Planned Parenthood and the Eugenics Movement

[Geee]

National Review:

Today’s medical innovation amid moral ambiguity echoes that of a century ago.

There is a haunting familiarity to the arguments defending Planned Parenthood’s sale of body parts from aborted babies for medical research: an echo of another era of medical innovation amid moral ambiguity. Then, as now, the response of cultural leaders — especially religious leaders — is a story about the corruption, and potential renewal, of Western civilization.

 

Today we’re told there is no other way to achieve the research results we desire, because fetal tissue is a “uniquely rich source” of stem cells, which provide invaluable clues to human development. Second, we’re led to believe that research on aborted babies will heal diseases, eradicate physical defects, and greatly enhance the human condition. And finally, we’re warned that prohibiting medical experimentation of this kind would mean “subordinating science to religion.”

 

Well, now. It ought to give us pause that each of these claims was enlisted a century ago when it was believed that the tools of evolutionary science could be applied to improve the human species. “What Nature does blindly, slowly, ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly,” English anthropologist Francis Galton told a learned society in London in 1909. “As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.”