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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (68154)	8/9/2015 8:09:51 AM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

The facts: Abortion and forced Sterilization were actually things that Sanger wrote AGAINST! She did not endorse abortion. She only advocated birth control and education. If she endorsed abortion at any time, she would have been arrested, because abortion, was illegal until 1972, and advocacy of it was illegal until the 1950s. The above quote sounds like Sanger is advocating the cleansing of "the race" of "defectives" and "mentally ill", and advocating a nazi-version of racial supremacy. When you put the paragraph in context, with it's surrounding paragraphs, Sanger is actually saying the opposite -- the paragraph is part of an intro where she CRITICIZES various remedies offered by government. When The Pivot Of Civilization was written, in 1922, the USA, indeed the world, was getting over the ravages of the worst Influenza epidemic in history! Millions of Americans died -- we lost a whole generation of people between 1918 and 1920. The idea of "racial regenration" was not used in the context of "white racial regeneration". It literally meant "human" regeneration. But that's just a sidenote. Let's see what the whole page says, and what the liars for Christ always leave out. "At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the necessity for Birth control education without a complete comprehension of the dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present attempts at control, or the proposed programs for social reconstruction and racial regeneration. It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly summarized as follows: * Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic. * Marxian Socialism: This may be considered typical of many widely varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction, emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i. e. capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological chaos and human waste. I shall attempt to show that the Marxian doctrine is both too limited, too superficial and too fragmentary in its basic analysis of human nature and in its program of revolutionary reconstruction. * Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and uncontrolled fertility of the ``unfit'' and the feeble-minded establishing a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate among the ``fit.'' But in its so-called ``constructive'' aspect, in seeking to reestablish the dominance of healthy strain over the unhealthy, by urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer nothing more farsighted than a ``cradle competition'' between the fit and the unfit. They suggest in very truth, that all intelligent and respectable parents should take as their example in this grave matter of child-bearing the most irresponsible elements in the community.

To: Greg or e who wrote (68154)	8/9/2015 8:33:46 AM
From: Solon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 69300

That is beautiful! Thanks for posting that. It is a great philosophical leap from the idea of punishing our criminals and degenerates...to curing them of disease and giving them medical care and protection and counselling toward the goal of moral and useful lives. Right on! She did not say so, but hopefully the paupers and illiterates would not be given farms alongside of criminals and dope-fiends? [Correction: she does acknowledge the need for special departments of separation! My bad] There would need to be separation and some overall armed supervision. And what about the costs of this health care as compared to the current costs of incarceration in prisons? The idea of society working together toward universal physical and mental health seems far more humane than simply tossing the dregs of society into prisons or letting them sleep under bridges and in the alleys, but is it doable? In Canada we use prisons, halfway houses, psychiatric wards, and welfare assisted living to deal with some of these problems. The idea of segregating them in open spaces and giving them medical and moral counselling and such is very idealistic, but it is hard for me to consider putting certain classes of criminal fiends into the equivalent of the Betty Ford Center when they have committed such atrocious acts? One would need to be a nurse, I suppose, to be able to consider such behaviour as a health issue. I had a similar idea which I proposed years ago, excepting that the criminal elements would be segregated on fertile land that was walled in with armed guards and that no assistance would be given past an initial supply of food and seeding and such. Our only costs would be the wages of the guards. And having chosen the life they value, they could live with the society they have chosen--or choose to civilise one another. "The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection and segregate on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct. Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health not punishment, it is safe to say that about fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense–defending the unborn against their own disabilities. The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers' health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxis goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs her health; place these mothers under public health nurses to instruct them in practical scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives–thus reducing maternal mortality. There would be a careful follow-up in the homes where infants have died, to ascertain the causes and to prevent when possible the further increase of children until the causes have been removed–reducing infant mortality. While the above steps seem to be emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace."