The Atlantic magazine - which recently declared itself unable to affirm its own founding commitment to "Be the organ of no party or clique" - lent its pages to a full throated endorsement of eugenics and mass sterilization, The National Pulse can reveal.
The piece weighed and measured the benefits of the mass sterilization of those suffering manic depression, epilepsy, the feeble-minded, and "Certain chronic criminals," based on the idea that these were hereditary traits that should be forcibly bred out of the human population.
Little is done to make sterilization easily available on a voluntary basis, particularly to the poor and underprivileged.
Myerson's piece discusses "Mongolian idiocy," as well as "Feeble-mindedness" and epilepsy as rationales by which to enforce sterilization amongst the wider public.
We recommended sterilization in the case of feeble-mindedness.
Sterilization might well be recommended for those patients living in the community, since desirable qualities of other kinds are only incidental to schizophrenia and not part of its make-up.
As for epilepsy, we believed that if the individual's epileptic attacks were infrequent and if the qualities of the personality were intact, there was no reason for recommending sterilization.
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