Pro-life leader criticizes professor’s support for coercive sterilization

Sep 2, 2010 / 23:18 pm

A British professor’s call to sterilize by force members of society who would be “inadequate parents” prompted criticism from the interim head of Human Life International (HLI), who warned that the view is more mainstream among academics and derives from a society where life is controlled “at our whim.”

Prof. David Marsland told the BBC that “permanent sterilization” is the solution to child neglect or abuse, LifeSiteNews reports.

Attributing abuse and neglect to “a very small minority of inadequate parents,” he said these parents have “a number of moral and mental inadequacies” caused by “serious mental defect,” chronic mental illness, drug addiction and alcoholism.

“Short of lifetime incarceration,” he said, the solution is “permanent sterilization.”

The professor’s response came in a BBC program which reacted to an English local council that wanted to force contraception on a 29-year-old woman. Council members judged her to be incapable of making decisions about childrearing.

Prof. Marsland is Emeritus Scholar of Sociology and Health Sciences at Brunel University, London and Professorial Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Buckingham.

HLI interim president Msgr. Ignatio Barreiro-Carambula denounced the comments on Thursday, saying they show that “no evil is ever fully buried in the past.”

"Every time we think we've seen the last of the Sangerian calls to forcibly sterilize and otherwise do away with the disabled, we are aghast at their return," he said in a Thursday press release. “Sangerian” is a reference to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist who was among the many intellectuals who called for birth control to target racial minorities and other “unfit” persons.

“Our elites have established a society of contraception and abortion, wherein life itself is just another factor to be controlled at our whim,” the monsignor argued. “This society in turn creates more and more people who are depersonalized and marginalized, and they think that the answer to this is to simply get rid of the people whose situations we have helped to create? This is insanity."

Msgr. Barreiro also warned that the professor should not be regarded as a fringe character.

"What many people may not realize is how mainstream Prof. Marsland's comments are in the 'progressive' academy,” he commented, charging that supporters of forced sterilization are “destroyers” of life.

“Only a corrupt person could make this barbarity sound so 'reasonable'," he continued. “We are not fooled. We must all denounce this evil and stop it in its tracks."

He called on Christians and all men of good will in academia to reject the reasoning of the professor and those like him who have “again gone too far.”

“We must tell them that we reject the notion that human beings are mere animals that must be controlled by those who think they know better."