The Supreme Court also declared that a 20-year statute of limitations could not be applied, paving the way for compensation claims from victims after years of legal battles.

"For the state to evade responsibility for damages payments would be extremely unfair and unjust, and absolutely intolerable," the court in Tokyo said.

Japan's government acknowledges that around 16,500 people were forcibly sterilised under the law that aimed to "prevent the generation of poor quality descendants."

An additional 8,500 people were sterilised with their consent, although lawyers say even those cases were likely "de facto forced" because of the pressure individuals faced.

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Eugenics is the study of how to manage reproduction within a human population to increase desirable heritable characteristics.

Among the Chinese Communist Party's goals listed in its policy blueprint for the years 2021-2025 is to "optimize its birth policy" and "improve the quality of the population."

"I am actually very worried," Columbia professor Leta Hong Fincher told a panel of China experts in a virtual event hosted by the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) on Nov. 13.

"What caught my eye was that they actually use specific language saying that China needs to 'upgrade population quality,' " she said.

Fincher said that the Chinese government's plans to control reproduction were part of the regime's goals to maintain internal security. They would do this by encouraging growth of the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China.

At the same time, the government would systematically limit births of an ethnic minority, the Uyghur Muslims.

"We see it happening in Xinjiang with the forced sterilization of particularly Uyghur Muslim women. And the language in the plan suggests to me that the government is going to continue with that," she said.

"You have seen a huge reduction in birth rates in Xinjiang and, on the flip side, the government is also trying to coopt and persuade Han Chinese women who are college-educated into having more babies."

The government of China's Xinjiang autonomous region has acknowledged that birth rates fell by nearly a third in 2018. Much of the fall was attributed to "better implementation of family planning policy."

In Xinjiang, an estimated one million Uyghurs have been detained in re-education camps.

Inside the camps, they are reportedly subjected to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uyghurs are monitored by pervasive police forces and facial recognition technology.

The final version of the latest Chinese five-year plan will not be passed until the National People's Congress meets in March 2021.

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Angelus News

La Croix

The filmmakers interview some of the people who spent much of their young lives in psychopaedic institutions in New Zealand.

These were situated at Templeton, Braemar, near Nelson, Kimberley, near Levin, and Mangere in Auckland.

In the documentary, Dr Hilary Stace, a Victoria University disability researcher, says it wasn't uncommon in the early to mid-1900s for authorities to pressure parents into handing their wayward children over to the State where they would be "looked after".

These actions were supported by government policy at the time and a burgeoning eugenics movement.

"Eugenics is the science of selective breeding, basically that took ideas from Darwin's survival of the fittest and genetics and applied it to humans," Stace says.

"There were regulations and laws passed over the decades from about 1911 where children, but also adults, were labelled with various types of impairments which led them to be seen as undesirables."

The policy of breeding out "undesirables" led to the establishment of psychopaedic colonies in New Zealand. These were situated at the locations sited above.

When these centres eventually closed late last century, most residents moved into the community.

Until recently, the conventional view was that eugenics fell on stony ground in New Zealand.

However, a law authorising eugenic sterilisation was almost passed by the New Zealand Parliament 90 years ago.

The "eugenic sterilisation law had broad support among New Zealand politicians, medics, the judiciary, several women's organisations and academics," writes Dr Hamish Spencer in a 2018 book on the subject.

"This support would have been sufficient to gain parliamentary approval had the government pushed."

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• stuff.co.nz
• palgrave.com
• Image: stuff.co.nz

Speaking to members of the Forum of Family Associations on Saturday, Francis decried the "fashion" for prenatal testing of an unborn child's health with a view to aborting those that are sick or disabled.

He told the Forum this practice is "the murder of children...to get a peaceful life an innocent [person] is sent away..."

He went on to recall his horror when as a child he heard stories from his teacher about children "thrown from the mountain" if they were born with a malformation.

"Today we do the same thing," he said, before moving on to draw an analogy between the Nazi regime and today's expectation of physical and mental perfection.

"Last century, the whole world was scandalised by what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today, we do the same thing but with white gloves," he said.

The Nazi eugenics programmes saw hundreds of thousands of people forcibly sterilised and tens of thousands killed in an attempt to "clean" the chain of heredity of those with physical or cognitive disabilities.

Pope Francis then went on to urge families to accept children "as God gives them to us."

Throughout his papacy, Francis has often repeated the Church's consistently-held anti-abortion stance and integrated it into his condemnation of what he calls today's "throw-away culture."

In this respect he has frequently pointed out how the sick, the poor, the elderly and the unborn are considered unworthy of protection and dignity by a society that instead prizes individual ability.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Crux Now
• Reuters
• Los Angeles Times
• Image: Twitter

Speaking to an international conference entitled "Catechesis and Persons with Disabilities: A Necessary Engagement in the Daily Pastoral Life of the Church" last Saturday, Francis said he is concerned that a mentality of "rejection" prevails, as if people with disabilities weren't capable of being happy.

He condemned the "eugenic tendency" and the egotistic perspective that leads many people to marginalise those with disabilities.

The human and spiritual wealth of people with disabilities is being overlooked, Francis told the conference participants.

"Too many people still reject people with disabilities, as if it prevented them from being happy and fulfilled," he said.

"Proof of it is the eugenic tendency to suppress the unborn who have some form of imperfection."

Francis has often spoken out against abortion, which he calls a "scourge". In his view, it is similar to the "brutal tactics of the Mafia".

"At a cultural level, there are still expressions that undermine the dignity of [people with disabilities], due to the prevalence of a false conception of life," Francis said.

In addition, Francis said it's "a dangerous deception" to think that only people with disabilities are vulnerable. Quoting a girl he met during his recent trip to Colombia, the pope said that vulnerability is part of the human experience.

Instead of taking the eugenic view, Francis suggests people should seek love as the answer to their concerns about people with disabilities: not the "fake one, deceitful and pious, but the real one, concrete and respectful."

Source

• Crux
• Breitbart
• Image: CruxNow

Charlotte (Charlie) Helene Fien, who is 21, wrote her speech after watching a television documentary called 'A world without Down Syndrome'.

The documentary discussed a new test that could be used to abort all babies with Down Syndrome.

"Please do not try to kill us all off. Do not allow this test," Fien said to the UN.

"If you do allow it you are no better than the Nazis who killed 200,000 disabled people. I have a right to live and so do other people like me.

"The goal is to eradicate Down Syndrome in future. This makes me angry and very sad. I have Down syndrome. I am not suffering. I am not ill.

"None of my friends who have Down Syndrome are suffering either. We all live happy lives. We go out to the pub, have dinner parties at my friend Aimee's house, have boyfriends and have plans and goals for the future!

"We just have an extra chromosome, but we are still human beings. We are human beings!

"For those who know and love somebody with the Syndrome, the plan to eradicate Down Syndrome people is is beyond appalling and has the bitter taste of Nazi eugenics."

Today, the same thing is happening, Fien said.

"In Iceland, Denmark and China not a single baby with Down Syndrome has been born for seven years."

At present, 90 per cent of all Down Syndrome pregnancies in the UK currently end in abortion.

Fien's mother says her daughter developed normally, despite gloomy predictions from doctors when she was born.

She says Fien walked at 15 months, was toilet-trained before either of he brothers (who don't have Down Syndrome), is bilingual in French and English and can read and write in both languages. Fien's father is French and her mother is English.

Source

• LifeSite
• BrightVibes
• FoxNews
• YouTube

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Scaraffia's article comes in the wake of the Italian translation of a 1920 book by two German scholars, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, that set the ideological foundations for the Nazi program of extermination of disabled and incurably sick people.

The authors of the 1920 book (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living) proposed that the lives of the chronically ill or of the mentally and physically disabled were "unworthy of being lived" and should be given a "charitable death."

Scaraffia argues this mentality can still be seen in the "writings of many contemporary bioethicists, and of many politicians who support legislative proposals of a euthanasic type."

"Contempt for imperfect human life, over estimation of the abilities of science" are "still firmly present in our time," she concludes, and this shows that "eugenics is still alive and has not been wiped out together with the Nazi past." Read More - NCR