Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Eugenics redux?

Canada's Conservative government has announced, ahead of June's G8 summit, that although the theme of the meeting is "improving maternal health", it will not fund abortion on demand in third world countries. For this it is being pilloried by the usual gang of liberals, progressives, wimmin's rights nutters and advocates of baby-killing -- the same people who applauded when Henry Morgentaler was made a member of the Order of Canada.

Steve Harper says that there are better ways to spend taxpayers' money on helping third world women -- ways which will not cause division amongst Canadians. He is right (for once) and those who accuse him of trying to reopen the abortion debate are wrong.

Walt wonders if the loony lefties who think the developed countries should be handing out condoms and paying for D&C's in Africa have heard of eugenics.

Popular in North America and the U.K. during the first half of the 20th century, eugenics is the study and practice of selective breeding applied to humans, with the aim of improving the species. The idea is that you will gradually get rid of the inferior specimens by keeping them from breeding. Has no-one made the connection between this theory and the agitation for more birth control and more abortions in the third world?!

Eugenics had many proponents until it became associated with Nazism in the 1930s. Among them was Canada's own Nellie McClung, who has been honoured for her tireless campaigning for the vote and other rights for women. But now Forces for Good in Winnipeg are fighting to prevent the erection of a statue of Nellie because -- horrors! -- she thought it would be better if the inferior races didn't have so many babies.

This view was shared by historian H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, and even abortion advocate Margaret Sanger. They all thought that the poor and uneducated, those with mental problems, low intelligence or loose morals should be discouraged or even forcibly prevented from breeding.

Like many others of his day, Wells argued, in his book Anticipations, that it was only natural that the white races should dominate the others. It followed from Darwin's theory of natural selection that northern Europeans were better able, physically and intellectually, to develop and rule a better world. Asians came next (in descending order of yellowness or brownness) followed by Amerindians, with black Africans at the bottom of the totem pole, so to speak.

Australian doctor and sexologist Norman Haire, inventor of birth control devices, went farther. He advocated the killing of inferior babies and the sterilization of the unfit so society's resources could be focused on preserving higher-quality people.

Even now, inferior babies -- that is girl babies -- are routinely killed or abandoned to die in China, India and Africa. (In the Indian communities of North America they are simply aborted.)
See "Gendercide" in The Economist of 4 March 2010, for details of how at least 100 million girls have simply disappeared due to abortion, infanticide or neglect.

The net result of the birth control and abortion programmes that the libbers and lefties demand we fund in the third world will be a reduction in the number of non-white babies. So...would Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton, the women in sensible shoes and all the others who accuse the Tories of sexism, racism, and so on please explain the difference between their "maternal health" agenda and eugenics?

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