Ruth Institute Blog

by Angela Franks

First published at Public Discourse.

A new biography of Margaret Sanger fails to confront the Planned Parenthood founder’s ideological commitment to eugenics and population control. Read more…

by Rob Schwarzwalder

A judge’s decision to order the abortion of “a mentally ill woman’s unborn baby and sterilize her — if it meant she had to be ‘coaxed, bribed, or even enticed … by ruse’ into the procedure” has drawn appropriate fire from officials in the Bay State. Read more…

by Shannon Roberts

Past Eugenics and sterilisation programs in the United States are coming back to bite them, with North Carolina currently the first State to address compensation for victims.

According to the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, at one time 31 states in the United States had government-run eugenics programs. In North Carolina alone, close to 8,000 men, women, and children, largely poor, black, disabled or uneducated, were forcibly sterilized from 1929 to 1974.  The programs were aimed at creating a better society by eliminating those considered undesirable.  Read more…

by Charlie Butts

Life Dynamics, a group fighting to return full legal protection to unborn children, has conducted an exhaustive study that validates claims made in its documentary that associates Planned Parenthood with the eugenics movement. Read more…

An entertaining little blurb by Michael Cook:

I missed the centenary of the death of Francis Galton on January 17. For those of  you who don’t know much about Charles Darwin’s family tree, Galton was his cousin, a prodigy who spoke Latin and Greek at three and invented foreign travel, statistics, fingerprints, weather maps and eugenics when he grew up. Read more…

Manuel and Sophia Corpas, Mercatornet.com

Ever-more sophisticated technology allows us to detect ever more genetic anomalies. What will we do with this knowledge?

One of our biggest worries in the field of genome medicine is the use of prenatal genetics tests to justify the abortion of human embryos. Current technologies allow enhanced detection of genetic abnormalities that a few years ago would have been unthinkable. Read more…

Michael Cook Mercatornet.com

Down Syndrome children are disappearing because of the popularity of do-it-yourself eugenics.

The dwarf wedgemussel, the Chittenango ovate amber snail, the Choctawhatchee beach mouse and the frosted flatwoods salamander are among 614 animal species listed as threatened or endangered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. If Dr Brian Skotko, of Children’s Hospital Boston, has his way, Down Syndrome children should be added to the list. In a recent issue of the journal Archives of Diseases in Childhood he points out that the number of DS children born is declining year by year, at least in developed nations. Read more…