The problem with eugenics is not just its racist history. It’s a present crisis.
By John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, Christian Post:
Last month, the LA Times reported that the University of California at Berkeley would no longer take money from “The Genealogical Eugenic Institute Fund.” The school had been drawing from the fund for years, until a “shocked and dismayed” bioethics professor learned of the fund and saw the term “eugenics” in the title. Rightly so.
Modern “eugenics” emerged as an application of Darwinism in the late 1800s. Social scientists believed they could “improve the human race” by encouraging the “well-bred” and healthy to procreate, while discouraging (or even, for some, forcibly preventing) the poor, the sick or just the “undesirable” from having children.
While eugenics typically brings to mind the Nazi attempt to exterminate 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, the idea’s intellectual development is largely American. For example, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger openly advocated for eugenics, and actively worked to advance birth control with African American women as part of what she called the “Negro Project.”
By the way, the organization she founded is the best example in our culture of systemic or structural evil. Planned Parenthood kills black babies at a rate five times higher than children of other ethnicities.
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