Bluegrass Genocide
“They were forced to undergo hysterectomies. Their tubes were tied and they were given vasectomies, sometimes without anesthesia.”
The scientific and political communities in America were solidly behind the project. Those performing the sterilizations were considered humanitarian heroes, and academics who questioned the idea were subject to vilification, loss of employment, and loss of academic funding. The press and political activists formed a solid phalanx to protect the pro-eugenics side. Glenn Reynolds of
PUBLIC HEALTH HAS ALWAYS INVOLVED A LOT OF GROUPTHINK: When Sterilization Was Dogma: Why the Eugenics Movement is Relevant Today. “Eugenicists sought to ‘improve’ the human species in the same way that one would improve cattle or soybeans—and using basically the same techniques.”
Later in the day, Glenn added an update—an excruciatingly poignant email that he had received from a reader:
“After giving birth to me in 1971, just months after turning 18, the rural community hospital staff convinced my mother to have a tubal ligation before she left.
Only decades later did I realize how improper this seemed for a healthy, married, drug-free young woman of 18. But she was in Appalachia, and poor. Was the hospital staff trying to avoid more of “her kind” being born?
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/title-x-family-planning-program-1970-1977
Then I heard of the Family Planning Services Act and began to wonder if there was in 1971 a federally-funded bias toward sterilizing poor young women in Appalachia. Is this why I never had siblings and face being the sole caretaker and provider for my aging mother?
But I can only wonder because I can’t find any research or data or even articles inquiring about changes in birth and sterilization rates among women in Appalachia before/after the Family Planning Services Act took hold.
Maybe the Act didn’t make a difference at all. Or maybe it was a quiet Bluegrass Genocide.
No one seems to want to ask.”
This writer’s expression, “bluegrass genocide,” is a marvel of imagery, simplicity, and power. Nowhere to be found on the internet (till now), the term lashes an arcadian adjective to a dystopian noun. Just two words and five syllables describe a sweeping saga, imparting both sense of place and sense of horror. It starkly captures the inhumanity that, for the better part of the last century, exerted a vice grip over science, medicine, culture, politics, journalism, and public policy—the notion that experts are entitled to play God with lives in pursuit of their favored social goals. The writer’s addition of “quiet”—”a quiet Bluegrass Genocide”—makes the events described all the more vile.
Sometimes, the word “genocide” is used in a hyperbolic and, in my view, inappropriate ways, but here, the term is more than apt. For linguistic sticklers (like me), the word “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, to describe the systematic murder and exile of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire and Jews under Nazi Germany. But the word also applied to smaller, more subtle, events. Lemkin was a moving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. That document defined genocide as any of five acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” with one of those acts being, “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
The final lines of the email stick in the ears.
“Maybe the Act didn’t make a difference at all. Or maybe it was a quiet Bluegrass Genocide. … No one seems to want to ask.”
If, in fact, the question has not been asked, then it certainly should be.
While I know next-to-nothing about the Family Planning Services Act, I’m from Virginia, and I know how my state’s government, dominated by ostentatiously inbred elites, sent swarms of public health practitioners and social workers into the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains to round up and sterilize those they considered unworthy. My article on Tuesday recommended that readers view the The Lynchburg Story—a 49-minute video I used for two decades to shatter medical practioners’ perceptions of their own profession and of the conduct of science and governance in general. I’ll re-embed the link here—again with the caveat that there’s a buzzing sound at the beginning and a brief segment where the screen goes blank.
In this documentary, Roanoke Times writer Mary Bishop interviews one of the victims of Virginia’s sterilization program—a sad, gentle soul named Jesse Frank Meadows, who was incarcerated and sterilized at age 17. In the interview that elicited the Bluegrass Genocide letter, Ted Balaker asked me, “What types of people were sterilized?” If you want a relatively quick, depressing answer, read Mary Bishop’s “An Elite Said Their Kind Wasn’t Wanted”—and especially her description of Jesse Frank Meadows’s life of state-imposed loneliness.
In my estimation, the Bluegrass Genocide comment described above stands as the most meaningful response I’ve received to any Bastiat’s Window article. But here are a few other really fine comments that have been posted or emailed recently.