Eugenics or "good genes" refers to selective breeding techniques designed to "improve the race." Usually this meant aborting babies and sterilizing people so they can't pass on their problems to children. But on the lighter side it also included birth control--however, this was birth control for the sake of social evolution (which we'll get to later). Today, eugenics is a dirty word. And rightfully so. It paints over so much inhumanity, racism, genocide, with a thin excuse of "bettering the world." Eugenics conjures images of Nazi Germany sterilizing the handicapped, of Gattaca where "inferiors" are not allowed to live, and of sterilized imbeciles in insane asylums. But little do Americans know that it was U.S. social policies which Hitler claimed as inspiration for his eugenics legislation in WWII. How could such an aweful practice sprout on American turf? The seedbed of ideas is not hard to find. The eugenics policies that were passed in America were in the 1920's and 30's and they were not repealled until "eugenics" became passe after Hitler's exploits gave it a bad name. In the 1860's the bookshelfs bowed under the heavy social weight of the newly release Origin of the Species, by Charles Darwin. But to be more technical, the title is: On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Here Darwin put forward the idea of competing animals vying for limited resources and ultimate survival in a world that is "red in tooth and claw." This natural selection idea was not all that new, but it was clearly presented and abundantly illustrated in Darwin's book. But built into Darwin's argument was a population scare forecasted by Thomas Malthus in his famous (but seriously flawed) Principle of Population. Written a few decades earlier, Malthus argued that human populations grow by multiplication while the food resources grow additively and so, he predicted, we would all run out of food within a few generations. By this logic, Human survival is a zero-sum game where we will have to restrict our growing population or "return to nature" killing each other to keep ourselves alive. Humans are just more animals subject to the cold logic of natural selection. Meanwhile, religious conversative influence in the universities was starting to wane around the start of the 20th century as well, as historically Christian schools like Brown, Yale, Harvard and Princeton were caving in to German rationalism (with its brutal skepticism), higher criticism (which questioned the historicity and truth of the Bible), and theological liberalism (which dismissed much of orthodoxy and historic Christian ethics). Ideas like the sacredness of life and the "imago dei" were being reinterpreted naturalistically or abandoned altogether. The university then had little power to fight the tide of evolutionary appeal. Naturally, with such ideas leading the way, social darwinism rode into town in royal cavalcade. By the turn of the century social evolution was swirling aboutin educated circles and into popular conversation. By the 1920's and 30's court cases and legislation were appearing which pushed for sterilization of imbeciles, poor people, minorities and all sorts of "defectives" as they were called. In less than 20 years, estimates indicate about 600,000 people were sterilized, many of whom thought they were getting some kind of flu shot. Of course, when Hitler took the eugenics experiment into the public limelight and coldly applied its brutal logic the term became passe and most overtly eugenics-oriented legislation was repealed. However, America has not recovered from its eugenics experiment of the 1920-30's. We have just transferred the emphasis to abortion and translated the lingo into the language of "women's rights" (though the early women's lib movement carried the 'right to life' cause alongside the suffrage issue), and "choice" (though dead babies have no choice, and the vast majority of pregnancies already involved the choice of consensual sex). True to form, abortion on demand has preyed overwhelmingly on minority and impoverished populations--serving the same purposes for which eugenics and social evolution were drawn. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, herself saw the Aryan race as the most advanced race and in her "Negro Project" she targeted black ministers as cultural support in her cause saying, "The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members" (quoted in, Michael K. Flaterly, "White Lie" The American Spectator Aug. 1992). At the time she had both sterilization and birth control in mind because abortion was not yet legal. Now all three are legal, and all that has been lost is the popular acceptance of terms like "eugenics" and "social evolution." Sanger's cause was hardly slowed even when social evolution was scandalized by the cold logic of the Holocaust and and Hitler's "Final Solution." We cannot estimate how many people were preempted by the 600,000 (estimated) sterilizations in American eugenics legislation in the 1920's and 30's. But we do know that since Roe versus Wade legalized abortion in 1973 in America, in just 35 years America has seen 49,000,000 legal abortions. This year America is slated to pass the 50,000,000 mark for legal abortions. -That is almost as much as the populations of California and New York combined. Or about 2x the population of Texas. -That is more than the populations of either South Africa or South Korea. -That is about 6 million more than Stalin killed during his communist regime in Russia. -That is about 4.5 x's as many as Hitler ever killed in Nazi Germany -That is more than 100 x's as many as Mussolini killed in Fascist Italy. -That is 50 x's more than the total number of American's who have died in combat throughout U.S. History. -That is 12 million more than all the deaths in combat in all the wars in all the world during the entire 20th century. Abortion is an arm of eugenics, and, if you listen closely to the arguments used today to support it you can hear the same logic of social evolution. I pray that God has mercy on our country and intervenes to stop this genocide. We dare not cannibalize our kids for mere comfort any longer and presume to ask God's favor or blessing on our country. Lord save us from ourselves. Let the terror stop. If you are considering or know someone who is considering an abortion, please do not be another statistic in that 50 million. That is a record you don't want to be a part of. There are other options.