiency,
under the leadership of W.E.B. DuBois, one of the founders of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
DuBois’
ideas are fundamentally about combating prejudice, but at the same time he
talked about and embraced the notion that not all blacks were equally gifted
and equally talented, and that the future of African Americans should hinge on
the future procreation of the talented. Those ideas really are resonant with
eugenic ideals of the time.
Eugenics was also supported by other African
American intellectuals such as Thomas Wyatt Turner, and many academics at Tuskegee University, Howard University, and Hampton University; however, they believed the best blacks were
as good as the best whites and “The Talented Tenth” of all races
should mix.
Again,
eugenics is embraced as a way to better one’s race. DuBois was so enamored of
this idea, that he apparently did not believe that the main movement was
against colored people. After all, he was intelligent, articulate, and
(somewhat) accepted, by some white people.
Eugenics is not
just about aborting babies that we don’t like, which we shall read about in further
along this document. It is also about sterilizing people against
their will. And it happens today, even in our beloved United States of America.
Hitler’s famous reign of terror included
sterilization and genocide, as well as experiments with pregnant women and
twins. Hitler got his best ideas from the United States of America. Hitler took
the eugenics idea to a new low – perfect people by genetic engineering and
genocide.
In July 1933, in Germany, Adolf
Hitler came to power––
and immediately enshrined eugenics
in state policy, with a law that mandated the sterilization of men and women
suffering from any one of nine presumably heritable conditions.
It had been based on a model law
written by Harry Laughlin.
Before Hitler, there was a
German eugenics movement. But it did not have a sterilization law. The
sterilization law was ultimately enacted with the inspiration of what American
states had been doing.
The more zealous American
eugenicists applauded the Nazi law, which applied to all people, whether
institutionalized or not. As one Virginia sterilization advocate put it:
“The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
The Supreme Court
Ruling That Led to 70,000 Forced Sterlizations. NPR Shots, Health news from
NPR. Fresh Air, Terry Gross. March 1 2016.
I listened to this
story, “The Supreme Court Ruling that led to 70,000 Forced Sterlizations”, while traveling in
my car. It profoundly affected me, so much that I still think about it now,
three years later. (The title of the book being discussed is “Imbeciles”, which
was the inspiration for the name of my new blog. I had written my first blog on
this podcast just after hearing it, but it somehow was lost in ether space).
Eugenics, the perfect race. We all know about the monster that Hitler was, and
how he convinced and controlled an entire country to pursue his twisted dreams.
The guy was on his way to conquering the entire world, and he would stop at
nothing to achieve this. When he was the ruler of the world, the mass
executions would grimly continue. Thankfully, we didn’t get to that point. But
on his way to glory, Hitler was responsible for many millions of deaths, based
on nothing but supremacy. And his inspiration? American eugenics, which started
in earnest in 1927, following the ruling of the Supreme Court –
“In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court decided,
by a vote of 8 to 1, to uphold a state’s right to forcibly sterilize a person
considered unfit to procreate. The case, known as Buck v. Bell, centered on a
young woman named Carrie Buck, whom the state of Virginia had deemed to be
“feebleminded.”
It was the
start of a national movement to prevent certain individuals from having
children, and it spread across this country like wildfire. It was accepted as
the correct action for a strong society. It remained in place, legally, until
the late 1970’s.
Scientific American ran articles on the subject, and the American
Museum of Natural History hosted conferences. Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander
Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and many other prominent citizens were
outspoken supporters. Eugenics was taught in schools, celebrated in exhibits at
the World’s Fair, and even preached from pulpits.
Eugenical
Sterilization Map of the United States, 1935; from The Harry H. Laughlin
Papers, Truman State University
The goal was to
rid society of undesirable people, people who were a burden on society. Those
who made these decisions liked to think that they were doing a favor to those
affected – by taking away their need to raise children who were defective, to
prevent defective people from raising children- because clearly they were not
capable. To prevent the birth of people who, because of their deficiencies,
would have a horrible life.
“In the early 20th century across the country, medical
superintendents, legislators, and social reformers affiliated with an emerging
eugenics movement joined forces to put sterilization laws on the books. Such
legislation was motivated by crude theories of human heredity that posited the
wholesale inheritance of traits associated with a panoply of feared conditions
such as criminality, feeblemindedness, and sexual deviance. Many sterilization
advocates viewed reproductive surgery as a necessary public health intervention
that would protect society from deleterious genes and the social and economic
costs of managing ‘degenerate stock’.”
Eugenics was a commonly accepted means of protecting
society from the offspring (and therefore equally suspect) of those individuals
deemed inferior or dangerous – the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill,
criminals, and people of color.
DR. SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE,
WRITER: The impulse to
perfect humanity is an ancient aspiration. The idea that somehow or the other
that you can get the best humans by selectively breeding the best, most fit, heartiest,
most beautiful. It’s an ancient desire. You find it in Sanskrit texts. You find
it in Greek texts. The trouble is that only some human beings can dictate or
decide what those, what the correct features might be. Who decides?
Who decides? The ones with
power, money, ideas, and the ability to make things happen. The ability to sell
their ideas. Here is the big problem – these people who advocate selective
breeding, which leads to sterilization, truly think that they are solving a
serious social problem. They see nothing
wrong with what they are doing. The imbeciles who will be sterilized? No need
to get their permission, or even explain what is going to happen to them – they
are not capable of making decisions like that anyway.
As I
listened to this podcast, I couldn’t stop thinking about my family’s involvement in this travesty. My
grandparents, who were beautiful people, were young adults when this started. I
could not imagine how these intelligent, enlightened, tolerant people could
have witnessed this while this, and did not speak out against it. My parents,
who grew up with this attitude. And myself and siblings, who were also raised,
mostly ignorant, of the individuals now safely stored in the State Schools for
the Mentally Ill. Darwinism was used as a supporting scientific basis for this
– of course, natural selection wasn’t fast enough, so it was up to the
intelligent people to bring it along faster.
“All told, as many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly
sterilized during the 20th century. The victims of state-mandated sterilization
included people like Buck who had been labeled “mentally deficient,”
as well as those who were deaf, blind and diseased. Minorities, poor people and
“promiscuous” women were often targeted.”
These people were also institutionalized, which is where the
majority of sterilizations took place.
“The first eugenics law in the United
States was passed in Connecticut in 1895, and it was a law against certain
kinds of marriages. They were trying to stop certain unfit people from
reproducing through marriage. It wasn’t really what they wanted, though,
because they realized that people would just reproduce outside of marriage.”
They decided to institutionalize these people to keep them
from breeding. But then that was too expensive, so sterilization made more
sense – let the women out after their surgery, and let them earn their own way,
so society didn’t have to support them. If they were too deficient to work,
then they lived and died in these institutions or on the streets. Men also had
surgery, but this, of course, was much simpler, faster, and with many fewer
complications. Women, especially, were not told what their surgery entailed –
some thought they had their appendix removed.
When I was 14, back in 1961, I saw Stanley Kramer’s
brilliant movie “Judgment At Nuremberg.” It was about the war crimes
trial of Nazis after World War II. There was a stunning scene in which a
witness, a Dr. Wieck, is testifying about novel techniques of the Nazis, like
the sexual sterilization of those considered physically or mentally weak. The
German defense lawyer, played by Maximilian Schell, who won an Oscar for that
performance, reminds the witness that sterilization in the name of improving
the gene pool didn’t begin with the Nazis or in Germany. And he read from a
High Court ruling in another country that defended the practice. That ruling
justified sterilization in order to prevent our being swamped by incompetence.
Why wait for the imbeciles – that was the scientific term of the day – to
starve or turn to crime?”
Carrie Buck was a young
woman living mostly on the streets, with no education. She was taken in by a
foster family, but used as a slave. She was raped – which led to being taken
away. Since she had no education, she was considered to be feeble minded. She
had an attorney appointed for her to sue for her rights in the case called Buck
vs Bell, appealing the case to the Supreme so that the highest court would find
against her and open the doors for sterilization of anyone deemed incompetent.
The thing is, there had
been laws allowing the sterilization of undesirable people, but rarely was the
procedure performed. This was opening the floodgates to what the advocates
wanted.
Carrie Buck
was nobody you would have heard of. She was born in 1906 in Charlottesville,
Virginia. Soon afterward, her father either abandoned the family or
died—there’s no reliable record—leaving Carrie and her mother, Emma, in dire
poverty. As a toddler, Carrie was taken in, with the approval of a municipal
court, by a well-to-do couple, John and Alice Dobbs, who asked to become her
foster parents after seeing Emma on the street. Carrie lived with the Dobbses
and went to school through the sixth grade, after which they pulled her out of
school so that she could do housework full time. She cleaned their house and
was hired out to clean neighbors’ homes, until, at seventeen, she was
discovered to be pregnant—she later said that she’d been raped, by Alice Dobbs’s
nephew—at which point her guardians moved to have her declared mentally
deficient, although there was no prior evidence that this was the case. They
then had her committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.
Carrie and her sister were both sterilized and then
later released. They did not know they had been rendered unable to have
children. They both were married and childless. Years later, they were finally
told the truth, not knowing why they had no children until a journalist told
them what had been done to them. Later, in the old age home, Carrie Buck could be
found reading the newspaper and doing the crossword puzzles – so much for being
feeble minded.
I am of the age
where I remember Mental Institutions. These were state run “Schools for the
Mentally Ill,” where everyone was free to park their disabled and mentally
deficient relatives. People with Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Mental
Retardation – they were packed off to these schools as infants. People who
became depressed, hysterical or violent, who were raped, single mothers, gays –
were often placed here. It was not unusual, especially in the late 1800’s to
early 1900’s for women to end up here, courtesy of their loving husbands. Many of these people were sterilized without
their consent. It was thought that they should not be allowed to breed, and
certainly never to live in society. I had never really seen many people like
this until the early 1980’s when these facilities were shut down, and the inmates
were main streamed. We have come a long
way. It is no longer so unusual to see a person with CP or DS that they are
stared at, but that was the norm when I was a kid.
This story hit the
airwaves like a bolt of lightning, no – more like a hurricane – becoming world
news soon after. If it had not been for Geraldo Rivera’s story breaking open
the truth about these institutions, it would have been many more years before
they were finally exposed and shut down.
Even today, people
with disabilities are often assumed to have low intelligence. The following is
a quote from Molly McCully Brown, a poet and author, who happens to have
cerebral palsy.
We do have a strange tendency in this country to equate any
kind of disability with less intellectual capability and with even a less
complete humanity. Certainly as a child and as a teenager — and even now as an
adult — [I] encountered people who assumed that just because I used a
wheelchair, maybe I couldn’t even speak to them. I often get questions directed
at people I’m with, as opposed to me, and that’s a really interesting
phenomenon.
Several years ago, I broke my ankle. I still had to work and
run errands. Shortly after my injury, I wasn’t very strong on the crutches, so
I would use the motorized shopping carts. It was very strange to be making my
way around the store, and to be completely ignored by the other shoppers. Not
the way it normally is as a non-invalid – they would look at me and look away
immediately, refusing to make any eye contact.
California prisons sterilized 148 women between 2006-2010. The
law that allowed women to be forcibly sterilized while in prison was taken
down in 1979. Why was this practice pursued? Well, it is obvious to those
of superior intellect. Only the stupid people commit crimes, so why should we
allow them to breed? Especially when
most of the victims were women of color. The prisons continued to sterilize
women, with their “consent”. Not so much men, of course. No, not men.
Eugenics is often practiced
based on skin color.
In North Carolina, women of color were
forcibly sterilized even into the 1970’s – women who are peers of mine.
“…thousands of people were forcibly sterilized in
North Carolina. It was happening there up until 1974.
Certain were deemed by the state unfit to reproduce,
some because they were mentally ill or had epilepsy, some because they had been
teenage mothers, survivors of rape or incest. Some had low IQs, and some were
gay.”
The original idea was to carefully
evaluate and sterilize people who were not capable of raising children, and
often these people could not live on their own. On the surface, it seemed to be
the best option – the potential parents could not care for themselves or
children, the children would have to be raised by the grandparents or taken
over by the state – and of course, the children themselves, who could
potentially suffer greatly as unwanted children or living with parents unable
to care for them. The kicker is, most of those affected were poor, people of
color, or disabled.
It goes without saying that poor
people, and many were people of color, and the disabled – often have no voice
of their own in the legal system. Many were sterilized outside of the legal
system under orders of overzealous social
workers and judges. These people have not only been seriously victimized, but
they have no legal case – there are no legal records.
Hermann J. Muller was a “Fly Boy”
who had participated in the fruit fly experiments, under the direction of
Goddard. He continued his own experiments, and came to the realization in 1926
that the Eugenics movement was flawed, morally wrong. He understood not only
the inability to predict the outcomes of certain breedings, but also that the desirable traits were being
dictated by a small group of people, who were therefore trying to direct the
future generations. He decided to speak out.
Henry Goddard, who had coined the
term “moron”, had now recanted his
earlier ideas and regretted his earlier assessment of these so called morons –
that people he had classified as such were, after all, able to learn and able
to care for themselves and others.
The Great Depression served to
convince these eugenics advocates that their theories were all wrong. Now we
had lawyers on the bread line. Was it their genetics, or was it circumstance?
Maybe a prostitute was just trying to pay her bills. In 1932, the Eugenics Conference was largely
unattended.
And yet, the movement experienced a
massive upsurge in surgeries. It was the Great Depression, there were many
undesirable people in institutions who were simply too expensive to maintain.
They were sterilized and released – into an economy where most people had no
jobs and no place to live. They went from the frying pan to the fire.
In 1934, a movie called “Tomorrow’s Children” was
released, discussing frankly the fact that people were being forced against
their will to be sterilized. In 1935, perhaps as a result of this movie, which
was still being played in theaters, the Carnegie Institute came to Cold Harbor
to review the research. What they found was sloppy, worthless data.
From the moment the case of the “sterilized
heiress” first hit the news, in January 1936, Americans were enthralled by
it.
First, there was the girl, Ann Cooper Hewitt––a San
Francisco socialite who stood to inherit two-thirds of her late father’s vast
estate––and her shocking claim: that her mother had had her sterilized to gain
control of that inheritance.
Ann Cooper Hewitt is sent to the
hospital for an emergency appendectomy and she comes out sterilized. And when
she discovers it, she is understandably horrified, and she sues both her mother
and the two surgeons. She claims that her mother has done it because her
father’s will stipulates that if Ann should die childless the inheritance would
go to her mother. Equally intriguing was the claim of the mother, Maryon,
that her daughter Ann was feebleminded––a diagnosis based on an intelligence
test she’d been given just hours before her sterilization.
Ann says that she’s writhing in pain and then a woman
walks in the room, and the woman starts asking her all these questions. “What’s
the longest river in the United States?” and, “How many years is a
presidential term?” And Ann’s reaction is, “Why are you asking me these
asinine questions? What does this have to do with appendicitis? And she doesn’t
answer most of the questions. Although her score identified the girl as a
high-grade moron, a court-appointed psychiatrist at a preliminary hearing found
her to be well read, fluent in French and Italian, and “perfectly normal
in every respect.”
Since this young woman was not conforming
to the profile necessary to condone sterilization, the attorneys for the
surgeon opined that she was not fit to be a mother, so the surgery was a
rational decision. Even though this case was national news, and eugenics had
been proven false, the judge dismissed the case. Now sterilization to prevent
people who were deemed to be unfit to be parents was accepted.
A bizarre side show of this
movement is that women who WANTED to be sterilized so they could STOP having
children and enduring a life of virtual slavery (let us not forget that women
could not vote, own property, could not have any decent jobs, and were subject
to whatever their husbands wanted) and were also NOT allowed birth control.
These women had been deemed worthy of reproducing, to pass on their superior
genes – or at least, those of their husbands. But they were not allowed to have
the surgery.
Margaret Sanger was at the center
of this storm, advocating for birth control for women. She had been approached
by many women who did not want to be continuously pregnant. Sanger felt that
birth control would give women more power over their lives. She also pushed for
black women to have access – most black women were very poor, their families
lived in poverty. With less children, she reasoned that these families would be
better off. Many have said Sanger was a racist. I’m not so sure.
Sanger was very clear that she would bear no
confusion on that point in 1934 when she wrote: “I admire the courage of a
government that takes a stand on sterilization of the unfit and second, my
admiration is subject to the interpretation of the word ‘unfit.’ If by ‘unfit’
is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an admirable
gesture, but if ‘unfit’ refers to races or religions, then that is another
matter, which I frankly deplore.”
Sanger was, unfortunately, enamored of the
eugenics movement and supported its basic tenets. She saw it, like birth
control, as a way to give women more control, but also to improve humanity.
Mainstream America could not get
behind the birth control, as that would open the door to freedom for too many
women. It would threaten white superiority by reducing the number of
descendants. And why not just sterilize these black women and be done with it?
Hitler eagerly adopted the
eugenics program of the United States when he came to power. The Germans
already had been obsessed with making Germany strong, after the humiliation of
their defeat in The Great War. This was so important that individual rights
were second to the power of the nation. They already had eugenics laws that
were not yet being utilized, but were quickly put to use. When sterilization
was not fast enough, they began killing. They started with infants that were
deemed unfit. The lucky ones were given lethal injections, some were left to
die by starvation. By the end, over 400,000 people were killed.
By the
mid-1940s, the full horror of what happens in Nazi Germany becomes
apparent––the movement from sterilization to extermination, the killing of
several millions based on this kind of idea of the betterment of human race.
And it creates a vast embarrassment for the American Eugenics Movement.
Ironically and
embarrassingly, during the Nuremburg Trials, a German attorney asked “How
can you charge my client with the crime of eugenic sterilization when your own
US Supreme Court said this was okay?”
By the end of
the 1940’s, the eugenics movement had faded from the mainstream of American
life.
But the laws
that had been passed in the name of eugenics would remain on the books for
decades––barring some people from entering the country and others from
marriage, and subjecting thousands to forced sterilization at the hands of the
state.
By the time
such practices finally came to an end, in the 1970s, the total number of
sterilized Americans would exceed 60,000.
Canada also embraced forced
sterilization, following America’s lead. Author Robert Wilson said, “The Sexual
Sterilization Act, passed in 1928, was robustly used by the
government until its repeal in 1972. The Act called for a four-person Eugenics
Board, which was empowered to approve the sterilisation of people living in
designated state institutions, often mental hospitals.”
But there was a more direct reason for my feeling of proximity to
eugenics (wrote Wilson). I found myself
working in a university department whose first head – a university-employed
academic philosopher, like me – served for the last third of his long life as
chair of the Alberta Eugenics Board from 1928 until 1965. John MacEachran was a
long-serving provost at the University of Alberta and among the institution’s
most celebrated administrative leaders. During his time on the Eugenics Board,
MacEachran’s signature authorised 2,832 sterilisation orders. Roughly half
of these sterilisation-approvals were given during the post-eugenics era that,
on the standard view, began with the fall of the Nazis.
Leilana Muir was a plaintiff,
successfully suing the Province of Alberta for wrongful confinement and
sterilization, which lead to more than 800 subsequent successful suits,
effectively shutting down the now illegal practice of forced sterilization in
Alberta. Leilana had been abandoned at the institution in 1953 because her
mother didn’t want her, at the age of 10 years. Lest we lose sight of the whole problem, it is not just about
forced sterilization. It is about people who were abandoned or taken from their
families, and given a label of being not quite human, a label that would follow
them all of their lives, leaving permanent scars and lack of self confidence. These people were treated very poorly, as they
had no value to society. If they were given the opportunity to return to
society, they would never have their own biological children, and might not
even know that they had been sterilized.
Sweden, Norway, Finland and
Denmark also had eugenics programs.
Australia’s eugenics program was
never legal, but that didn’t stop the government from performing forced
sterilization on primarily women and girls who were deemed mentally
insufficient. Most of this program was focused on aboriginal people. It
included forced removal of children and an immigration policy that was
unofficially known as the White Australia Policy.
In India, fully 37% of the female
population were sterilized, many died. This was as recent as 2014, and involved
primarily women of the lower caste. Of course, the country does not acknowledge
that the caste system still exists. Most of these women were paid to undergo
the procedure.
In the late 1990’s, Peru
sterilized over 300,000 of the indigenous people. Romani (gypsies) women in the
Eastern block. First Nation women in Saskatchewan in 2016.
I personally know a woman who is about 20 years younger than I
am. She is labeled as mentally deficient. She has been tremendously overweight
for most of her adult life. One day she decided to get out of her apartment,
taking the dog for long walks around the village. She began to lose weight, and
suddenly began to menstruate again. She confided in me that she had been under
the impression that she had surgery as a child to remove her uterus, and was
confused by the renewed cycles. She was not severely deficient and knew she
could not pass blood without a uterus. All I could think of was that she had
her tubes tied. She knew (or believed) she had been sterilized and was not all
that concerned about it. She told me it was perfectly fine, as she was not
mentally capable of raising children.
She was sterilized in the 1970’s or 1980’s, after
this procedure was supposed to be illegal. How did that happen?
The 1978 Federal Sterilization Regulations, created by
the United States Department of Health,
Education and Welfare or HEW, (now the United States Department of Health
and Human Services) outline a variety of prohibited sterilization practices that
were often used previously to coerce or force women into sterilization.[110] These were intended to prevent
such eugenics and neo-eugenics as resulted in the involuntary sterilization of
large groups of poor and minority women. …and subjecting minors and the
mentally incompetent to sterilization…
However, several studies have indicated that the forms are
often dense and complex and beyond the literacy aptitude of the average
American, and those seeking publicly funded sterilization are more likely to
possess below-average literacy skills.[112] High levels of misinformation
concerning sterilization still exist among individuals who have already
undergone sterilization procedures, with permanence being one of the most
common gray factors.[112][113] Additionally, federal
enforcement of the requirements of the 1978 Federal Sterilization Regulation is
inconsistent and some of the prohibited abuses continue to be pervasive,
particularly in underfunded hospitals and lower income patient hospitals and
care centers.[69][111]
the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially
those of a particular ethnic group or nation.
“a campaign of genocide”
synonyms:
racial
killing, massacre, wholesale
slaughter, mass slaughter, wholesale killing, indiscriminate
killing;
mass
murder, mass
homicide, mass destruction, annihilation, extermination, elimination, liquidation, eradication, decimation, butchery, bloodbath, bloodletting;
pogrom, ethnic cleansing, holocaust, Shoah;
literaryslaying;
rarebattue, hecatomb
“the killing
of Native Americans was the biggest genocide in world history”
Genocide has been
practiced since the beginning of time. There has always been a group of people
who hated another group so much that they were willing to attempt the
eradication of that population. That
does not mean it is the way we should be living now. Should we not have evolved enough as humans to
understand that this is immoral?
Natural selection,
in its own time, along with genetic mutations
(which have allowed evolution) – is the way our universe was designed;
whether by divine intent or by cosmic chance. Instead of twisting our world to our
own vision, we should just leave the universe alone – it does a better job than
we ever can.
Had reproduction been perfect, the only living creatures
on Earth would be single-celled organisms, our 3.5 billion-year-old ancestors.
We are, quite literally, the product of reproductive mistakes and planetary
cataclysms. We — and all other living creatures — are the mutants who made it
in a planet that threw many curved balls our way. Still, despite life’s
remarkable resiliency, up to this point the evolution of life on Earth has been
a passive process. Genes mutated in random ways, without anyone at the helm.
Native
Americans– USA. Black
people and those who were on their side- USA. Jews- Germany, ancient
Rome, Egypt, Israel and Palestine, Russia pograms. Armenians– Ottoman Empire. Cambodians-
Khmer Rouge. Tutsis- Rwanda. Bosniak and Croations– Bosnia.
Darfuri- Sudan. Dzungar – Qing Dynasty. Chinese tribes– Mongolians
(Genghis Khan). Indigenous tribes – Brazil. Irish – Cromwellian
conquest. Romani (gypsies) – Germany. Queensland aborigines –
Australia.
Four years after
Hitler gained control of Germany, over 400,000 Germans had been exterminated.
And the worst was yet to come.
The current
conditions in Afghanistan are a direct result of the USSR invading that
country, propping up their own appointed government, and then pulling out –
leaving it in the hands of the Taliban. Massive genocide of the ruling class
and the common people of Mujahideen.
The book called The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is a first hand account
of the recent history of Afghanistan.
I believe that
humans are inherently tribal,
that we are loyal to our tribe, to those that we consider to be part of our
clan. But that also means that we are suspicious of anyone outside of our
tribe. Sooner or later, this uneasiness tends to lead to war. The cause can be
hunger, injured pride, accidental or intentional harm to one’s own by the
“other side”.
We have evolved so
rapidly in our technology that we are virtually disconnected from our natural
world, and from each other. Many people live in social isolation. We are not
meant to live this way; our natural evolution has not caught up to our modern
way of living. We still need and crave a stable social network, and many no
longer have this. We seem to be unhappy. Unhappy humans are not very capable of
figuring out what the cause is, so we blame someone else. Our tribes now seem
to be comprised of people who think like us, and often LOOK like us. Anyone who does not fit the standard of the
tribe is not to be trusted. Today, in our country and many others, we see this.
Our current administration is taking advantage of our fears to divide us and
pit us against each other. If unchecked, it could lead to another type of
genocide. Certainly, it has been shown
that hate crimes have escalated since 2017, and supremacist groups have grown
bold, operating in the open, no need to hide their individual identities.
EUTHANASIA is
simply another form of genocide. Only it was not always “kind” or “painless”
eu·tha·na·sia
/ˌyo͞oTHəˈnāZH(ē)ə,ˌyo͞oTHəˈnāzēə/
noun
the painless killing
of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an
irreversible coma.
Edwin Black wrote that one of the methods
that was suggested to get rid of “defective germ-plasm in the human
population” was euthanasia.[7] A 1911 Carnegie Institute report explored eighteen
methods for removing defective genetic attributes, and method number eight was euthanasia.[7] The most commonly suggested
method of euthanasia was to set up local gas chambers.[7] However, many in the eugenics
movement did not believe that Americans were ready to implement a large-scale
euthanasia program, so many doctors had to find clever ways of subtly
implementing eugenic euthanasia in various medical institutions.[7] For example, a mental
institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk
infected with tuberculosis (reasoning that genetically fit
individuals would be resistant), resulting in 30–40% annual death rates.[7] Other doctors practiced
euthanasia through various forms of lethal neglect.[7]
In the 1930s, there was a wave of portrayals of eugenic
“mercy killings” in American film, newspapers, and magazines. In
1931, the Illinois Homeopathic Medicine Association began
lobbying for the right to euthanize “imbeciles” and other defectives.[78] The Euthanasia Society of America was founded in 1938.[79]
Iceland
has been curing Down’s Syndrome!!
Apparently someone decided that people with Down’s Syndrome are a burden
on society, and must be eradicated. If you know anything about Down’s Syndrome,
it is not hereditary. It is the result of a mix up in genetic material, and can
happen at any time – any pregnancy, any woman, regardless of color, religion or
creed. Iceland has decided to rid itself of this plague, and the only way to do
that is to abort babies that might have Down’s Syndrome. “Might have”.
The only way to do that is to abort babies
that might have Down’s Syndrome. “Might have”.
The test for
Down’s Syndrome in a pregnant woman is not 100% accurate, and in fact, requires
more testing to determine if the first test was accurate. And by the way, the
second test is even less accurate. These tests are minimally invasive, but does
involve sticking a long needle into the mother’s pregnant uterus. What could possibly
go wrong?? A mother could abort her baby based on these inaccurate tests, and that baby
– did not have Down’s Syndrome. Or the test procedure might set off
complications, such as the needle
induced labor or caused other damage to the uterus, baby, or placenta.
Before I got
pregnant for the first time, my husband and I discussed the possibility of
having a less than perfect child, one with Down’s Syndrome, or Cerebral Palsy,
or …. We decided to NOT have the screening tests done for imperfect children. I
was 37 when our son was born, so I was considered to be at a higher than
average risk for birth defects. But we had decided to take whatever was given
to us. Our son did not have Down’s Syndrome or any other birth defect, nor did
his sister who arrived in my 39th year. They are not perfect
children, however. No one is perfect that I know.
Iceland is practicing
eugenics, with the blessing of its citizens. Only three babies with Down
Syndrome were born there in 2009, for a 99% “success” rate. England – 90%.
France 77%. America 67%.
I find this
abhorrent. I know many people with Down Syndrome, and they are, by far, the
nicest people I know. Yes, most of them need lifetime care givers – but not all
do. And it should be up to the parents to decide, without being pressured into
aborting these babies. I have a friend who has intentionally adopted three
children with Down Syndrome, after raising her own biological family.
I find eugenics of
any type abhorrent. I see no reason to abort any child because it has a birth
defect – the only reason I support abortion for a defect would be to prevent a
child being born with a fatal disease, not living long once born – especially
if the defect would cause pain and suffering. I do support abortion as a choice that women
should be able to make without interference, but that is a different story all
together.
Genetic counseling is the newest approach to eugenics. Potential parents can
have their DNA analyzed and then counseled as to their genetic fitness as
parents, guided regarding genetic disorders that they might pass on to their
children. These people may decide to not have children, or to have screening
tests done to determine if this particular pregnancy should proceed to birth or
be terminated. This is scary enough to contemplate – what if some government
decided that it would make these decisions? It is well known that some genetic
diseases are carried by certain lines of people. Tay-Sachs disease is more common among Jewish
people. Sickle Cell Anemia is most often found in people from Africa. The
decision to eradicate these diseases could lead to vague proof of carrier
status, leading to forced sterilization.
EUGENICS – DOES NOT ALWAYS WIN
People who were
once hidden away in institutions, forced to be sterilized, even killed – these
people are now living in general society. As a child, I rarely saw people with
Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, disfigurement, or mental retardation. These were
people we stared at because they were so different and we had never seen them –
while being told not to stare.
My children have
grown up with diversity – because these people are part of our society. They,
like anyone else, live in a family, go to school, attend church and have jobs.
Some even marry.
This link leads to
a story about a couple who married and recently celebrated their 22nd
anniversary. They both have Down Syndrome. They were discouraged from marrying,
but they did, and it has worked. They are just one example of what all of
society has missed prior to the 1970’s.
I sincerely hope
that our race of humans will, one day, become more enlightened. Enlightened
enough to understand that we are all worthy of life. That our artificial tribal
classifications of color, gender, sexual preference, religion, location, traditions,
etc are just that – artificial and unimportant. I fear that this will not happen
for many generations.
