Genetically Inferior Children

A road trip kept me away from the internet for a few days, but I did take a picture to share with you while I was in Charlottesville, VA: a historical marker commemorating Carrie Buck and the Buck v Bell Supreme Court decision on sterilizing "genetically inferior" people.

Unlike Charlottesville's many other historical markers, this one is camouflaged under the trees at the bus stop just north of 8th St. NW on Preston Avenue.  Feel free to reproduce the picture and spread the word. 

In case you can't read it, it reads

BUCK v BELL

In 1924, Virginia, like a majority of states then, enacted eugenic sterilization laws.  Virginia's law allowed state institutions to operate on individuals to prevent the conception of what were believed to be "genetically inferior" children.  Charlottesville native Carrie Buck (1906-1983), involuntarily committed to a state facility near Lynchburg, was chosen as the first person to be sterilized under the new law.  The US Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell on 2 May, 1927, affirmed the Virginia law.  After Buck more than 8,000 other Virginians were sterilized before the most relevant parts of the act were repealed in 1974.  Later evidence eventually showed that Buck and many others had no "hereditary defects."  She is buried south of here.

During the trip I fell even farther behind on my weekly Economist, but I still think this article might interest you:

It's not news now that young women favor Obama by 20 points (58% to 38%). The Scarcer Sex also points out that, as I said, women vote in larger numbers than men.  Get out there and vote, young women!  Better yet, run for office.

Adoption is a reproductive choice

When economically-strapped families abandoned their babies as foundlings, at least they had a choice. 

When women stopped giving birth at home, they moved into a system that made their choices for them.  A recent yahoo! news story describes how women around the world, still bleary from industrial-strength anesthetics, unwittingly signed over their illegitimate babies for adoption as late as 1987. 

In Spain, an 80-year-old nun, Sister Maria Gómez, became the first person accused of baby snatching in a scandal over the trafficking of 1,500 newborns in Spanish hospitals over four decades until the 1980s.

Did adoptive parents choose babies with health problems?  

Until midcentury, eugenics proponents did their best to forestall this issue.

After then, the answer depended on the adoptive family.

(A)t midcentury, when social workers were still reluctant to place less-than-perfect children, many ordinary families expressed both willingness and desire to raise many different kinds of children as their own….Well-educated adopters were particularly interested in identifying children who could take advantage of a college education.

How many of these babies were from out-groups such as Native Americans?  And where did those children go? 

Eighty-five percent of the Native children removed from their families from 1941 to 1967 were placed innon-Indian homes or institutions, said the Association on American IndianAffairs report. The aim, said White Hawk, was assimilation and extinction of the tribes as entities, as their younger generations were removed, year after year... 

Did biological parents choose to extinguish their own culture?

Kudos to the families who adopted special-needs children.  Even the families who adopted Native children may have thought they were doing good.  Still, the decision about whether to put the children into the system at all belonged to the parents, especially mothers, and the news story makes it clear that those women were deprived of their choice.

I hope we can all agree that adoption is loving response to an unintended pregnancy, and yet the choice to put the baby up for adoption belongs strictly to the biological mother.

How Much Does a Eugenically-desirable Baby Cost?

Effing cheapskates!

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$5000?  Who do they think they are?  Who’d sell eggs to them when the agency below offers “Compensation: First time donors receive $7,000+; Repeat donors receive up to $10,000”

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Got the eggs but somebody’s shooting blanks, or there’s no man around?  Buy the sperm.

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We are constantly recruiting males from all ethnicities, religions, and races.

No Clomid?  No needles?  No labor and delivery?  $14,000 a year for a checkup and a bunch of girlie magazines?  Young men, there are worse ways to pay for college.

Normally I include URLs so you can check my sources.  In this case I don’t want to send any traffic to these ads, though you can easily find them.    

If you find them on Craigslist, please flag them.  Flagging means that you request Craigslist to take down the ad.  If any one ad receives enough flags, Craigslist takes it down automatically. 

Even if you think that selling or renting out your body parts looks like a great deal, as someone who is at that moment using Craigslist you’re obliged to flag ads that violate Craigslist’s terms of use.  The terms forbid the sale of “blood, bodily fluids or body parts” but the site doesn’t maintain employees to enforce the terms.  It relies on users to do that. 

To flag any ad on Craigslist, open the ad.  Look for the box in the upper right corner that says

please flag with care: [?]

miscategorized

prohibited

spam/overpost

best of craigslist

Left-click on “prohibited.” That's all there is to it.

I kinda wish I could've made this kind of money when I was in the "right" age group.  I'm not entirely against this traffic, but I marvel to see how much people will pay for a "perfect" baby when so many children with issues are available for adoption right now.

"the worthlessness and filthiness of certain classes of people"

A century ago powerful men prevented unintended pregnancies. They sterilized the “unfit.”

Indiana was the first state to enact a forcible sterilization law.  By 1942, 30 states had enacted similar laws.  Indiana Acts of 1907, Chapter 215, authorized sterilization of anyone who is “insane, idiotic, imbecilic, feeble-minded or epileptic, and by the laws of heredity is the probably potential parent of socially inadequate offspring likewise afflicted.”

In 1912, J.N. Hurty, President of the American Public Health Association, presented a paper entitled “Rural Hygiene” at the association’s annual meeting. 

The family physician, after becoming cognizant of a contemplated marriage which must lead to nervous and weak offspring, should take steps to prevent its consummation.  If the rules of professional secrecy regarding matters of importance to progeny work against social progress, they are in so far immoral.  The physician must take an active part in race hygiene.

Hurty began his career as a pharmacist.  "It was not until Hurty had become the [Indiana] State Health Officer and had observed the stupidity of mankind, the worthlessness and the filthiness of certain classes of people" that he promulgated eugenics.* 

Fifteen years later, in his decision on Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., expanded on Hurty's theme:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. 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. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

To Hurty and Holmes, if you had absence seizures or bipolar disorder, maybe even dyslexia, your pregnancy wouldn't be a gift from God.  It would be a drain on the state, and should be prevented, whether you wanted it or not. 

It’s been four generations now since Buck v. Bell.   If you want to safeguard your right to decide whether or when to have children, tell your elected representative how important it is to you.  And tell him or her that you vote.

* You can learn more in THE HOOSIER HEALTH OFFICER: A Biography of Dr. J.N. Hurty and The History of the Indiana State Board of Health to 1925, by Thurman N. Rice, MD, published by the Indiana State Board of Health, 1946.