[Peace-discuss] Population control

[C. G. Estabrook]

Tonight AWARE heard a proposal for a working group on
population control.  Not to put too fine a point on it, such a
proposal flies in the face of one of our stated purposes,
anti-racism.  I'm suggesting, not that the motives of the
proposer are racist, but that if we understand the real
politics of population control, we see that it is what used to
be called "objectively" racist.  

Alex Cockburn explains the context below, with reference to
a recent comment by William Bennett, Reagan's Secretary of
Education.  

I confess that I may be sensitive on this issue, not only
because of the configuration of my own family, but also
because one of the classic studies of the need of public
policy to prevent the birth of undesirables was authored by a
cousin, Arthur H. Estabrook of the Eugenics Records Office at
Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1916, "The Jukes in 1915."  

"Jukes" was a pseudonym for a family used as an example in the
social science of a century ago to argue that there was a
genetic disposition toward criminality. This science was used
to advocate eugenics, or the "scientific" breeding of human
beings, by attempting to demonstrate that social inferiority
was heritable.  The Jukes family was described by Richard L.
Dugdale in 1877 in "The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism,
Disease and Heredity."

A. H. Estabrook's study, a follow-up to Dugdale's, purported
to draw its conclusions from a study of 2,820 persons,
including 2,094 descendants of the original six Juke sisters.
Enthusiastic readers of Estabrook's study included 
 
   (a) the liberal icon Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., who wrote the opinion when the court approved
involuntary sterilization in Buck v. Bell, 1927:  

"In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents...
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 ... 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.  Three
generations of imbeciles are enough"; and 

   (b) the National Socialist German Workers' Party, who put
into practice the social policies pioneered in America. 

Cf. <www.wehaitians.com/bad%20seed%20or%20bad%20science.html>.

====================

  Alexander Cockburn
  Rhetoric and reality in the business 
  of getting rid of black people
  October 7, 2005

Every year or so, some right-winger in America lets fly in
public with a ripe salvo of racism, and the liberal watchdogs
come tearing out of their kennels, and the neighborhood echoes
with the barks and shouts. The right-winger says he didn't
mean it, the president "distances himself," and the liberals
claim they're shocked beyond all measure. Then, everyday life
in racist America resumes its even course.

This past week it's been the turn of that conservative public
moraliser, William Bennett. He should have known better than
to loose off a hypothetical on his radio show. Announce
publicly that "if you wanted to reduce crime, you could abort
every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go
down," and many Americans reckon that's no hypothesis, that's
a plan waiting to happen.

Of course that's what Bennett did say, and he should have
known better. Americans mostly don't understand hypotheses,
any more than they feel at ease with irony. Particularly in
the age of the Internet, literalism is the order of the day.
Qualifications such as Bennett added (to the effect that this
would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible
thing to do") are useless.

The deeper irony here is that liberals have pondered longer
and deeper than conservatives on how exactly to carry out
Bennett's hypothetical plan, either by sterilization or
compulsory contraception.

Before Hitler and his fellow Nazis (who said they had learned
much from U.S. sterilization laws and immigration
restrictions) made the discipline unfashionable, eugenics and
the prevention of socially unworthy babies were hot topics
among America's social cleansers.

The keenest of these cleansers were not Southern crackers but
Northern liberals. States pioneering sterilization laws
included Robert La Follette's Wisconsin and Woodrow Wilson's
New Jersey. Around the country, after Indiana led the way in
1909, eugenic sterilization was most energetically pushed by
progressive politicians, medical experts and genteel women's
groups. In the mid-1930s, Alabama's governor, Bibb Graves,
vetoed a sterilization bill enthusiastically passed by the
legislature. The populist Graves cited "the hazard to personal
rights."

Behind this sterilization drive was the Malthusian fear that
poor people reproduce at a faster rate than rich ones or those
endowed with a high IQ. The highly regarded biologist Garrett
Hardin wrote in his 1949 book "Biology: Its Human
Implications" that "Either there must be a relatively painless
weeding out before birth or a more painful and wasteful
elimination of individuals after birth." If we neglect a
program of eugenics, will the production of children be
non-selective?  By 1968, Paul Ehrlich, in his "Population
Bomb," was urging a cutback in government programs of "death
control," i.e., public health. Nixon cut health benefits and
pumped money into population control.

Allan Chase, in his "The Legacy of Malthus," says 63,678
people were compulsorily sterilized in America between 1907
and 1964 in the 30 states and one colony with such laws. But
there were hundreds of thousands more sterilizations that were
nominally voluntary but actually coerced. Chase quotes federal
judge Gerhard Gesell as saying in 1974, in a suit brought on
behalf of poor victims of involuntary sterilization, "Over the
past few years an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income
persons have been sterilized annually by state and federal
agencies." This rate equals that achieved in Nazi Germany.

Gesell said that "an indefinite number of poor people have
been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization
operation under the threat that various federally supported
welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to
irreversible sterilization. Patients receiving Medicaid
assistance at childbirth are evidently the most frequent
targets of this pressure."

Writing toward the end of the 1970s, Chase reckoned that
probably at least 200,000 Americans per year were the victims
of involuntary and irreversible sterilization.

In the mid-1990s, liberals flourished the same basic
hypothesis as Bennett. They said there was a cycle of poverty
and welfare dependency that bred crime. In 1994, Arizona and
Nebraska prohibited welfare increases for recipients who had
additional babies while on the dole. Connecticut in the same
year gave serious consideration to a bill providing additional
subsidies for welfare mothers who accepted a contraceptive
implant (called Norplant).

Though race specific terms were usually avoided by
eugenicists, who preferred words like "weak minded" or
"imbeciles" (a favorite of that enthusiast for sterilizing,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, a jurist much admired by liberals) the
target was, by and large, blacks. What direct sterilization
could not prevent, incarceration or medically justified
confinement has also sought to achieve.

Bill Bennett didn't know the half of it. He was about a
century behind the curve.

[Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of
the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of
Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.]