The Mason Brief

Dan Mason, Ph.D.

The Forefathers of the

Modern Anti-Life Framework

Secularism, Materialism, Eugenics, Abortion, and Assisted Suicide

Ideas do not appear from nothing. They have fathers.

The ideas that now govern Western bioethics, reproductive law, and end-of-life policy were shaped by specific people who held particular beliefs and argued for particular conclusions. Most of the people living under those ideas have never heard these names. That is not an accident. A framework that presents itself as scientific, neutral, and inevitable does not advertise its founders.

The forefathers of this worldview were not identical men with identical goals. They formed connected streams: secularism removed God from public authority, materialism removed spirit from reality, eugenics ranked human worth by biology, abortion severed unborn life from legal protection, and assisted suicide placed death under human autonomy.

Those five streams flow in one direction. Follow the direction far enough, and you reach a world in which human life is valued by function, measured by utility, and disposed of by calculation.

That is the world being built around us right now. These are the men and women who drew the blueprints.

SECULARISM

George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906)

Most people have never heard of George Jacob Holyoake. He is probably the most influential Englishman no one remembers.

In 1842, Holyoake became the last person imprisoned in England for publicly denying the existence of God. He served six months. When he came out, he was not defeated. He was organized. He spent the next decade developing a systematic alternative to religious public morality, and in 1851, he gave it a name: secularism.

Holyoake was careful. He did not call himself an atheist. He called himself a secularist. He argued that public life, law, education, and morality should be governed entirely by this-world considerations, without reference to God, divine command, or the afterlife. Religion could survive in private. It had no legitimate claim on public policy.

Secularism is a code of duty pertaining to this life, founded on considerations purely human, and intended mainly for those who find theology indefinite or inadequate, unreliable or unbelievable.

Holyoake, The Principles of Secularism, 1854.

That sentence is still the operational definition of every argument for keeping religion out of law and policy today. Holyoake did not invent atheism. He did something more practically consequential: he gave irreligion an institutional program and a vocabulary that could enter the public square without appearing to attack anyone's faith directly.

The effect was to make God's absence from law not a radical position but a neutral one. The burden of proof shifted. Now it is the religious claim that must justify its presence in public life. Holyoake built that shift. It took a century to complete, but the architecture is his.

MATERIALISM

Epicurus (341–270 BCE) and Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Materialism has a longer history than any of the other streams. Epicurus built its foundation twenty-three centuries ago.

Epicurus taught that the universe consists entirely of atoms and the void. The gods exist but take no interest in the material world. Death is simply the dissolution of the atomic structure that constitutes a person. There is no soul, no afterlife, no divine judgment. Morality is a social contract for mutual benefit, not a divine command.

The practical implication of Epicurus is that human beings have no soul to account for and no divine image to bear. They are material processes. Their material characteristics determine their value: their pleasure, their pain, their function and their fitness. When those characteristics diminish or disappear, the philosophical basis for their continued existence diminishes accordingly.

Epicurus did not build institutions. He built premises. Every subsequent materialist thinker in Western history borrowed those premises, whether they knew it or not.

Karl Marx formalized materialism as a social science. His dialectical materialism declared that religion is the opium of the people: a drug that keeps the oppressed from recognizing their material condition and acting to change it. He wrote: the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all other criticism.

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.

Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1844.

Marx extended Epicurean materialism into a systematic framework for analyzing society, history, and morality without reference to God or transcendent value. His framework became the operating ideology of the Soviet state, which produced the institutional catastrophes documented in this paper series. But his contribution to the movements in this article is more specific: he provided the intellectual vocabulary for treating religion as a symptom of social oppression rather than as a source of moral authority. That vocabulary is now standard in every academic department in the Western world.

EUGENICS

Francis Galton (1822–1911)

Francis Galton was Darwin's cousin. He read On the Origin of Species when it was published in 1859 and described it as a liberation from the superstition that human qualities were divine gifts. He spent the next half-century building the scientific and institutional infrastructure for managing those qualities systematically.

He coined the word eugenics in 1883. From the Greek: well-born. His definition: the science of improving the inborn qualities of the human race.

Galton's argument was simple. Natural selection improves a species by eliminating the weak. Civilization prevents natural selection from operating on humans by protecting and supporting people who would otherwise not survive or reproduce. Therefore, humans must take natural selection into their own hands through deliberate reproductive management. Science can measure hereditary human qualities. Society should use those measurements to guide who reproduces and who does not.

Galton was not a fringe figure. He was one of the most celebrated scientists in Victorian England. He developed statistical tools, including regression analysis and the concept of correlation, that are still standard today. He founded the Eugenics Society. He endowed the Galton Laboratory at University College London in his will.

His influence was direct and documented. The United States passed compulsory sterilization laws in the early twentieth century, drawing explicitly on his framework. The Supreme Court upheld them in 1927. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority: three generations of imbeciles are enough. Germany's racial hygiene laws, which preceded the Holocaust, cited American and British eugenics literature that cited Galton.

Galton did not intend genocide. He intended science to be applied to human improvement. The framework he built had a logic. His successors followed it.

The question was then forced upon me: Could not the race of men be similarly improved? Could not the undesirables be gotten rid of and the desirables multiplied?

Galton, Memories of My Life, 1908. Those two questions are still the operational logic of every contemporary argument for prenatal genetic screening, selective abortion, and population management by reproductive policy.

ABORTION AND REPRODUCTIVE IDEOLOGY

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966)

Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. It became Planned Parenthood in 1942. She is the institutional founder of the American reproductive rights movement.

Sanger's framework was explicitly eugenic. She fused Malthusian population control, Galtonian eugenics, Darwinian biology, and feminist autonomy into a single reproductive ideology. She believed that controlling reproduction, particularly among the poor, immigrants, and people with disabilities, was the most important social reform available. She wrote that the most urgent problem of any community is producing the most efficient, most competent, most capable population.

The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.

Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 1920.

Sanger was not personally pro-abortion. She preferred contraception and sterilization to termination. But her foundational argument severed the connection between reproduction and inherent human value. In her framework, a life is not inherently worth producing or protecting. Its worth is assessed by the social conditions into which it would be born, the genetic stock it would carry, and the resources it would consume or produce.

That assessment is the direct ancestor of every contemporary argument that abortion is healthcare, that restricting abortion harms vulnerable communities, and that reproductive autonomy is the foundation of women's full participation in society. Sanger built those arguments on an explicitly eugenic foundation. Contemporary reproductive rights advocates have largely stripped the eugenic framing while retaining the foundational assessment: a life's worth is conditional on the circumstances into which it arrives.

Sanger's Negro Project, launched in 1939, targeted Black communities in the American South for birth control outreach. She recruited Black ministers and physicians to lead the effort precisely to avoid the appearance of outside imposition. Her correspondence from this period makes her eugenic motivations explicit.

Planned Parenthood has distanced itself from Sanger's eugenic statements while continuing to operate the institutional infrastructure she built. The infrastructure serves the same function: providing reproductive management services concentrated in low-income and minority communities. Whether that concentration is the result of deliberate policy or a demographic coincidence is a contested question. The institution's founding purpose is not.

ASSISTED SUICIDE

Derek Humphry (1930–)

Derek Humphry is less well known than the other figures in this article. He is also the most direct.

In 1975, Humphry obtained barbiturates from a compliant doctor and provided them to his wife, Jean, who was dying of cancer. She took them and died. Humphry described the experience in his 1978 book Jean's Way, which became a founding document of the modern assisted dying movement.

In 1980, Humphry founded the Hemlock Society in Los Angeles, the first organized advocacy group for legal assisted suicide and euthanasia in the United States. The Hemlock Society later merged with other organizations to become Compassion and Choices, which today is the leading advocacy organization for assisted dying legislation across the United States. In 1991, he published Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying. It became a bestseller, appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, and provided practical instructions for self-administered death to anyone who obtained it.

Humphry's contribution is not primarily philosophical. It is institutional and practical. He built the organizations, wrote the manuals, lobbied the legislatures, and funded the ballot initiatives that produced the Death with Dignity laws now on the books in multiple American states. Oregon passed the first such law in 1994. Humphry's Hemlock Society was the primary advocacy organization behind it.

The philosophical framework Humphry operated from is Benthamite utilitarianism: a life of sufficient suffering has no obligation to continue, and the compassionate response to that suffering is to provide the means to end it. His contribution was not the argument. It was the operational infrastructure that converted the argument into law.

Good death is my aim. I believe passionately in the right of a person to self-determination, even in death, especially in death.

Humphry, Final Exit, 1991.

The phrase right to self-determination in death is the operational thesis of every assisted dying law currently on the books. Humphry did not invent the idea. He organized the movement, wrote the handbook, and built the legislative pathway. The Death with Dignity laws in Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado, and other states are his institutional legacy.

One Moral Direction

These five forefathers did not build one formal movement, but they helped build one moral direction: human life detached from God, measured by utility, biology, autonomy, and social control.

Holyoake removed God from public authority. Once God is removed from law and policy, there is no transcendent standard above the state or the expert class. The state becomes the highest arbiter of what lives are worth protecting.

Epicurus and Marx removed spirit from reality. Once persons are material processes with no soul and no divine image, their value is entirely a function of their material characteristics. There is no philosophical floor below which a life cannot be graded.

Galton proposed a grading system: measure hereditary quality, identify the fit and the unfit, and manage reproduction accordingly. Science replaces theology as the authority over human values.

Sanger applied that grading system to reproductive policy: the worth of a potential life is conditional on the circumstances into which it would be born, the genetic quality it would carry, and the resources it would require. Prevention of unworthy births is a social good.

Humphry applied it to existing lives: a life of sufficient suffering has no obligation to continue. The compassionate state provides the means to end it. Autonomy replaces dignity as the governing concept.

Follow the five streams forward, and they empty into the same place: a world in which no human life possesses inherent worth before and independent of its functional assessment.

That is not a description of the future. It is a description of the present in jurisdictions that have adopted all five frameworks simultaneously. In those jurisdictions, a child with Down syndrome can be screened, selected against, and aborted without legal consequence. A terminally ill person can request a lethal prescription and receive it. An elderly person with dementia can, in some European countries, be euthanized if the assessment determines that her quality of life no longer merits continuation.

The people making those decisions are not villains. They are following the logic of the framework they inherited from these five forefathers. The framework does not produce monsters. It produces compassionate technocrats applying rational calculations to human beings who have been removed from the category that would otherwise protect them.

What Would Have Stopped It

The framework the five forefathers built can be dismantled from only one direction: the restoration of the premise their combined work was designed to remove.

That premise is not complicated. Human beings bear the image of God. They possess inherent dignity before and independent of their biological fitness, social utility, reproductive status, or experiential capacity. That dignity is not a gift from the state. It is not a product of the social contract. It cannot be assessed, graded, or revoked by any calculation.

When that premise is present in the law, Galton's eugenics is prohibited. When it is present in medicine, Humphry's assisted dying protocol is a violation of duty rather than an expression of compassion. When it is present in reproductive policy, Sanger's population management logic has no legal foothold.

The premise requires an accountability structure external to the state and the expert class. That is what Holyoake's secularism removed from the public square and what Marx's materialism declared an illusion. When the external accountability structure is absent, the state or the expert class becomes the sole arbiter of human value. The five streams flow freely.

That is the forensic finding. Five streams, five forefathers, one direction. The foundation that would have checked each stream was the same, and its removal was the shared purpose, intended or not, of all five.

This is the intellectual and moral lineage that Clark, Foster, and York (2007) celebrate as liberating and scientific in their defense of science's materialist roots against Intelligent Design. They invoke Darwin, Marx, and Freud as the heroes of human freedom. They do not trace the downstream policy applications of the framework shared by those three figures with Holyoake, Galton, Sanger, and Humphry. The forensic question their article never asks is the one the five streams force: does a materialist permission structure that removes any higher moral boundary better protect human dignity, or does it logically open the door to the anti-life policies that its most consistent practitioners have always defended in the name of autonomy, progress, and compassion?

Dan Mason, Ph.D., is the developer of the DB-FEP + DQA + ELIS forensic evaluation framework and the author of the DB-FEP Working Paper Series published on ResearchGate. The academic companion to this article is WP-2026-039. He writes at The Mason Brief on forensic evaluation of contested scientific, philosophical, and policy claims.

The data of biology, genetics, and history remain neutral. The worldview determines the permitted conclusions.

Copyright 2026, Dan Mason, Ph.D. All rights reserved.