What’s a little “dabbling” in eugenics between friends? (Washington Post edition)

Via the Family Foundation’s blog, we learn of a paragraph buried in WaPo reporter Anita Kumar’s post on the anti-abortion group opposing Democrat Sen, Edd Houck that is…well…quite revealing. A flier circulating in the district takes partial aim at Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger. Anita’s biographical sketch of Sanger runs like this:

Sanger, a nurse who died in 1966, is credited with opening the first birth control clinic in the nation and founding Planned Parenthood. She is a frequent target of attacks by the antiabortion-rights movement because, as she writes in an autobiography, she spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the KKK and she, like other prominent people of her time, dabbled in eugenics, which looks at ways to improve the human species.

Read that last bit again — “…dabbled in eugenics, which looks at ways to improve the human species.”

Go do a quick online search for “eugenics.” You can find this brief history of eugenics in Virginia. It isn’t pretty. In 2002, Gov. Mark Warner formally apologized for the forced sterilization of “defectives,” and more specifically, for Virginia’s own “dabbling” in eugenics:

“Today, I offer the commonwealth’s sincere apology for Virginia’s participation in eugenics,” Warner said.

“As I have previously noted, the eugenics movement was a shameful effort in which state government never should have been involved,” he said. “We must remember the commonwealth’s past mistakes in order to prevent them from recurring.”

It is strange and disturbing that a movement which callously destroyed lives can be fobbed off by Post writers and editors as a simple upper-crust past time. But perhaps it should not come as a surprise.

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About the author

Norman Leahy

Norm Leahy has written about Virginia and national politics online since 2002, beginning with One Man's Trash (OMT), and continuing through Bacon's Rebellion (both the blog and the e-zine), Sic Semper Tyrannis, NBC12's Decision Virginia, Richmond.com and Tertium Quids. He is the chief blogger at "The Score" and a producer of "The Score" radio show as well as being a Washington Examiner contributor.