Richard Spencer, the keynote speaker in Charlottesville and the central figure of the alt-right movement, finds abortion useful. He has explained that abortion will help to bring about his vision of an elite, white America: “The people who are having abortions are generally very often Black or Hispanic or from very poor circumstances.” The people whom Spencer wants to reproduce, he says, “are using abortion when you have a situation like Down Syndrome.” It is only “the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics,” he claims, “who use abortion as birth control.”
On this understanding, abortion is a form of eugenics, helping to shape the population to produce more desirables and fewer undesirables. This is why Spencer supports the practice — not because he believes that it is a moral good or that women are owed the right to choose, but because he views it as a morally neutral tool that improves the American gene pool by making it whiter and richer.
Spencer has specifically contrasted his position on abortion with that of National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. Spencer mocks Ponnuru for undertaking a “human rights crusade,” built on the assumption that “every being that is human has a right to life.” Spencer, of course, doesn’t believe that is true.
He has openly mocked conservatives who worry about a “black genocide” or “how [abortion] is destroying black communities.” He knows that an estimated 75 percent of women who have abortions are poor. He knows that black women, receiving an outsize 36 percent of all American abortions, are almost five times as likely to terminate their pregnancies as white women. Nothing could make him happier.
Also secure in that knowledge is the pseudonymous alt-righter Aylmer Fisher, who writes in Spencer’s Radix Journal. “It is important we not fall prey to the pro-life temptation,” Fisher proclaims. Her reasoning is predictable: “The only ones who can’t [avoid an unwanted pregnancy] are the least intelligent and responsible members of society: women who are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and poor.”
This sort of racism is largely foreign to today’s pro-choice movement. Its members genuinely believe that a fetus either does not count as human life or does not carry moral value. The task of pro-lifers is to convince them on the science and ethics, and show that abortion preys on women more than it empowers them.
But abortion hits racial minorities harder than any other group, and this fact has not been incidental to its history in America. As National Review’s Kevin Williamson detailed extensively in a cover story earlier this year, progressive eugenics was “the intellectual ferment out of which rose the American birth-control movement.”
Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, wanted “to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy.” In other words, she sought to improve the human race.
However, she faced an obstacle — the same one that so troubles Richard Spencer and his acolytes: “The feebleminded are notoriously prolific in reproduction,” wrote Sanger in Woman and the New Race. This would be a problem with a solution to which Sanger devoted her life’s work: controlling the birth rate, especially among the “unfit” (read: the poor, blacks, and Catholic immigrants).
This goal brought her into contact with Clarence C. Little, the president of the American Eugenics Society (AES), and a founding board member of the American Birth Control League (ABCL), which eventually became Planned Parenthood. Little’s two associations are not coincidental: The ABCL, founded by Sanger in 1921, even shared office space with the AES. Moreover, as Williamson notes, “Little believed that birth-control policy should be constructed in such a way as to protect ‘Yankee stock’ — referred to in Sanger’s own work as ‘unmixed native white parentage.’”
Linda Gordon, author of The Moral Property of Woman: A History of Birth-Control Politics, examined the ABCL’s in-house publication, the Birth Control Review. She reports that, “A content analysis of the Birth Control Review showed that by the late 1920s only 4.9 percent of its articles in that decade had any concern with women’s self-determination.” Furthermore, “It was Sanger’s courting of doctors and eugenists that moved the ABCL away from both the Left and liberalism, away from both socialist-feminist impulses and civil liberties arguments toward an integrated population ‘program for the whole society.’”
Re: Morality of abortion
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Originally Posted by basics
my property", which is notable because most abortions involve black babies and other "undesirables." The Progressives just changed their strategy from lynching blacks to killing them before they're even born. When leftists accuse conservatives of racism, remember what another leftist [supposedly] once advised, to "accuse your enemy of that which you are guilty."
