eugenics-- a reference

[Tanya Marquette]

http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/
here is an archive on eugenics in the usa.
there was a landmark case Buck vs Bell where a young woman
was falsely set up and sterilized. this led to 30 state passing
sterilization laws against 'defective' people.
Science is never neutral: it, like history, is always at the service
of the power structure of the times. UAnfortunately, that power structure
always seems to have the same type of thinking and behavior toward
the public.
tanya
tamarque@earthlink.net
EarthLink Revolves Around You.

[Theresa Partington]

this is more what I understand by eugenics - the idea that you improve the human gene pool by sterilising those with mental or physical disabilities rather than relating to race specifically. I believe German soldiers were encouraged to impregnate Norwegians during wartime occupation - I guess that was a form of racial eugenics - trying to further establish the blond, blue-eyed master race. I don't think they were trying to modify the genetic structure of the Jews by selective breeding - which is why that was genocide rather than eugenics. In the Bill Gates issue, the eugenics would be if he was trying to breed people to have resistance to malaria by encouraging those who have resistance to reproduce and preventing the others.

Anyway, it is a semantic debate at this point and a bit of a digression. There are probably lots of grey areas. Rape as a tool of war, to dilute true ethnicity for example.

Theresa

--- In minutus@yahoogroups.com, "tamarque@..." wrote:

[Tanya Marquette]

it may be a semantic issue in some ways, but important because when you dilute the understandings and disconnect
the history, history becomes distorted and consequently the understandings and implications. don't fall for that effort
to dilute the purposes of eugenics. what has changed is the way that eugenics is being applied with greater subtlety.
the idea of eugenics fell from grace so new language has been refined but the practice has become more pronounced
with many different tactics. you mentioned some of them, but that is not all. for example clinical practice applies eugenics
by deciding which patients are more important to save. i lost a very young member of my family (age 33) this week due
to such underlying attitudes and practice. he was told to take antibiotics for a flu when he was having a brain aneurysm.
no insurance put him in the category of 'useless eaters' for this clinic used mainly by the poor. he collapsed after a few
days and died on the way to the hospital. the hospital was great in keeping the body alive because they got to harvest
his organs--11 of them. i have to wonder if poorer folks were going to get any of them. that breaks my heart--the whole
process of losing this young man, his family disrupted, the organs going to the wealthy, not the poor. that is one of the
ways eugenics is applied to americans.
tanya