By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A British sociologist and health expert has determined that sterilization of the mentally and morally “unfit” is the best way to prevent child abuse.
LifeSiteNews.com is reporting that in an interview on a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) radio show, Professor David Marsland said “permanent sterilization” is the solution to child abuse and neglect.
“Children are abused or grossly neglected by a very small minority of inadequate parents,” Marsland said. These parents are not distinguished by “disadvantage, poverty or exploitation,” but by “a number or moral and mental inadequacies” caused by “serious mental defect,” “chronic mental illness” and drug addiction and alcoholism.
“Short of lifetime incarceration,” he said, the solution is “permanent sterilization.”
Marsland, Emeritus Scholar of Sociology and Health Sciences at Brunel University, London and Professorial Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Buckingham, made the comments in reference to a debate about a local city council that wanted to force contraception on a 29 year-old woman who was mentally incapable of making decisions about childbearing. However, a judge refused to permit it, saying such an action would “raise profound questions about state intervention in private and family life.”
Marsland agreed that the children of parents who abuse substances can be rescued from their situation, but questioned why society should allow “predictable victims” to be harmed by the same perpetrators. “Here too, sterilization provides a dependable answer.”
The professor dismissed human rights objections to his plan, saying that “Rights is a grossly overused and fundamentally incoherent concept … Neither philosophers nor political activists can agree on the nature of human rights or on their extent.”
Marsland’s arguments were partially confronted by another professor on the show, Janet Radcliff Richards, a Professor of Practical Philosophy at Oxford.
“I would dispute the argument that this is for the sake of the children,” she said. “It’s a curious case that if the child doesn’t exist, it can’t be harmed. And to say that it would be better for the child not to exist, you need to be able to say that its life is worse than nothing. Now I think that’s a difficult thing to do because most people are glad they exist.”
However, she went on to say that sterilization might be the answer in some cases, citing the “cost to the rest of society of allowing people to have children when you can pretty strongly predict that those children are going to be a nuisance.”
Commenting to LifeSiteNews on the show, Brian Clowes, director of research for Human Life International (HLI), said Marsland’s view follows that of other eugenicists such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger who also endorsed sterilization of the so-called “unfit” such as Blacks, Catholics, the poor, and the disabled.
“It does not seem to occur to Marsland that most severe child abuse is committed by people he might consider ‘perfectly normal,’ people like his elitist friends and neighbors,” Clowes said.
“Most frightening of all is Marsland’s dismissal of human rights. In essence, he is saying people have no rights whatsoever, because there is no universal agreement on what those rights actually are.”
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