Eugenics was born in America at the beginning of the 20th century and reached fruition under Hitler. It's the idea that human genetics can be improved by the state through selective breeding.
Kitty Werthmann, who lived under Hitler's rule in Austria, related what she saw there in the late 1930s to a Tea Party crowd Friday night. She said that the mentally ill were executed and that non-Aryan women were subjected to forced abortions. At the time they didn't know about the mass execution of Jews in concentration camps, but it was the logical extension of Hitler's crazed plan to purify the German race.
She warns that she sees the roots of the same tree growing in the United States.
Eugenics is a platform in Progressivism, and early 20th century leftist political philosophy.
Margaret Sanger, the founder of the pro-abortion legalization organization known as Planned Parenthood, said, "The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind."
Progressive hero George Bernard Shaw wrote, "The only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man."
Hitler, leader of the National Socialists (Nazis) took that advice to heart.
In the 1970s, President Obama's science czar, John Holdren, went so far as to seemingly approve of using sterilants in public drinking water to control population growth.
State-sponsored eugenics isn't in America yet. But we are certainly handing the government tools to accomplish it if some radical ever gained power in this country. And, as Werthmann points out, totalitarianism happens slowly and gradually.
For example, consider this scenario. My wife and I are expecting a baby; we're in the first trimester. The state of California gives a "highly recommended" blood test at this stage in the pregnancy to determine if the fetus is at risk for Down's Syndrome or other diseases. If the test comes back positive, we will be educated on our "options" to terminate the pregnancy. We said no thanks, it won't affect our decision either way. But it was pushed and pushed.
Why does the state have an interest in our pregnancy? Because if something is wrong and we go through the pregnancy, the state may be on the hook financially through social programs.
Is it far fetched to imagine then, in a world with universal healthcare where the government is on the hook for every medical cost, that they would attempt to limit those costs? Since they are already in the business of doing blood tests, they could determine which babies are at a higher risk of diabetes, or cancer, or heart disease. It is outside the realm of possibility that one day they might assess a high fee on the parents to continue with the pregnancy? As government nears bankruptcy, could it happen someday that these pregnancies would be prevented from being carried through?
We are far removed from that scenario now. But we are certainly at risk of it if we continue heading in this direction and ignoring the warning of eyewitnesses to history like Kitty Werthmann.
Eric Ingemunson's commentary has been featured on Hannity, CNN, NBC, Inside Edition, and KFI's The John and Ken Show.
Eric was born and raised in Ventura County and currently resides in Moorpark. He earned a master's degree in Public Policy and Administration from California Lutheran University. As a conservative, Eric supports smaller government, less taxation, more individual freedom, the rule of law, and a strict adherence to the Constitution.
Actually, state sponsored eugenics in America has come and gone. Beginning in 1907 an unknown number, but in the tens of thousands, of Americans were forcibly sterilized due to "feeble mindedness", criminality and other genetic defects thas shouldn't be passed along to offspring. The Nazi use of eugenics in the service of genocide caused it to be rejected by most Americans after WWII, but forcible sterilization was still legal in 27 states as late as 1956 and the last legal involuntary sterilization in the United Stated is believed to have occurred in Oregon in 1981. Best estimates are that 65,000 Americans were involuntarily sterilized in 33 states during this period.
For Californians, it's an even more uncomfortable part of our history. From 1909 to WWII California was the national leader in enforcing the laws, performing as many as a third of all forced sterilizations in the country. Quoting from the Wikipedia article on Compulsory Sterilization: "Information about the California sterilization program was produced into book form and widely disseminated by eugenicists E.S. Gosney and Paul B. Popenoe, which was said by the government of Adolf Hitler to be of key importance in proving that large-scale compulsory sterilization programs were feasible."
Just because state sponsored eugenics programs have come and gone once doesn't mean it can't happen again. As Edmund Burke pointed out, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." That includes the parts we'd rather not know about.
Anonymous, that's a great comment. World War II changed a lot of the words that were popular on the left--socialism, totalitarianism, eugenics, fascism, and dictators were all "good" words prior to that war.
After 1945, those words fell out of vogue for obvious reasons, but the ideas did not. The ideas persists, but the names have changed.