Nicole,
” Haggis, missing the point. It does not matter if it is "national policy" or not. The US justice system allows these laws to still be on the books. And a parnet, in many states, can petition the courts to have a child under go this procedure. If the courts let it happen then it may as well be "offical national policy".
Once again, I have to respectfully disagree.
Eugenics has never been the law of the land in the U.S. and as one of your links pointed out, in 1927 The Supreme Court struck down as illegal any attempt to codify the practice of eugenics within the U.S.
Thank you for all the links I read them all. I still personally think there is a vast difference. In the U.S. concerned and loving, albeit misguided, parents decided to ask the state to sterilize their mentally handicapped child. In Sweden the state decided that because a woman was poor she was unfit to have children.
From 1936 until 1976, Swedish bureaucratic men (and women? Hard to believe) decided who would be sterilized.
In Sweden the government came to you and told you your daughter would not be allowed to reproduce.
“They included women released from prison, the mentally ill, people with learning difficulties, the poor, epileptics, alcoholics and women of "mixed racial quality".
Under those governmental standards how many of us here wouldn’t have been born?
My grandmother was an epileptic so I guess you’d have to put a check mark against my name.
My wife's grandmother was in her '30s before she learned how to read AND she was poor so the mean, redheaded Yankee nurse is doubly cursed and she'd never been born.
But, again, I realize there comes a point in any discussion when reasonable people agree to disagree. I’ll respect your position that there is no moral distinction between the two sets of circumstances and the U.S. is as equally culpable as Sweden, and move on.
