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The fifth of the dysgenic influences which has been fostered by the institutional taboo is uncovered by recent studies of the effect of certain emotions on the human organism.
Although romantic love in its present expression may often lead to uncongenial marriages and even involve dysgenic mating, its æsthetic and refining influences are such as to make it desirable in spite of these drawbacks.
But there is a point at which philanthropy may become positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the self-supporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race. Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective are permitted to procreate and thus increase their numbers.
Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering and the social injustice which makes some too rich and others too poor. Birth Control Review. Vol. V. No. 4. p. 7. War has thrust upon us a new internationalism. To-day the world is united by starvation, disease and misery.
In removing the economic handicaps at present connected with the reproductive function in women, care must also be taken that the very measures which insure this do not themselves become dysgenic influences.
The sixth dysgenic effect of the control by taboos is the rebellion of economically independent women who refuse motherhood under the only conditions society leaves open to them. The statistics in existence, though open to criticism, indicate that the most highly trained women in America are not perpetuating themselves.
Any attempt, therefore, to split up womanhood, so that the lower types shall become the mothers, and the higher the companions of men, is a directly dysgenic proposal, opposing the great eugenic principle that the best of both sexes must be the parents of the future.
Ignored though it be by the feminist leaders, this is the first of questions; and in so far as any clear opinion on it is emerging from the welter of prejudices, that opinion is hitherto inimical to the feminist claims. Most notably is this the case in America, where the dysgenic consequences of the so-called higher education of women have been clearly demonstrated.
The effect of maternity endowments and maternity centers supported by private philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute necessity is to discourage it. Such "benevolence" is not merely superficial and near-sighted.
Eugenics thus aims to seek out the root of our trouble, to study humanity as a kinetic, dynamic, evolutionary organism, shifting and changing with the successive generations, rising and falling, cleansing itself of inherent defects, or under adverse and dysgenic influences, sinking into degeneration and deterioration.
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