British Professor David Marsland Criticized for Pro-Eugenics Sterilization Comment
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 2, 2010
London, England (LifeNews.com) — Professor David Marsland, an Emeritus Scholar of Sociology and Health Sciences at Brunel University and a fellow at the University of Buckingham, is facing criticism from pro-life advocates for saying people who are mentally "unfit" should be forcibly sterilized.
Marsland told the BBC radio program Iconoclasts over the weekend that “permanent sterilization” is a good remedy for child abuse.
“Children are abused or grossly neglected by a very small minority of inadequate parents," and those parents stand out because of their ‘moral and mental inadequacies," caused by “serious mental defect,” “chronic mental illness” and the use of drug and alcohol.
“Short of lifetime incarceration,” they should face “permanent sterilization.”
Marsland also proposes sterilization for the children of such parents.
“Why should we allow further predictable victims to be harmed by the same perpetrators? Here too, sterilization provides a dependable answer," he says.
Monsignor Ignacio Barreiro-Carambula, the interim president of Human Life International, denounced the comments.
“Professor Marsland’s comments only go to show that no evil is ever fully buried in the past,” said Monsignor Barreiro. “Every time we think we’ve seen the last of the Sangerian calls to forcibly sterilize and otherwise do away with the disabled, we are aghast at their return.”
Here Monsignor Barreiro was referring to Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and a noted racist eugenicist who, with the support of Adolf Hitler and many progressive intellectuals, openly called for such programs to be used against racial minorities and other “unfit” persons in the early 20th century.
“Our elites have established a society of contraception and abortion, wherein life itself is just another factor to be controlled at our whim. This society in turn creates more and more people who are depersonalized and marginalized, and they think that the answer to this is to simply get rid of the people whose situations we have helped to create? This is insanity,” the HLI leader said.
“What many people may not realize is how mainstream Prof. Marsland’s comments are in the ‘progressive’ academy. These so-called ‘philosophers’ are not lovers of wisdom, but destroyers of wisdom and of life itself. Only a corrupt person could make this barbarity sound so ‘reasonable’,” said Monsignor Barreiro. “We are not fooled. We must all denounce this evil and stop it in its tracks.”
Barreiro called in particular on Christians and all those of good will who serve in academia to reject Marsland’s murderous reasoning.
He concluded, “This is an opportunity to show that although we have disagreements, at least we can agree that Marsland and those like him have again gone too far. We must tell them that we reject the notion that human beings are mere animals that must be controlled by those who think they know better.”
Related web sites:
Human Life International – https://www.hli.org
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