"The Hunger Games" confronts its audience with a premise that is surely improbable and undeniably barbaric: that human life has become expendable, and children-the most innocent of us all-are the ones being used and killed for sport, their humanity masked by euphemisms. Victims are deemed "tributes."
This seems so far removed from our modern, civil rights-backed society. You may think there is no way to draw parallels, what with our 21st century emphasis on equality. Yet social Darwinism and its application, eugenics, are prevalent both in the U.S. and abroad.
On July 16, Rosa Silverman of the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph published an article with shocking statistics from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, an independent IVF regulator in the U.K. In 2009, the most recent year for data, Down syndrome was given as a reason for 31 of the 127 test-tube baby abortions. These children would not be perfect, that much they knew. But who is? Infertility had been conquered, but the young conqueror couldn't survive our own hunger games.
Earlier this month, parenting website Babble.com published an equally jarring story about Paul Corby, a 23-year-old from Pottsville, Pa. in need of a heart transplant. "According to the Corbys, and according to a letter from Penn Medicine which they shared with me, Paul has been denied the placement in large part because he is autistic," Babble contributor Joslyn Gray writes. Not only has Corby been denied a transplant outright, he has been denied any of the hope or solace that accompanies consideration for the life-saving procedure. His mother has a petition on Change.org and, at the latest count, is just thirty-two thousand shy of the three hundred thousand-signature goal.
If Corby's autism is not the principal reason behind Penn Medicine's refusal, the hospital has done nothing to rectify the public or the press's understanding of this tragedy.
If it is any consolation (it isn't), our predecessors can't hide the vestiges of social Darwinism either. Just this year, North Carolina legislators voted down a measure to provide compensation for victims of forced sterilization. According to Jennifer Calhoun of The Fayetteville Observer in a June 5, 2011, article, there were at least 7,600 documented cases of state-sanctioned sterilization between 1929 and 1974. The state's eugenics board supported forced sterilization to keep people with "feeblemindedness," among other traits, from having children. The movement was billed as a way to curb the need for welfare and other government expenses. The means to this intended end were gruesome. "'(My fallopian tubes) weren't tied,'" she said. "'Mine were cut and burned at the end. It was a tool they used to just have the power-the power of God,'" said Mary English, a victim of forced sterilization Calhoun interviewed. The state had the third most forced sterilizations in the nation under the eugenics board program.
History has spared other more brazen proponents of social Darwinism. Margaret Sanger, the founder of what is now known as Planned Parenthood, once appeared as a choice on a list of important women for a middle school project of mine. Her pernicious legacy has been whitewashed. "(Sanger) referred repeatedly to the lower classes and the unfit as 'human waste' not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenics view that human 'weeds' should be exterminated," writes Edwin Black in his book "War Against the Weak."
Her desire for Americans to embrace eugenics and, as she wrote in the April 1932 edition of Birth Control Review, "to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane...and others," speaks for itself.
Sanger's ideas may not have been subtle, but most of the other underpinnings of social Darwinism are. Next time we watch or read the latest pop blockbuster, let us pull ourselves out of the haze and acknowledge the proximity and palpability of the hunger games around us.
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