No, RBG Is Not Embracing Eugenics

[NB: like all my posts here, but particularly on this topic, this is a personal opinion and should in no way reflect upon my employer or any other organization with which I may be affiliated. Thx, JPB]

I so very rarely delve into abortion politics because my personal views are just that, personal, and entirely separate from my thoughts of Roe, Casey, or the broader abortion case jurisprudence as it stands today.* But this hullabaloo over Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent comments about not wanting more impoverished kids is absurd. Separate from the context, the statement is perfectly reasonable.

The quote:

It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.

Uh, yeah. For a party that embraces a smaller (if not non-existent) welfare state, this should be common sense. If abstinence were the context, this would be perfectly acceptable to the right.

The problem is one of philosophical priors, not a lurking embrace of Sangerian ethnic cleansing.

This isn’t a small semantic difference. Progressives and other pro-choice folks don’t see abortion as murder. They just don’t. You can believe it is, that doesn’t change the fact that they don’t. If you want to say that being actively pro-abortion is effectively supporting mass murder, it’s an opinion and it’s consistent. 

Suggesting, however, that RBG and other pro-choicers actively want to wipe-out the people who are poor, not the symptoms of poverty—you know, like teenage motherhood and all its trappings like dropping out of high school, working at a low-skill job that can’t pay for food, shelter and daycare, etc.—is just nonsense. 

They don't see the fetuses as people, so the underlying problem with the statement is that she does not believe abortion is killing children, not the destruction of a class or race of persons. Your problem, if you have one, is her view of abortion, not of poor people, let alone poor people of color.

Regardless of your opinion of abortion’s morality, just because a woman has an abortion at 17 because having a child would financially ruin her doesn’t mean she’ll never have kids when it’s a better time for her. Ergo, it’s not  supporting eugenics to say that, as a matter of public policy, we shouldn’t encourage unwed teenage motherhood. 

The left sees this as an abortion issue, the right sees this as a family/personal responsibility issue—both would agree, in a vacuum, unwed teen mothers are not ideal. The difference comes in what to do after a woman gets pregnant, but I’m not here to say what that should or should not be.

If you want to say abortion is murder, that’s your business. But don’t equate being pro-choice with supporting genocide through attrition. Yes, pro-choicers have a racist, horrific past—but that’s because America has a racist, horrific past. It’s no more racist to be pro-choice than it is to be in favor of small government. 

Both have roots in racism, because they both have roots in America. 

bellum medicamenti delenda est

*Indeed, RBG herself has misgivings about the rationale supporting current abortion jurisprudence.

PS—I’m not going to argue about this on Twitter, so don’t try.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

So The Nation recently published its list of "The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century." Regardless of your political leanings, the list is certainly debatable. (I may write more on some of their selections later.) But one of the last paragraphs of the introduction to the list struck me as offensively off-base:

A few of the people on the list expressed views, at some point in their lives, that progressives consider objectionable, such as Margaret Sanger's endorsement of eugenics, Earl Warren's support for rounding up Japanese-Americans during World War II, Bayard Rustin's support for the Vietnam War and Jackie Robinson's attack on Paul Robeson. They made mistakes, which may be understandable in historical context, but which should be acknowledged as part of their lives and times.

Now, it must be mentioned that Jackie did testify before McCarthy's the House Un-American Activities Committee. That's a big deal. But here's some background on exactly went down:



More here.

What, pray tell, do you suppose would have happened if some uppity nigger baseball player told HUAC, by way of polite declination, to shove it's "invitation"? Yet somehow, this action--the reluctant testimony to separate the fight for racial equality from the looming specter of communism--is mentioned in the same sentence with support for a war that killed over a million soldiers and civilians, Margaret Sanger's enthusiastic genocidal attachment to Eugenics and throwing thousands of American citizens into detention camps for their ethnicity. (Without mentioning FDR's role in it, no less.)

This "attack" was mentioned again in Robinson's profile--as was Warren's culpability in the Japanese internment in his own--but Rustin's and Sanger's "mistakes" are stricken from their laudatory bios. Apparently, to Professor Dreier and The Nation's editors, an effectively coerced statement that illustrates differing civil rights approaches--while maintaining the shared contempt of the United States' criminal and unconstitutional discrimination policies--reflects as poorly on Jackie Robinson as the racist dedication of Margaret Sanger and authorizing the false imprisonment of over 100,000 innocent people.

Unbelievable.