If you start researching the intellectual movements of the first 30 years of the twentieth century, you will find that eugenics was extraordinarily popular on the left. I’ve been looking at Spanish feminists and co-operativists of the 1920s and 1930s, and they were all eugenicists. And so were their colleagues and friends in the rest of Europe and the US. Margaret Sanger was not an outlier. She was extremely typical.
The reason for eugenicism’s popularity among the leftist crowd of the early twentieth century is that these were the people who were absolutely convinced that their ideas were going to save the world. They were possessed by a missionary zeal. But what stood in their way was that the masses were completely uninterested in their ideas. There are only two conclusions you can draw when that happens: the ideas are no good or the masses are defective. And nobody likes abandoning their pet theories.
The rhetoric of the urgent need to eliminate the “inferior” masses that stood in the way of “superior” human beings changing things for the better had to be abandoned by the left once Hitler adopted it. But the sensibility that informed these beliefs never disappeared. A belief in dumb, unwashed masses that stand in the way of everything good because something is physically wrong with them is still an organizing principle on the left.
Clarissa's Blog 
The rhetoric was abandoned? Not so fast! Bill Clinton received this letter shortly before taking office, from Ron Weddington, co-counsel from the Roe v. Wade case. One of Clinton’s first acts in office? Legalizing the abortion pill.
““[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I’m not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can’t afford to have babies.
In 1989, 27% of all births were to unmarried mothers, a huge percentage of whom were teenagers. If current trends continue, soon a majority of the babies born will be born into poverty and one half of the country cannot support the other half, no matter how good our intentions. I am not proposing that you send federal agents armed with Depo-Provera dart guns to the ghetto. You should use persuasion rather than coercion…
No, government is going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions… RU-486 and conventional abortions. Even if we make birth control as ubiquitous as sneakers and junk food, there will still be unplanned pregnancies. There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe V Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery… And then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario.”
https://www.lifenews.com/2015/01/13/lawyer-who-drafted-roe-vs-wade-use-abortion-to-eliminate-poor-people/
Full letter can be found in Tab F here. I recommend reading it, it’s short:
http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/A_2006_jw-ru486-report.pdf
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Interestingly enough, if one is actually serious about reducing the number of out-of-wedlock births, then changing our child support laws to what they were before the 1970s or so might actually be a rational way to go about this. But it would get denounced as being too cruel, which is AFAIK why few-to-no people actually propose this.
But Yeah, it’s not surprising that once one could easily get child support for out-of-wedlock children, even if one doesn’t actually need the extra money, then the percentage of out-of-wedlock births out of all total births would gradually skyrocket.
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A funny story on this subject. I heard my 6yo declare solemnly to her 6yo cousin, “It’s impossible to have children without getting married first!”
“But my parents aren’t married,” he replied.
“Ha ha,” she said, dripping with first-grader sarcasm. “Then where did you and your sister come from?”
“I guess you must be right,” he said.
It’s all in the upbringing.
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My children are also confused about this. The neighbor kids don’t have dads…
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The general gist of that letter to Bill Clinton is not inaccurate: If the poor, dull, and uneducated were successfully encouraged to breed less while the smart and educated were successfully encouraged to breed more, then our society and any society which also experiences such trends will likely have less problems with each and every future generation. A smarter population is a more economically productive population (Garett Jones’s 2015 book Hive Mind covers this) and also possibly make better voters on average since the risk of political ignorance is possibly less with smarter people.
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Eugenicist ideas were generally popular. Among conservatives, too. https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/white-feminism-and-eugenics-the-case-of-gertrude-davenport/ … and the ultra-right (Germany 30s & 40s)
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Yes, a sizable part of the public actually does appear to support voluntary eugenics through incentives:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/07/public-policy-never-necessarily-follows-from-scientific-findings-yes-and-no/
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Let’s be real here: One can also argue that a merit-based immigration policy is eugenic, or at least eugenic-adjacent, because it selects new residents and citizens based on desirable traits of theirs while often condemning those who didn’t make the cut to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and/or oppression (because these things are much more widespread in the developing world than they are in the developed world).
The old forced eugenics was obviously bad and evil, no doubt about that. At the same time, though, I don’t view it as unreasonable for a state to say that STEM university graduates are much more likely to produce successful children than high school dropouts are and that thus the former should be given incentives to have larger families while the latter should be given incentives to curb their fertility. They would always be able to refuse these incentives if they would want to.
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