Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

But for one GLARING omission, and it WAS intentional as hell... I would have rated it 5 stars. It was well researched, nuanced and well paced. The historical context, rather than current standards of "enlightenment" provided a better understanding of it's founder's scientific understandings human genetics on behavior and how that impacted the purported goals of eugenics. It spends lots of the final third of the program discussing in detail the history of using genetics as an excuse for forced sterilization of "the feeble-minded. And in 1 hour 52 minutes of run time Margeret Sanger makes a single 20 second cameo appearence. Blink twice and you miss it. Even then it only mentions her using eugenics as "part" of her promotion of more liberal birth control access for women; Vassar women. Her appearence is associated with her position in the year 1926... and she is NEVER seen or heard of again. Period. Full Stop. Half the film intimately, and rightly so, links the eugenics movement to not just discussions of the feeble-minded in society.. But how it was used to shut down mass immigration following WW1 on racial purity grounds. Yet somehow, the vast oevre of Sanger's later work and promotion of first birth control and then the promotion of abortion as a racial population control just didn't quite make the "cut". See effectively, racial eugenics IS alive and well today in America. There's a reason that every population group except blacks has steadily increased as a percentage of the over all population. That reason is Planned Parenthood and of course Margeret Sanger; the greatest, most successful racial eugenecist of all. That, I suppose, was a little too much for "The American Experience" to include. I mean forced sterilizations, check; Nazis and graphic shots of concentration camps.. no problem. Yet even as Americans in the 1950s were rejecting eugenics as a result of seeing the horrors eugenics invariably led to in WW2 (and don't forget the Japanese who believed in literally CULLING the Chinese as an ENTIRE RACE)... Margeret Sanger was just hitting her stride. Pity really. See America has gotten so lost in the trees about a womans "Right to Choose" (which I actually support, I just think it's a damn poor form of birth control); we tend to forget who planted that forrest, and where.. and above all...WHY. Other than THAT.... It's really an excellent historical review of the eugenics movement in this country. I still recommend it.