Around the turn of the 20th Century, Francis Galton created a pseudoscientific approach to “improving” society through selective breeding. Building on Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest, he launched a movement that would lead to the forced sterilization of thousands of Americans — especially racial minorities and those considered “unfit” — in the name of social progress. While Americans eventually abandoned eugenics and decry its horrors today, some of the same horrors are perpetrated on children and people with disabilities in the name of self-actualization.
Both the transgender and abortion movements have eerie echoes of this dark chapter in America’s past. Supposed treatments for gender dysphoria — the persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s birth sex — involve sterilization and are disproportionately applied to children with Autism. Abortion clinics target black women with the message that abortion is empowering despite the plain fact that it involves killing an unborn baby.
While neither transgenderism nor abortion is designed to prevent Autistic people or minorities from having children, they arguably achieve some of the eugenics movement’s horrific goals. Both also traffic in pseudoscience to deny the biological reality of sex and the humanity of unborn babies.