{"id":93463,"date":"2023-06-08T19:10:57","date_gmt":"2023-06-09T00:10:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=93463"},"modified":"2023-06-08T19:10:57","modified_gmt":"2023-06-09T00:10:57","slug":"93463","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=93463","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

A Quiet Bluegrass Genocide<\/a><\/p>\n

Bluegrass Genocide<\/h4>\n
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Sometimes, the comments on <\/strong>Bastiat\u2019s Window<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0take my breath away.<\/strong>\u00a0Tuesday, (6\/6\/23) brought one such case. In his terrific\u00a0Shiny Herd<\/a>\u00a0substack, Ted Balaker interviewed me on the mania for eugenic sterilization of those deemed \u201cunfit to reproduce\u201d for the first 75+ years of the 20th century. As Ted and I discussed:<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThey were forced to undergo hysterectomies. Their tubes were tied and they were given vasectomies, sometimes without anesthesia.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The scientific and political communities in America were solidly behind the project.\u00a0<\/strong>Those performing the sterilizations were considered humanitarian heroes,\u00a0and 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<\/p>\n

Glenn\u2019s Substack<\/a><\/div>\n

PUBLIC HEALTH HAS ALWAYS INVOLVED A LOT OF GROUPTHINK:<\/strong>\u00a0When Sterilization Was Dogma: Why the Eugenics Movement is Relevant Today.<\/a>\u00a0\u201cEugenicists sought to \u2018improve\u2019 the human species in the same way that one would improve cattle or soybeans\u2014and using basically the same techniques.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later in the day, Glenn added an update\u2014an excruciatingly poignant email that he had received from a reader:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAfter 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.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cher kind\u201d being born?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/embryo.asu.edu\/pages\/title-x-family-planning-program-1970-1977<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

But I can only wonder because I can\u2019t 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.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe the Act didn\u2019t make a difference at all. Or maybe it was a quiet Bluegrass Genocide.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

No one seems to want to ask.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This writer\u2019s expression, \u201cbluegrass genocide,\u201d is a marvel of imagery, simplicity, and power.<\/strong>\u00a0Nowhere 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\u2014the notion that experts are entitled to play God with lives in pursuit of their favored social goals. The writer\u2019s addition of \u201cquiet\u201d\u2014\u201da quiet Bluegrass Genocide\u201d\u2014makes the events described all the more vile.<\/p>\n

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Sometimes, the word \u201cgenocide\u201d is used in a hyperbolic and, in my view, inappropriate ways, but here, the term is more than apt.<\/strong>\u00a0For linguistic sticklers (like me), the word \u201cgenocide\u201d 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\u00a01948 United Nations Genocide Convention<\/a>. That document defined genocide as any of five acts \u201ccommitted with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,\u201d with one of those acts being, \u201cImposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.\u201d<\/p>\n

The final lines of the email stick in the ears.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe the Act didn\u2019t make a difference at all. Or maybe it was a quiet Bluegrass Genocide. \u2026 No one seems to want to ask.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If, in fact, the question has not been asked, then it certainly should be.<\/p>\n

While I know next-to-nothing about the Family Planning Services Act, I\u2019m from Virginia, and I know how my state\u2019s 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.<\/strong>\u00a0My article on Tuesday recommended that readers view the\u00a0The Lynchburg Story<\/em>\u2014a 49-minute video I used for two decades to shatter medical practioners\u2019 perceptions of their own profession and of the conduct of science and governance in general. I\u2019ll re-embed the link here\u2014again with the caveat that there\u2019s a buzzing sound at the beginning and a brief segment where the screen goes blank.<\/p>\n

In this documentary,\u00a0<\/strong>Roanoke Times<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0writer Mary Bishop interviews one of the victims of Virginia\u2019s sterilization program\u2014a sad, gentle soul named Jesse Frank Meadows, who was incarcerated and sterilized at age 17.\u00a0<\/strong>In the interview that elicited the Bluegrass Genocide letter, Ted Balaker asked me, \u201cWhat types of people were sterilized?\u201d If you want a relatively quick, depressing answer, read Mary Bishop\u2019s \u201cAn Elite Said Their Kind Wasn\u2019t Wanted<\/a>\u201d\u2014and especially her description of Jesse Frank Meadows\u2019s life of state-imposed loneliness.<\/p>\n

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