Two threads by me.
Sterilize the Unfit Says British Professor
LONDON, August 30, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The mentally and morally “unfit” should be sterilized, Professor David Marsland, a sociologist and health expert, said this weekend. The professor made the remarks on the BBC radio program Iconoclasts, which advertises itself as the place to “think the unthinkable.”
Pro-life advocates and disability rights campaigners have responded by saying that Marsland’s proposed system is a straightforward throwback to the coercive eugenics practices of the past.
Marsland, Emeritus Scholar of Sociology and Health Sciences at Brunel University, London and Professorial Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Buckingham, told the BBC that “permanent sterilization” is the solution to child neglect and abuse.
“Children are abused or grossly neglected by a very small minority of inadequate parents.” Such parents, he said, are not distinguished by “disadvantage, poverty or exploitation,” he said, but by “a number or moral and mental inadequacies” caused by “serious mental defect,” “chronic mental illness” and drug addiction and alcoholism.
“Short of lifetime incarceration,” he said, the solution is “permanent sterilization.”
The debate, chaired by the BBC’s Edward Stourton, was held in response to a request by a local council in the West Midlands that wanted to force contraception on a 29-year-old woman who members of the council judged was mentally incapable of making decisions about childrearing. The judge in the case refused to permit it, saying such a decision would “raise profound questions about state intervention in private and family life.”
Children whose parents are alcoholics or drug addicts can be rescued from abusive situations, but, Marlsand said, “Why should we allow further predictable victims to be harmed by the same perpetrators? Here too, sterilization provides a dependable answer.”
He dismissed possible objections based on human rights, saying that “Rights is a grossly overused and fundamentally incoherent concept … Neither philosophers nor political activists can agree on the nature of human rights or on their extent.”
Complaints that court-ordered sterilization could be abused “should be ignored,” he added. “This argument would inhibit any and every action of social defense.”
Brian Clowes, director of research for Human Life International (HLI), told LifeSiteNews (LSN) that in his view Professor Marsland is just one more in a long line of eugenicists who want to solve human problems by erasing the humans who have them. Clowes compared Marsland to Lothrop Stoddard and Margaret Sanger, prominent early 20th century eugenicists who promoted contraception and sterilization for blacks, Catholics, the poor and the mentally ill and disabled whom they classified as “human weeds.”
He told LSN, “It does not seem to occur to Marsland that most severe child abuse is committed by people he might consider ‘perfectly normal,’ people like his elitist friends and neighbors.”
“Most frightening of all,” he said, “is Marsland’s dismissal of human rights. In essence, he is saying people have no rights whatsoever, because there is no universal agreement on what those rights actually are.”
The program, which aired on Saturday, August 28, also featured a professor of ethics and philosophy at Oxford, who expressed concern about Marland’s proposal, saying, “There are serious problems about who makes the decisions, and abuses.” Janet Radcliffe Richards, a Professor of Practical Philosophy at Oxford, continued, “I would dispute the argument that this is for the sake of the children.
“It’s curious case that if the child doesn’t exist, it can’t be harmed. And to say that it would be better for the child not to exist, you need to be able to say that its life is worse than nothing. Now I think that’s a difficult thing to do because most people are glad they exist.”
But Radcliffe Richards refused to reject categorically the notion of forced sterilization as a solution to social problems. She said there “is a really serious argument” about the “cost to the rest of society of allowing people to have children when you can pretty strongly predict that those children are going to be a nuisance.”
Marsland’s remarks also drew a response from Alison Davis, head of the campaign group No Less Human, who rejected his entire argument, saying that compulsory sterilization would itself be “an abuse of some of the most vulnerable people in society.”
Marsland’s closing comments, Davis said, were indicative of his anti-human perspective. In those remarks he said that nothing in the discussion had changed his mind, and that the reduction of births would be desirable since “there are too many people anyway.”
Davis commented, “As a disabled person myself I find his comments offensive, degrading and eugenic in content.
“The BBC is supposed to stand against prejudicial comments against any minority group. As such it is against it’s own code of conduct, as well as a breach of basic human decency, to broadcast such inflammatory and ableist views.”
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HLI Denounces Eugenicist Professor's Call to Sterilize the 'Unfit'
FRONT ROYAL, Virginia, September 2, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Monsignor Ignacio Barreiro-Carambula, Interim President of Human Life International (HLI), yesterday denounced comments made recently by British Professor David Marsland in which Marsland called for certain "unfit" members of society to be forcibly sterilized.
"Professor Marsland's comments only go to show that no evil is ever fully buried in the past," said Monsignor Barreiro. "Every time we think we've seen the last of the Sangerian calls to forcibly sterilize and otherwise do away with the disabled, we are aghast at their return." Monsignor Barreiro was referring to Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and a noted racist eugenicist who, along with Adolf Hitler and many progressive intellectuals, openly called for such programs to be used against racial minorities and other "unfit" persons in the early 20th century.
"Our elites have established a society of contraception and abortion, wherein life itself is just another factor to be controlled at our whim. This society in turn creates more and more people who are depersonalized and marginalized, and they think that the answer to this is to simply get rid of the people whose situations we have helped to create? This is insanity," said Monsignor Barreiro.
"What many people may not realize is how mainstream Prof. Marsland's comments are in the 'progressive' academy. These so-called 'philosophers' are not lovers of wisdom, but destroyers of wisdom and of life itself. Only a corrupt person could make this barbarity sound so 'reasonable'," said Monsignor Barreiro. "We are not fooled. We must all denounce this evil and stop it in its tracks."
Monsignor Barreiro called in particular on Christians and all those of good will who serve in academia to reject Marsland's reasoning: "This is an opportunity to show that although we have disagreements, at least we can agree that Marsland and those like him have again gone too far. We must tell them that we reject the notion that human beings are mere animals that must be controlled by those who think they know better."