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title: "The science is settled! "Others who supported eugenics included…"
date: 2016-09-15
source: facebook
type: Archer T. Ships shared a link.
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# The science is settled! "Others who supported eugenics included…

*September 15, 2016 · Facebook*

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[http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/](http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/){target="_blank"}
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The science is settled!\
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\"Others who supported eugenics included Victoria Woodhull, the suffragist and progressive activist who was the first woman to run for president; the inventor Alexander Graham Bell (who later moved away from the movement); foundations connected with the Carnegies, the Harrimans and the Rockefellers, which donated large sums toward eugenics research; professors at leading universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Johns Hopkins; and editorialists of the New York Times. Bruinius also fingers Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate who founded the American Birth Control League, the predecessor to Planned Parenthood, as having sympathy for eugenics; though Sanger did say many suspect things, her closeness to the movement has been questioned and rejected by her supporters. Then there was Theodore Roosevelt, who, in a letter to the eugenicist Charles Davenport in 1913, hoped that\
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"Someday we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type."\
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The time to act is now!\
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\" In 1907, Indiana passed "the first sterilization law in human history," Bruinius writes, and "in the next two decades, the United States became the pioneer in state-sanctioned programs to rid society of the 'unfit.\'" At least 30 states enacted similar laws, and sterilization became routine. California, which ran the most aggressive program, sterilized more than 2,500 people in a 10-year period; in all, more than 65,000 Americans were rendered infertile.\"\
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[http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/](http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/){target="_blank"}
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