50 years ago: Good riddance to Margaret Sanger

On September 6, 1966, Margaret Sanger died, eight days before her 87th birthday. Mrs. Sanger, born Margaret Higgins, was a nurse who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn, New York on October 16, 1916. Promotion of contraception was illegal then, but Mrs. Sanger fought her case in the courts and eventually won the right to promote her views. She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and the Clinical Research Bureau in 1923, and with financial assistance from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., travelled to various foreign countries to promote birth control. Conflict within the ABCL led Mrs. Sanger to leave the organization in 1928 and she took full control of the CRB, renaming it the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. The ABCL and BCCRB merged in 1939 to become the Birth Control Federation of America, which changed its name to Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. Mrs. Sanger helped to found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood in 1946, which became the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952.

Mrs. Sanger was a racist and eugenicist who had actual Nazis contributing to her Birth Control Review magazine. Planned Parenthood operates more than half of the abortion clinics in the United States; videos were made in 2015 that seemed to show personnel at Planned Parentood clinics offering to sell body parts of aborted fetuses. If the body count resulting from her ideas is any indication, Margaret Sanger may have been the most evil woman in history. She, like the Pharisees, had her reward; she was named Humanist of the Year for 1957 by the American Humanist Association, and has several buildings named in her honour.

This blogger has neither the time nor the desire to go into great detail about the evils of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood; some of the blogs on my blogroll have material on these subjects (especially the Planned Parenthood body parts scandal), and readers are encouraged to search them for information. I recommend the book Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood by George Grant (1988) as an excellent expose of Margaret Sanger and the organization she helped to found.

Australian Neo-Nazi "ethicist" Peter Singer receives his country's highest civilian honour

Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people. Proverbs 14:34

Surely some future historian, surveying our times, will note sardonically that it took no more than three decades to transform a war crime into an act of compassion, thereby enabling the victors in the war against Nazism to mount their own humane holocaust, which in its range and in the number of its victims, may soon far surpass the Nazi one. It is significant that, whereas the Nazi holocaust has received lavish TV and film coverage, the humane one goes rolling along largely unnoticed by the media. Malcolm Muggeridge, Sanctity of Life, Chatelaine, December 1979, p. 138

Professor Peter Singer, an "ethicist" whose views on the sancity of human life I find virtually the same as those of the Nazis, was named a Companion (AC) in the General Division of the Order of Australia in the Queen's Birthday 2012 Honours Lists (see page 8 of linked document):

For eminent service to philosophy and bioethics as a leader of public debate and communicator of ideas in the areas of global poverty, animal welfare and the human condition.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has compiled some revealing quotes from major figures in the animal rights movement. Of interest for this post are these, merely a small sample to illustrate Professor Singer's low view of the sanctity of human life:

An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable. — Peter Singer, godfather of the animal rights movement, Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals, 2nd. edition, 1990.

Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans. — Peter Singer, godfather of the animal rights movement, Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals, 2nd edition, 1990.

There are some circumstances, for example, where the newborn baby is severely disabled and where the parents think that it’s better that child should not live, when killing the newborn baby is not at all wrong … not like killing the chimpanzee would be. Maybe it’s not wrong at all. — Peter Singer, godfather of the animal rights movement.

Your dog can show you when he or she wants to go for a walk and equally for nonviolent sexual contact, your dog or whatever else it is can show you whether he or she wants to engage in a certain kind of contact — Peter Singer, godfather of the animal rights movement.

The one thing I would agree with concerning Professor Singer's "eminent service to philosophy and bioethics" is that while many who share his outlook pussyfoot around the implications, Professor Singer isn't afraid to take his views to their logical conclusions and state them.

Although Peter Singer is of Jewish background, that doesn't seem to have had much influence on his philosophy, as reported by Dan Goldberg of Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 24, 2012:

Although his family has a Passover seder -- “with a beet root instead of a lamb shank” -- and he celebrates Purim with his grandchildren, and Rosh Hashanah, Singer says Jewish traditions “did not play much of a role in my life.”

He concedes, though, that his family history did play a part in the development of his theories.

“As three of my grandparents died in the Holocaust, and the fourth was fortunate to survive in Theresienstadt, that was very much present in my life,” he said. “I am sure that it had some impact on my thought -- on my abhorrence of cruelty, of the naked use of power over the defenseless and, of course, of racism.”

His parents, he says, gave him the choice of whether to have a bar mitzvah celebration. He declined.

“I never believed in a god,” he said. “There may have been times when I wondered if there might be a god, but it always seemed to me wildly implausible that a god worth worshiping could allow the Holocaust to occur.”

50 years ago: Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann is executed in Jerusalem

On May 31, 1962, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, 56, was executed in Jerusalem. On December 15, 1961, a three-man Israeli court panel had sentenced Mr. Eichmann to death by hanging, four days after being convicted of all 15 charges against him. The charges were:

1/Causing the enslavement, deportation and murder of Jews;
2/Causing the deaths of millions of Jews;
3/Putting millions of Jews in ghettos, labour and concentration camps with the aim of destroying them (the Jews, that is);
4/Sending thousands of Gypsies to extermination camps;
5/Causing the inhuman treatment, deportation and murder of Jews in Axis-occupied areas;
6/Inflicting physical and mental harm on millions of Jews;
7/Planning a program for sterilization of Jews;
8/Deporting 100 Czechoslovakian children from Lidice to Poland, where they were killed;
9/Persecuting Jews on religious, racial, political and national grounds;
10/Appropriating Jewish property by force;
11/Deporting over 500,000 Poles;
12/Deporting 14,000 Slovenes;
13/Being a member of the SS;
14/Being a member of the Nazi Security Police;
15/Being a member of the Gestapo.

Go here to see an article about Gabriel Bach, the prosecutor in Mr. Eichmann's trial.

Thousands of babies aborted in U.K. because of "suspected disability"

In the United Kingdom, as in many other Western--formerly known as "civilized"--nations, the most dangerous place to be is in the womb. The reader will notice the outrage by the pro-abortionists at merely wanting the figures to be released. "Hellman asked just one question: 'Why are Adolf Hitler and the Nazis still regarded as villains by nations that are increasingly implementing his policies?'"

As reported by Hilary White of LifeSiteNews, July 21, 2011:

After a five-year legal battle, a pro-life group in the United Kingdom has succeeded in obtaining detailed statistics about eugenic abortions from the UK’s Department of Health (DoH).

26 unborn babies in the last nine years have been killed for having cleft lip or palate.The statistics reveal that thousands of babies have been killed for eugenic reasons, some of them (26 in the last nine years) for as minor a condition as cleft lip or palate, seven of them in 2010. These abortions were conducted under “Ground E,” the rule that allows any child at any gestational age to be killed whom doctors believe have a “substantial risk” of having a “serious” disability.

The UK’s Department of Health has refused since 2003 to reveal details about the eugenic abortions that are being committed in the country, arguing that the women involved could possibly be identified. However, the campaign group ProLife Alliance went to court in 2005 demanding that the figures be released. The High Court ruled against the department in April this year, but the figures were only released earlier this month.

In total, nearly 18,000 babies were aborted between 2002 and 2010 on the grounds of suspected disability. 1,189 were killed after the upper legal gestational age limit of 24 weeks. The figures show that these include 482 killed for Down’s syndrome in 2010 alone. In the same year, 181 abortions were attributed to musculoskeletal problems such as club foot, while 189 unborn children killed for anencephaly and 128 for spina bifida...

...Under current law, abortion is legal for any reason or none up to 24 weeks gestation. A recent legislative attempt to amend the Abortion Act 1967 to lower the gestational age limit for early term abortions resulted in a backlash in which age-limit restrictions were lifted for eugenic abortion.

Ann Furedi, the head of one of the UK’s most lucrative abortionist groups, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, has called the campaign to release the statistics an example of the “vindictiveness” of pro-life activists.

“Abortion for foetal anomaly is legal. Behind every one of these figures are doctors and nurses who deserve our admiration and support, and a couple who have often lost a much-wanted pregnancy.”

However, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children pointed out that the figures show that between 2001 and 2010, the number of abortions on the ground of disability rose by one-third, 10 times the increase in abortions generally.

SPUC’s Anthony Ozimic said, “It is clear that legal abortion is a system which discriminates, fatally, against the disabled.”

Responding to Furedi, Ozimic said it is misleading to refer to eugenic abortion as “losing” a pregnancy.

“It is grossly misleading of Furedi to imply that aborted babies are merely ‘lost’, as one might describe a miscarriage.” He called Furedi’s comment “extremist” and said that no abortion is ever medically necessary.

"Immortalist" Robert Ettinger, "Father of Cryonics," falls a little short of immortality in this life

And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: Hebrews 9:27

I have no doubt that Robert Ettinger is now surprised to find that Hebrews 9:27 is correct. As reported in the Daily Telegraph, July 24, 2011:

Robert Ettinger, who died on July 23 aged 92, was the intellectual father of the cryonics movement, whose members have themselves frozen at death pending scientific resurrection.

Ettinger preferred to style himself an "immortalist", since he argued that whole body or head-only freezing ("neurological suspension") was only one means of achieving indefinite life. His rationale for pursuing this goal was contained in his book The Prospect Of Immortality (1964), which revealed him as an unquenchable optimist about mankind's technological future.

He drew on his experience as a physics teacher and his interest in science fiction to predict the evolution of machines which would manufacture from raw atoms all that man needed. He foresaw intergalactic settlement, and argued that science would produce medical machines which would cure all diseases.

What now seemed to be a fatal illness would be no more than a twinge by 2050. From this it followed that the dead might be "cured" by the doctors of the future.

Ettinger proposed that governments immediately initiate a mass-freezing programme. He suggested that this might have huge social benefits. To pay the premiums on their frozen families, people would need steady work and would be compelled to live responsible lives. He predicted that when immortality was achieved, crime would become extinct, since criminals would be afraid of justice pursuing them beyond the grave. Immortality would secure for man a higher, nobler nature.

The authorities remained unmoved. But his book proved popular and did inspire a number of cryonics organisations. In 1967 the first man was drained of blood and permeated with cryoprotectant (a sort of human antifreeze) and placed in a vat of liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees.

Despite Ettinger's lofty aims, there were also opportunists, who imagined that cryonics would become big business, and outright ghouls. In the 1970s one Californian cryonics society went bust without informing the relatives of its dozen "patients", who found their loved ones decomposing in wooden packing cases in a suburban crypt. The head of that particular business had found alternative work repairing television sets.

The movement is hated by orthodox scientists, who hold that resurrecting a frozen body would be like "trying to turn a hamburger back into a cow". But by the mid-1990s there were some 65 or so people in suspension and half-a-dozen organisations dedicated to the philosophy of the deep-freeze, and catering to a growing band of immortalists.

Perhaps 1,000 people have taken out insurance policies to cover the cost of storage, which ranges between $28,0000 and $150,000. There are cryonics representatives in Britain and at least one family undertaker has added cryoprotectant perfusion to its more traditional services.

The son of Russian immigrants of Jewish stock, Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on December 4 1918. The family later moved to Detroit and young Robert was educated locally and at Wayne State University where he studied Physics and Maths. Despite his Jewish roots, he grew up a determined atheist...

...He had begun brooding on the possibilities of cryonics in the 1930s, and was later inspired by The Jameson Satellite, a science-fiction short story by Neil Jones, about a man who has his corpse placed into orbit in the belief that the cold of outer space would preserve him.

Millions of years passed, and the human race died out. Then a race of advanced aliens came along with mechanical bodies; they took the man's frozen brain, and put it in a mechanical body.

"It was immediately obvious to me," recalled Ettinger, "that the author had missed the main point of his own story – namely that if there was any sense at all in expecting a frozen person to be revived someday, there was no point in waiting for aliens to do it in millions of years. We could do it ourselves in a very short time, and not just for a few eccentrics, but for everybody."

"We have to wait for the technology of revival. But we have to see to the arrangements of freezing ourselves, because most of us are going to die long before the technology of revival is there."

In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story on the theme, fully expecting that other more influential people would pick up on his idea. When, by 1960, no mass freezing programme had been initiated, Ettinger wrote an essay on the subject, dealing mainly with "the insurance aspect", which he sent to some 200 people selected at random from Who's Who In America.

There was "virtually zero response", and he therefore wrote The Prospect of Immortality, which was first published privately. The sequel, Man Into Superman, appeared in 1968.

Ettinger retired from teaching in 1972, but to the end remained convinced that cryonics would catch on.

"Someday there will be some sort of psychological trigger that will move all these people to take the practical steps they have not yet taken. When people realise that their children and grandchildren will enjoy indefinite life," he said, "that they may well be the last generation to die."

Ettinger took particular encouragement from advances in nano-technology, the manipulation of computers at a microscopic level, which he thought would provide the machinery to successfully repair frozen corpses.

Robert Ettinger will be shipped back to Michigan to join his two wives and his mother in cold storage...