1937

Founding of Euthanasia Society of America (ESA) by Charles Potter, incorporated in New York in 1938, and counting among its influential members many supporters of birth control (e.g., Margaret Sanger). It differed from previous advocates by viewing euthanasia as part of a broader struggle for social betterment, including birth control and eugenics: “the struggle for euthanasia was the immediate successor of the struggle for birth control, ” i.e., the struggle to make birth control more publicly available (Lavi, 102). Eugenic reasoning was popular among euthanasia supporters: “euthanasia was closely tied to birth control in that both sought to use medical means to minimize social suffering by regulating undesired life. It is, therefore, no accident that the initial discussion of euthanasia as a eugenic solution was raised in the context of deformed babies” (108). ESA drew inspiration and advice from British Society for Legalization of Voluntary Euthanasia, founded in 1935 (113-114). In the face of Nazi euthanasia, the ESA “did not change its course of action, or its name, until the late 1960s” (121), and “The ESA continued to toy with the possibility that nonvoluntary euthanasia could be offered to the unfit in the United States” (123). “. . . the problem of the Nazi euthanasia was its unlawfulness, while the moral superiority of the ESA proposal was its lawfulness” (124).