Huffington Post Writer Say Eugenics and Sterilization Linked to Pro Life Movement

I about spit out my coffee when I read this piece this morning at the Huff Post. See "Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough"

It talks about what many of us consider a dark stain on American history. That is the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, which gave the eugenics movement in the United States an imprimatur and brought forced sterilisation. In this piece he says:

...Reflecting on this grotesque phenomenon in U.S. history raises troubling associations with current laws and policies. For example, is there any connection between the eugenics movement and the anti-choice movement? One of the principle elements of each of these movements is that a woman is deemed incompetent to make decisions about whether to bear children and indeed devoid of any legal right to control her own fertility. Forcing a woman to give birth -- which the anti-choice movement effectively requires -- really is not that different conceptually from preventing her from giving birth. Both movements place a woman's reproductive decisions under the control of either the government or other institutions, typically religious ones. (Consider the current attempt by some religious leaders to force an exemption in the Obama administration's contraception policy). Moreover, in both movements there is little interest in protecting the well-being of children by ensuring adequate prenatal and post-natal medical care of infants, and supporting other child-nurturing policies. One wonders whether the alleged desire for healthy children proclaimed by both movements is simply a pretext for controlling female sexuality....

Wow how can anyone type that with a straight face.

Over at Mirrors of Justice a Law Professor responds at Not from "The Onion"

...As I started the piece, I thought, "right on! HuffPo has its political leanings, clearly, but they are clear-eyed enough to see the troubling connections between the founding of Planned Parenthood and the early-20th-century eugenics movement. Good for them!" In fact, though, the piece's author is interested in, and worried about, the alleged connections between Holmes's view (and the eugenics movement generally) with today's "anti-choice" movement. He says nothing about the fact that the leading (and, perhaps, really the only) consistent voice against eugenics and its supporting ideology, before WWII, was the Catholic Church. He says nothing, at all, about the enthusiasm for eugenics among early abortion-rights advocates like Margaret Sanger. It's really one of the least self-aware pieces I can recall reading..

The modern Pro- life movement of course has in it's DNA a very Catholic look out. Not from the Onion indeed.