It would be cheaper to sterilize them than pay for abortions year after year.
It would also be cheaper to sterilize them.
No more kids. No more tax money to pay for them. No more medicaid to keep them healthy.
Sterilize the hell out of all of those welfare freeloaders.
And to think it wasn't that long ago when a good many RWnuts on USMB got all sorts of indignant when I
pointed out that eugenics in its origins was primarily a conservative initiative.
That's some powerful shit you're snorting. The principal opponents of Eugenics were the Churches, the same coalition which presently fights against abortion. Eugenics as an affront to God. People here were probably indignant about your comment because it was
ignorant.
What is even less well known is that the American eugenics movement not only flourished during the Progressive Era, but was especially influential “under reformist state administrations,” including in the state of Wisconsin, the very beacon of progressive reform.[6] “
t is evident,” as historian Rudolph J. Vecoli concludes in a study of the origins of Wisconsin’s sterilization law,
that sterilization was a Progressive measure. . . . it was taken up and agitated by reform groups and organizations, it was advocated by Progressive leaders and publications; and it was enacted by a Progressive legislature and administration.[7]
The Progressives, at least, understood that their approach to reform was animated by a new conception of government or, more precisely, “the State.” Importantly, this idea, the “German idea of the State,” departs from the American Founders’ understanding of government in a couple of key respects, both of which help explain the Progressives’ enthusiasm for eugenics.[11]
For the Progressives, to begin, the power of government is NOT limited in principle to securing the natural or “inalienable” rights of man, as the Declaration of Independence has it. “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” as the German-trained progressive political scientist and future New Dealer Charles Merriam concludes in a 1903 survey of progressive thinking,
but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle . . . each specific question must be decided on its own merits, and each action of the state justified, if at all, by the relative advantages of the proposed line of conduct.
“n general,” as the German-trained progressive economist Richard T. Ely likewise affirms, “there is no limit to the right of the State, the sovereign power, save its ability to do good.”[12] The first step toward bold, experimental reform was to untie the hands of government.
But the Progressives did not advocate an indiscriminate exercise of power; rather, in their view, the ultimate aim of “the State,” the “good” or objective whose pursuit determined the need for government action, was a particular conception of human excellence or “perfection.” The guiding object of ethics, and hence the State, Ely explains, is the “ethical ideal,” the idea, that is, that individuals are entitled to the “most perfect development of all human faculties [physical, mental, moral, aesthetic, etc.] . . . which can be attained[.]“ In short, the guiding principle of the Progressives’ domestic reforms, the aim that guided their assessment of existing social conditions, was a felt obligation to improve the relative level of physical, mental and moral development in America.
The very idea that a conservative could read from the Constitution a path which could lead to the State sterilizing people is nonsensical. To follow that path one has to reconceptualize the role of government, the very core of the Progressive vision.
