The Return Of Eugenics? Tennessee Judge Issues Sterilization Program For Inmates

A Tennessee judge is gaining national media attention for his unique incentive offered to inmates upon sentencing: convicts can undergo a free taxpayer funded sterilization procedure and get a 30 day reduction in jail time. Dozens have already taken advantage of the program since Judge Sam Benningfield of White County signed a standing order in May which offers vasectomies for men and a less permanent birth control implant, called Nexplanon, for women. Currently, 38 male and 32 female inmates are signed up for the program which the county district attorney is now seeking to get shut down.

Judge Benningfield described the arrangement"s purpose as "breaking a vicious cycle of repeat offenders who constantly come into his courtroom on drug related charges, subsequently can’t afford child support and have trouble finding jobs." The Tennessee Department of Health has reportedly given its approval for the local county program, which is now receiving fierce push back at the local and national levels, prompting a statement from the ACLU, which called an environment of coerced or legally pressured contraception and sterilization "unconstitutional" as a violation of basic individual rights.

White County District Attorney Bryant Dunaway has instructed his staff of prosecutors not to enter into any agreement related to Benningfield"s program, and told local Channel 5 News that, "It’s comprehensible that an 18-year-old gets this done, it can’t get reversed and then that impacts the rest of their life." Local news presented the judge as innovative and benevolent, merely looking out for the community"s interests, yet the endeavor is really nothing new. It actually hearkens back to a dirty little secret of the Progressive Era in America which rarely makes it into school textbooks: states once forced mass sterilization upon tens of thousands of citizens deemed "unfit" to produce families in a nation wide Eugenics movement that Hitler himself learned from.

Here are some fast facts about Eugenics in America and the Progressive Era:

Archival Eugenical Sterilization Map of the United States, 1935

• The Progressive economists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw science as a means of social management and control. Eugenics (meaning "well-born") involved societal and scientific intervention to bring about the "fittest" population (as in the Darwinian concept "survival of the fittest") through various means, including forced sterilization, abortions, euthanasia, and discriminatory marriage laws.


• Compulsory sterilization programs were established in over 30 states at the height of the Eugenics movement (1920"s through mid-20th c.) which resulted in over 60,000 sterilizations of often perfectly healthy people. State and mental health boards would evaluate individuals and declare them "feeble-minded", mentally deficient, or merely capable of passing on bad genes. Prison inmates were often targeted, even petty offenders, as criminality was seen as an inheritable trait. Sometimes unsuspecting people would enter a hospital for simple Appendicitis but wouldn"t figure out they"d been sterilized during their hospital stay until years or decades later.


• Notable cases include Carrie Buck, a completely normal teenager, who after being raped at the age of 17 was committed to the "Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded" where she was sterilized against her will. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. concluded of Carrie"s case that, "the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough." California"s Charlie Follett was sterilized as a child for merely being born to alcoholic parents. California accounted for about one-third of all compulsory sterilizations nation wide, and the state refused to ever compensate Follet, even denying his request for a simple burial plot after he died impoverished in 2012.


• Planned Parenthood was a product of the Eugenics movement. The abortion provider"s founder, Margaret Sanger, was among the most prominent eugenicists of the early 20th century, penning popular articles with titles like "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda" which argued that this "new weapon of civilization and freedom" could solve "race problems" and result in "racial regeneration." Racial segregationists tended to see Eugenics as a method of ensuring "racial purity" - indeed what was known was "positive Eugenics" involved laws which sought to prevent inter-racial marriage.


• Major corporate titans of the day, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution, and the Harriman railroad conglomerate were major funders of Eugenics research labs and committees.

Archival photo: Eugenicists used Anthropometry to measure "superior" physical traits.

• The "American Breeder"s Association" was America"s first eugenic organization (established in 1906), and as the name suggests, viewed humans as cattle: "strong" and "fit" qualities of human variation were studied in order to promote "good breeding" in humans. Eugenicists used Anthropometry - the measuring and study of human proportions - to establish what superior humans looked like.


• Sound familiar? Hitler was a great admirer of progressive America"s Eugenics policies and the Third Reich was directly inspired of American eugenic institutions. Hitler wrote in Mein Kamph: "The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole." Admiration went the other way too - in 1937 the American Eugenics Society issued official statements of praise for Nazi scientists as they attempted to "cleanse" the gene pool.

Tennessee Judge Benningfield"s current program is sure to restart a conversation over Eugenics. While it"s not currently to the point that inmates are "forced" into this arrangement, the catch-22 of "more jail time or get snipped" certainly could take us down a very dark and familiar path, a path that today"s progressives and advocates of centralized state social planning would like us to ignore and forget.

Bill Gates’ New Population Control Microchip Due for Launch in 2018

Bill Gates is due to launch his new population control microchip in 2018
[image: Neon Nettle]

By: Jay Greenberg, Neon Nettle | 

Multi-billionaire Bill Gates has developed a new microchip, along with researchers at MIT, that will allow for adjustments to be made to a person’s hormone levels via remote control, in a bid to reduce the planet’s population.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been working in conjunction with a small Massachusetts startup to develop the “digital pill” that will enable women’s fertility to be switched on or off, remotely, with the touch of a button.

The new “digital version of the contraceptive” pill will be tested in Africa this year where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent years developing vaccination and family planning programs.

Following testing, the microchips are due to be rolled out globally in 2018 with “every woman in America” replacing their regular contraceptive pill with the new remote-controlled chips, according to Gates.

According to the Guardian, the chip is implanted under the skin and releases small doses of the contraceptive hormone levonorgestrel on a daily basis, with enough capacity to last 16 years.

About the same size as a Scrabble tile, it houses a series of micro-reservoirs covered by an ultra-thin titanium and platinum seal.The hormone is released by passing a small electric current from an internal battery through the seal, which melts it temporarily, allowing a 30 microgram dose of levonorgestrel to seep out each day. And it can be simply switched off by a wireless remote, avoiding the clinical procedures needed to deactivate other contraceptive implants.

“The ability to turn the device on and off provides a certain convenience factor for those who are planning their family,” says MIT’s Dr. Robert Farra, adding that “the idea of using a thin membrane like an electric fuse was the most challenging and the most creative problem we had to solve.”

But just as hackers can spoof wifi remotes to operate neighbors’ garage doors and flip their TV channels, could a remote-controlled contraceptive open the floodgates for a new form of ovarian hacking?“Someone across the room cannot reprogramme your implant,” says Farra.

“Communication with the implant has to occur at skin contact-level distance. Then we have secure encryption. That prevents someone from trying to interpret or intervene between the communications.”

The idea for micro-dispensing chips was first developed in the 1990s by Professor Robert Langer at MIT, the founder of innumerable biotech companies and holder of more than 800 patents, known in the industry as “the most cited engineer in history”. His lab caught the attention of Bill Gates in 2012, during his search for a revolution in birth control (which has already spawned plans for a graphene condom), and Langer subsequently leased the technology to Microchips, a company already working on a micro-dosing implant for osteoporosis.

Langer says that the implant will be available by 2018, once the coming trials are complete, and that the device will be “competitively priced” in a bid to ensure it replaces conventional contraception.

Bill Gates recently caused controversy after he spoke out about the immigration crisis in Europe saying that the continent will be “devastated by African refugees” unless severe and immediate action is taken to reduce the population in Africa.

This has left many questioning Gates’ motives behind his vaccination programs after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had previously been accused of secretly sterilizing millions of women in Africa by doctors in Kenya after abortion drugs were discovered in Tetanus vaccines.

The program, which is funded by Bill Gates, has been accused of conducting a mass depopulation experiment on the people of Kenya without their consent.

Read more at: http://www.neonnettle.com/features/1046-bill-gates-new-population-control-microchip-due-for-launch-in-2018
© Neon Nettle

The Shocking Reason Many Teenage Girls are Prescribed Antidepressants

A striking new study published in JAMA Psychiatry links hormonal contraceptives to depression, especially in teenage girls.

The findings aren’t surprising to many women.

A professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and lead supervisor of the study, Dr. Øjvind Lidegaard said:

“We have known for decades that women’s sex hormones estrogen and progesterone have an influence on many women’s mood. Therefore, it is not very surprising that also external artificial hormones acting in the same way and on the same centers as the natural hormones might also influence women’s mood or even be responsible for depression development.” [1]

Here is What the Study Found

For the study, Lidegaard and his team tracked the health of more than 1 million Danish women between the ages of 15 and 34 over the course of 14 years, using data from the National Prescription Register and the Psychiatric Central Research Register in Denmark.

Women who were diagnosed with depression before age 15 were excluded from the study.

The researchers uncovered the following:

• Women who used birth control pills with a combination of estrogen and progestin were 23% more likely to be prescribed antidepressants than non-users.

• Women who took progestin-only oral contraceptives had a 34% greater likelihood of being prescribed antidepressants.

• In women who used a contraceptive patch, antidepressant use doubled.

• The likelihood of being prescribed antidepressants increased 60% for women who used vaginal rings.

• Women implanted with hormonal intrauterine devices (IUDs) had a 40% increased risk of being prescribed antidepressants.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation was that teens age 15 to 19 who took estrogen-progestin oral contraceptives were 80% more likely to be prescribed antidepressants.

Among women who did not use hormonal birth control, an average of 1.7 out of 100 began taking antidepressants in a given year. That rate increased to 2.2 out of 100 if the women took birth control.

While mood swings are often listed as a known side effect on the labels of contraceptives, Lidegaard’s study is the first to directly tie the products to clinical depression.

In the study, Lidegaard and his team theorized the difference in rates among women taking non-oral and oral contraceptives might be attributable to a difference in dose rather than how the contraceptives are administered.

They also noted that this association doesn’t imply that birth control alone causes depression. More research is needed to find out if there’s more to the story.

The team wrote:

“Adolescents seemed more vulnerable to this risk than women 20 to 34 years old. Further studies are warranted to examine depression as a potential adverse effect of hormonal contraceptive use.”

Unconvinced

Some experts take exception to the notion that birth control causes depression. The study did not show that depression is a direct result of contraception. [2]

They’re not surprised, though – many experts have suspected a link between the 2 for years.

Chelsea Polis, a senior research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health, explained:

“This is really resonating with a lot of women.

Part of that has to do with women’s individual experiences. Women do feel that clinicians aren’t taking their concerns seriously sometimes. And part of this reaction is this scientific literacy gap.”

Remember this?

Among women who did not use hormonal birth control, an average of 1.7 out of 100 began taking antidepressants in a given year. That rate increased to 2.2 out of 100 if the women took birth control.

These numbers show that, yes, the risk is higher, but it’s a relatively small risk to begin with.

The rates are even closer for women being diagnosed with depression at a psychiatric hospital. According to the study, 0.3 out of every 100 birth control users were diagnosed with depression versus 0.28 percent of non-birth-control users.

This does not add up to very many more cases in the birth control group, critics of the study argue.

Keyes said:

“You can have something that is twice the risk, but it can be a very rare outcome.”

However…

“This was a very well-conducted study. I think it’s an important piece of information. It lowers my confidence in my hypothesis, which is that hormonal contraception sort of regulates mood.”

Other Problems with Birth Control

Birth control has been linked to other serious health problems, as well. For example, combined estrogen-progestin birth control pills have long been tied to fatal blood clots.

Additionally, the permanent contraceptive device Essure, made by Bayer AG, has been blamed for injuring thousands of women.

Essure is inserted into a woman’s fallopian tubes, where it causes scar tissue to form and block a woman’s egg from becoming fertilized. Thousands of patients complained of adverse events, such as persistent pain, perforation of the uterus and/or fallopian tubes, internal abdominal bleeding, abnormal and irregular bleeding, and allergic or hypersensitivity reactions.

The device can also migrate outside of the fallopian tubes and become lodged in the uterus and other parts of the body.

In February 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) placed a “black box” warning on the Essure device’s packaging, but did not ban it, as many women had requested.

Sources:

[1] CNN

[2] Today

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.