She Thought Babies With Down Syndrome Were Better off Dead — Then She Had a Child With Down(s)

Subtrack.com ^ | Feb 17, 2021 | Sarah Terzo

[jmaroneps37]

There is always time to repent while your still have breath. There was rejoicing in Heaven when she turned away from her sin.

[Pajamajan]

The "parents" of baby Doe would not even let him be adopted, and subjected a little disabled baby to a brutal death.

Monsters. If they didn't want to take care of him, they could have let him be adopted. Sick.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Starting in the 1880's there was a movement in the upper echelons of society to breed a better human. After all humans were just animals and animals were suppose to be useful or they were put down.

I have a copy of a book called "Eugenics" from 1917 sitting on my book shelf and anytime I get overly optimistic about humanity I just read a couple of chapters and come back to reality with a thud. It isn't a book about "let's kill all the inferiors" or the rantings of a want to be Hitler. It is a "let's make people better" sort of book full of the very best of intentions. Who would not want healthy and smart grandchildren?

But once you start taking it to the logical conclusions you can see the glow of giant ovens.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

It was not originally in German. That is just where it was allowed to grow unrestrained.

An insanity swept the world for a few decades. Then they saw where it ended and decided this was not a road we should go down. But the people who remember how it started and how it ended are dead or dying. And the old ideas are coming back.

And they haven't even changed the names that much.

[Bikkuri]

Your FReeper name speaks for them.. I always thought of them exactly like that 😉

[Morgana]

Okay I knew about the Eugenics movement in the 1900s, Margaret Sanger and The American Birth Control League which is now called Planned Parenthood.

I just had no idea it went as far back to the 1880’s.

Were they allowing disabled babies to die even then?

I knew about forced sterilizations that went on then and up to about 1977.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Were they allowing disabled babies to die even then?

Oh sure.

In the upper class circles they were quietly shipped off to "institutions" where they often died quickly if they got out out of the hospital. Kids that were deaf or blind were also sent off.

For the children of poorer families they did not get out of the hospitals. They just "failed to thrive". It was a real common reason for death.

To be fair there was not much they could do to correct certain or even most disabilities but just comfort care was often withheld if they believed the child was not worth it.

"Let nature take it's course" was what parents of children with a cleft pallet were told. The end result was the child starved to death.