Leftist fans of Pope Francis went ballistic in early June after they read these comments made by the Holy Father:
"I have heard that it’s fashionable, or at least usual, that when in the first months of pregnancy they do studies to see if the child is healthy or has something, the first offer is: let’s send it away. I say this with pain. In the last century the whole world was scandalized about what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today we do the same, but now with white gloves."
One typical reaction was from the noted atheist, Richard Dawkins, who tweeted, "And you thought Francis was the 'good pope.' Abortion to avoid birth defects is not about eugenics. It’s about the avoidance of individual human suffering."
Really? I think not.
The American eugenics movement began in earnest in the late 19th century. Negative eugenics, also known as "dysgenics" or "cacogenics," seeks to purify gene pools by eliminating, by means of abortion and sterilization, undesirable human beings.
Undesirable human beings have been defined by eugenicists as physically imperfect or unfit human beings or members of select ethnic groups.
The British political scientist, Harold Laski, in a letter to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, urged the sterilization of "all the unfit, among whom I include all fundamentalists."
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood—which operates the largest number of abortion mills in the nation — said in 1921, that eugenics is "suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and through avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems." She went on to declare "more children for the fit, less from the unfit, that is the chief issue of birth control."
What really bugs the pro-abortion crowd is that the Pope compares selective abortions to Nazi eugenics.
The National Socialists were the first to make eugenics a matter of public policy. Shortly after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, he signed eugenics legislation into law.
Nazi racial legislation provided the legal framework for programs that affected millions of innocent humans and that utilized euthanasia, sterilization and abortion.
What few people know, however, is that the Nazis were greatly influenced by the American eugenics movement and the eugenics laws over two dozen states had enacted —based on the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, drafted by Harry Laughlin, Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office in New York — legalizing sterilization "regardless of etiology or prognosis" of criminals, mental patients, inebriates, the blind, the deaf, the deformed and the homeless, orphans, tramps, and paupers.
James Whitman’s 2017 book, "Hitler’s American Model," points out that in "Mein Kampf," Hitler praised America “as nothing less than ‘the one state’ that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order. . . . "
Indeed, there is ample evidence that German scientists in the 1930s were devotees of the American eugenics movement. The books and studies of two noted eugenicists, Lathrop Stoddard, a Harvard Ph.D. and Madison Grand, were widely read in Nazi circles.
Leading American eugenicists, men such as Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin of the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office, were very impressed with the Nazi Eugenics Courts.
When Stoddard was a visiting professor of Eugenics at a German university in 1940, he actually sat on the bench of the German Eugenics Court which had the power to order the sterilization of virtually any political opponent of the regime.
Stoddard was clear about who deserved credit for the intellectual justification of compulsory state sterilization of the unfit in Germany. It was, he said, a “gift” from the American eugenics movement.
After the Nazi defeat, it was widely accepted that eugenics had been discredited. Hence, the U.S. movement began to reinvent itself. For instance, Eugenics News was renamed the Journal of Social Biology; and the New Jersey League for Sterilization was reincorporated as Birth Right, Inc.
The legalization of abortion, third party artificial insemination, infanticide and geronticide became the platform of the new eugenics movement.
The late Richard John Neuhaus noted in a 1987 edition of the "Human Life Review," that eugenics has returned "with a vengeance in the form of developments ranging from all the adventurous to the ghoulish."
Abortion supporters are livid at Pope Francis because he exposed their pseudo-scientific underpinnings. As Dr. Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute put it, "Pope Francis went to the modern touchstone of evil, comparing 'selective' abortions . . . with the Nazi Eugenics program of race purification [because] . . . this time, he says, we are doing the very same thing 'with white gloves,' as if it’s just a medical procedure."
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." He is chairman of Aid to the Church in Need-USA. Mr. Marlin also writes for TheCatholicThing.org and the Long Island Business News. To read more George J. Marlin — Click Here Now.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.