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The Use Of The Birth Control Movement As A Eugenics Weapon, 1920'S-1960'S, Peyton P. Holstein
The Use Of The Birth Control Movement As A Eugenics Weapon, 1920'S-1960'S, Peyton P. Holstein
Young Historians Conference
While Margaret Sanger made great strides in the crusade for legalization and open access to birth control for women, groups paired her work with ideologies such as Social Darwinism to arm the eugenics movement throughout the Twentieth-century. The eugenics movement was a culmination of racism and newly found scientific theories which led a crusade to purify the American population through reproductive cherry-picking on the basis of race. One of the primary ways that this group attempted to weed out “undesirable” races within the American population was through birth control as well as sterilization. These two movements - birth control and …
The Escalation Of Human Sterilization In The 1900s, Rebecca S. Lumbantobing
The Escalation Of Human Sterilization In The 1900s, Rebecca S. Lumbantobing
Young Historians Conference
The sterilizations of over 200,000 Americans is an often forgotten part of Western science’s not so distant past. Sterilization was proposed as a eugenic solution to combat societal issues attributed to genetics, such as criminality, pauperism, and feeblemindedness. Sterilization laws began to be implemented in several American states. However, it was not until the 1920s, that eugenics advocates E.S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe created the Human Betterment Foundation to introduce the complex conjecture of eugenics to the layman. Drawing upon the original publications by the HBF, Sterilization for Human Benefit and “Human Sterilization Today”, and contemporary reviews, this paper explores …