4
Aetna (And Basically Every Old Insurance Company) Sold Slave Policies
As much as we all hate insurance companies like Aetna, they do provide a certain peace of mind. In theory, they protect us from financial ruin following disasters like house fires, medical emergencies, or when your sex dungeon floods (with water, hopefully). Insurance protects customers' most valuable assets and property. And back in America's early days, that meant many insurance companies profited by insuring human property, i.e. enslaved people.
Slaveowners would take out policies on their slaves should they happen to die or somehow be murdered for no reason and without repercussion. For example, in 1781, a slaver ship headed for Jamaica called the Zong had a disease outbreak, and many of the prisoners got sick. Insurance didn't cover slaves dying from illness, and sick slaves didn't tend to sell so well, but insurance did cover drowning. So to save money, the crew threw 132 people overboard to their deaths, most of them chained together so they couldn't keep afloat. As soon as the ship hit the shore, the crew filed an insurance claim on their "lost product." The only reason the insurance company wasn't forced to pay was that they won an appeal claiming you can't intentionally kill the very things you insured. This was after the jury in the first case was like, "No, it's totally cool to murder over a hundred people for insurance money."
Weirdly, as the example of the Zong demonstrates, insuring slaves wasn't actually lucrative for these companies. The assholes who took out such policies also tended to be the type of assholes who killed their own slaves. To make things worse, it's not like great records existed of which slave was which, so policyholders often cashed in when any of their slaves died, whether or not they were the specific person on the insurance form. But the practice still continued right up until the Civil War, with even longstanding insurance companies offering policies until as late as 1856. In 2002, a lawsuit was filed against Aetna, along with other companies, claiming they should pay reparations for their part in slavery. It was dismissed two years later.
Related: 5 Famous Companies With Unexpectedly Dark Origins
3
Planned Parenthood's Founder Practiced "Eugenic Feminism"
Whether you believe Planned Parenthood is A-OK or a front for Satan to lay claim to young people's genitals, they provide a lot of valuable services, like cancer screenings and stemming the spread of AIDS. From the beginning, the organization has been committed to ensuring people have more reproductive choices and options. At least, as long as they weren't, uh, feeble-minded morons.
See, as many good things as Planned Parenthood does now, it's founder, Margaret Sanger, conceived of it as a eugenicist project. Sanger wanted to utilize what she called "feminist eugenics" to help mothers (whom she called "natural eugenicists") wield abortion to control a child's potential traits. She primarily blamed poverty and unwantedness as the reason a kid might grow up to be morally or physically "defective," but apparently felt that treating people like a dog show breeder was an easier fix than solving poverty.