And science as much as any other form of culture has been involved in the attempt to preserve social order; biology in particular has long served as a useful social weapon. In the late 19th and early 20th century, American and British social darwinists found in the theory of evolution by natural selection a kind of...
Tag - population control
In this article I will discuss the transition from eugenics to population control as it occurred in the work of one man, Raymond Pearl (1879-1940). Pearl is a useful and important figure for several reasons. He was a well-known biologist with a considerable reputation both in the United States and abroad. In the early...
In late November of 1974, three Los Angeles women filed claims for $2 million each against Los Angeles County-USC (University of Southern California) Medical Center, contending that they were sterilized without proper consent. The women, aged 24, 26, and 32, said their signatures on consent forms were sought while...
In 1973, two black sisters in Alabama, aged 12 and 14, were sterilized in a federally funded family planning program. Their mother had been persuaded to give her consent by making an X on a form which she could not read. She did not know that the operation was permanent.
Intense concern over rapid rates of world population growth burst into the mass media and public consciousness in the late 1960's with the publication of Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and the Meadows' Limits to Growth. The impact of these studies upon the public lay in their bold assertiveness and attractive...
The planned climax for the United Nations' World Population Year was the World Population Conference held in Bucharest, Rumania, in late August. Official, exclusive delegations composed of high level policy-makers attended from most countries. In addition several thousand others attended the prior International Youth...
There are many assumptions implicit in the argument for population control which are either questionable or outright nonsense from the point of view of radical political economy, and therefore many “radicals” have denounced the entire concept. After centuries of rapacious exploitation of the world’s peoples and...
The two letters that follow were stimulated by articles previously published by Science for the People: the first by a section in the pamphlet, Science and Technology in Latin America: Por Que?, and the second by the article, "Preventive Genocide in Latin America", in SftP, March, 1973. These letters offer criticisms...
In the late twentieth century, the precepts of Reverend Thomas Malthus are being revived, even though nineteenth century capitalists have found them inconvenient and backward. Whereas scientists such as Darwin had demolished the "scientific" basis of Malthus' predictions and socialist thinkers such as Karl Marx had...
In recent years, both the American government and the "philanthropic" agencies such as IPPF, have exerted continual pressure upon Latin American nations to reduce birth rates. A celebrated case in 1969 was Bolivia, which had recently nationalized Gulf Oil's holdings. When Bolivia, with a population density of less...