ID# 245:
Response on behalf of W.T. Doran to Harry E. Laughlin, about eugenics instruction survey
Date:
1920
Pages: 1 of 1
Source:
American Philosophical Society, ERO, MSC77,SerX,Box1: Harry H. Laughlin

245. University of Detroit Detroit, Michigan Department of Arts and Sciences February 16, 1920. Mr. Harry B. Laughlin Superintendent Eugenics Record Office Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. Dear Sir: Your letter addressed to President W.T. Doran has been handed to me. Allow me to say very frankly that in the opinion of the Faculty of the University of Detroit Eugenics is full of dangers and has been dealt with properly and unsparingly by the great authority Dr. F.E. Foerster, "Marriage and the Sex Problem" (p. 97). We make his verdict our own, especially the following: "My desire is to protect against the brutal and superficial heredity terrorism with which certain modern eugenic enthusiasts advocate a regulation of human breeding borrowed from the stables and totally foreign to the human race, where the problems of right and duty of propagation is so infinitely more difficult and complicated ....Moreover, it is only in the rarest cases that we find two parents who are both of them, physically and psychically, so equally and heavily tainted and defective, that anything could be safely predicted with regard to their children." May I also call attention to Christian Ethics by J. Elliot Ross, The Devin-Adair Co,P. 377-380, and to a number of articles which appeared in "America". Very respectfully yours, [signed] F. Heiuman S.J.
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