{"id":244396,"date":"2021-05-12T13:46:17","date_gmt":"2021-05-12T18:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=244396"},"modified":"2021-07-14T21:46:11","modified_gmt":"2021-07-15T02:46:11","slug":"planned-parenthood-board-std-experiments-prisoners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/planned-parenthood-board-std-experiments-prisoners\/","title":{"rendered":"Planned Parenthood board member aided in STD experiments on prisoners and mental patients"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Abortion organizations<\/a>\u00a0like Planned Parenthood and their\u00a0staffers<\/a>\u00a0have for decades been directly tied to eugenic sterilization<\/a> efforts and the targeting<\/a> of minority groups for abortion<\/a>,\u00a0population control<\/a> and racism<\/a>. And recently unearthed documents only strengthen the evidence of the cozy relationship between purveyors of abortion and proponents of eugenics. Those documents reveal that a\u00a0revered former Planned Parenthood board member was involved with abhorrent\u00a0syphilis experiments, in which Guatemalans were intentionally infected with\u00a0STDs without their consent.<\/p>\n

Like other population control measures, the highly unethical experimentation, conducted between 1946 and 1948 and co-sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), thrived on secrecy and was not uncovered until years later.<\/p>\n

Lead researcher of the study, John C. Cutler<\/a>, was aided by his wife\u00a0Eliese Cutler \u2014 a woman who was\u00a0reportedly<\/a>\u00a0a “Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania board member for more than four decades.” Together, the couple funded multiple pro-abortion and eugenics-based organizations during their marriage. As can be seen in the image below, John Cutler claimed Eliese “assisted as a volunteer in the [STD research] project and used her own camears [sic]… She had training as a photographer.”<\/p>\n

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John C Cutler praises wife Eliese for her assistance in unethical Guatemalan syphilis experiment (Image: National Archives)<\/p><\/div>\n

In his experiments, Cutler<\/a>\u00a0infected his research subjects with syphilis samples obtained from prostitutes. These grisly experiments were exposed after Cutler’s death by historian\u00a0Susan Reverby<\/a>, who reviewed the documents<\/a>\u00a0archived at the\u00a0University of Pittsburgh,<\/a> where Cutler had been employed.<\/p>\n

Cutler\u00a0became<\/a> the head of the population division of the Graduate School of Public Health at UPitt<\/a> in 1967 and appears to have been a 1974 member of the American Eugenics Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Historian Reverby found that although Guatemalan authorities approved of Cutler’s research, the individuals who were infected with the STDs did not. Cutler’s experiments were carried out on prisoners, members of the military, and mental patients. Reverby wrote that “supplies were offered to the institutions in exchange for access,” noting<\/a>,\u00a0“Cutler and the other physicians chose men in the Guatemala National Penitentiary, then in an army barracks, and men and women in the National Mental Health Hospital for a total of 696 subjects.”<\/p>\n

John Arras, a bioethicist at the University of Virginia,\u00a0gave the New York Times<\/a>\u00a0disturbing details about what Cutler did to one of his victims.\u00a0“She was first deliberately infected with syphilis and, months later, given penicillin. After that, Dr. John C. Cutler… described her as so unwell that she \u201cappeared she was going to die.\u201d Nonetheless, he inserted pus from a male gonorrhea victim into her eyes, urethra and rectum. Four days later, infected in both eyes and bleeding from the urethra, she died,” the paper reported.<\/p>\n

Reverby<\/a>\u00a0also noted Eliese Cutler’s involvement with her husband’s horrific research. Eliese\u00a0died<\/a> in 2012, nine years after her husband John’s death in 2003 \u2014 but the disturbing experimentation on Guatemalans didn’t come to light until 2010.<\/p>\n