Monday, October 23, 2006
Population Control vs. the Culture of Life
Jonah Goldberg has a great summary of the history of the Eugenics/Depopulation aspect of the Culture of Death in this recent piece that he wrote for NRO that Steve Ertelt posted at LifeNews:
As I write this, America’s population reportedly has passed the 300 million mark. The most remarkable aspect of this landmark event is how unremarkable it really is.
“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick ... the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks ...”
That was D. H. Lawrence daydreaming about population control. He was hardly alone. During the so-called Progressive Era, “enlightened” social planners were convinced that overpopulation was the gravest problem facing Western society. That’s why Lawrence gave “three cheers for the inventors of poison gas.”
George Bernard Shaw, a thoroughgoing eugenicist, believed that the “the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive.” H. G. Wells smiled at the prospect that the “swarms of black and brown and dirty-white and yellow people” will “have to go.” In America, Wells’s onetime girlfriend, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued that birth control was essential to stem the rising tide of the unfit. Leading feminists, Progressive economists and legal theorists shared a similar vision. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who concluded in the case of Buck v. Bell that the state had the power to forcibly sterilize “defectives,” believed that forced population control was at the very heart of Progressive reform.
The Holocaust diminished the popularity of eugenics, but the panic over overpopulation endured. Paul Ehrlich, author of the scaremongering “The Population Bomb,” predicted in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, roughly 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would starve or otherwise meet their doom in the “Great Die-Off.” Inspired by such fears, Alan Guttmacher, the former president of Planned Parenthood, was a champion of coerced birth control — i.e. “compulsory sterilization and compulsory abortion” — throughout much of the world.
This is a very enlightening glimpse of how the Culture of Death metastasized in the post-Modern era. However I recently came across an online version of one of Margaret Sanger's books that made me realize that there is nothing at all modern about the Culture of Death.
In it she points out that nearly every other culture practiced infanticide as a form of population control and adds that that it was most prevalent in cultures where woman were more influential in society. From the Greeks and Romans to China and India, she claims the practice was widespread. She also alludes to the "wise woman" of Europe's antiquity who in addition to being midwives and herbalists also had knowledge of abortifacents.
The one culture that stood in opposition to this was of course a small tribe originally known as Habiru. While their neighbors sacrificed their children to furnaces wrought in the likeness of pagan gods, the Deity of the Habiru encouraged them to cherish life.
Today the same Judeo-Christian Culture of Life stands alone against an ancient evil posing as a Brave New World.
As I write this, America’s population reportedly has passed the 300 million mark. The most remarkable aspect of this landmark event is how unremarkable it really is.
“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick ... the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks ...”
That was D. H. Lawrence daydreaming about population control. He was hardly alone. During the so-called Progressive Era, “enlightened” social planners were convinced that overpopulation was the gravest problem facing Western society. That’s why Lawrence gave “three cheers for the inventors of poison gas.”
George Bernard Shaw, a thoroughgoing eugenicist, believed that the “the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive.” H. G. Wells smiled at the prospect that the “swarms of black and brown and dirty-white and yellow people” will “have to go.” In America, Wells’s onetime girlfriend, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued that birth control was essential to stem the rising tide of the unfit. Leading feminists, Progressive economists and legal theorists shared a similar vision. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who concluded in the case of Buck v. Bell that the state had the power to forcibly sterilize “defectives,” believed that forced population control was at the very heart of Progressive reform.
The Holocaust diminished the popularity of eugenics, but the panic over overpopulation endured. Paul Ehrlich, author of the scaremongering “The Population Bomb,” predicted in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, roughly 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would starve or otherwise meet their doom in the “Great Die-Off.” Inspired by such fears, Alan Guttmacher, the former president of Planned Parenthood, was a champion of coerced birth control — i.e. “compulsory sterilization and compulsory abortion” — throughout much of the world.
This is a very enlightening glimpse of how the Culture of Death metastasized in the post-Modern era. However I recently came across an online version of one of Margaret Sanger's books that made me realize that there is nothing at all modern about the Culture of Death.
In it she points out that nearly every other culture practiced infanticide as a form of population control and adds that that it was most prevalent in cultures where woman were more influential in society. From the Greeks and Romans to China and India, she claims the practice was widespread. She also alludes to the "wise woman" of Europe's antiquity who in addition to being midwives and herbalists also had knowledge of abortifacents.
The one culture that stood in opposition to this was of course a small tribe originally known as Habiru. While their neighbors sacrificed their children to furnaces wrought in the likeness of pagan gods, the Deity of the Habiru encouraged them to cherish life.
Today the same Judeo-Christian Culture of Life stands alone against an ancient evil posing as a Brave New World.
papijoe 10:01 AM
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