The state of Indiana had asked the Supreme court to review a Seventh Circuit decision striking down an Indiana law regulating abortion. Today, the Supreme Court handed down a mixed ruling in Box v. Planned Parenthood.
Good News: The Court reversed the Seventh Circuit’s earlier ruling invalidating a provision on disposal of fetal remains from abortions. The Supreme Court has upheld part of the first provision of the Indiana abortion law that requires that the fetal remains be buried or cremated after an abortion. No longer will Indiana abortion facilities treat aborted children as “‘infectious waste’ and incinerat[e] them alongside used needles, laboratory-animal carcasses, and surgical byproducts.” These little ones will finally get the dignity they deserve.
Bad News: However, the Court left in place the ruling of the lower court that struck down Indiana’s law that prohibited abortions performed solely on the basis of sex, race, or disability. This part of the law is often referred to as a “nondiscrimination” provision.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a lengthy opinion voicing his opposition for keeping the “non-discrimination” provision blocked, citing the eugenic roots of abortion (emphasis added):
Each of the immutable characteristics protected by this law can be known relatively early in a pregnancy, and the law prevents them from becoming the sole criterion for deciding whether the child will live or die. Put differently, this law and other laws like it promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.
Conclusively, remaining silent on prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or disability is dangerous:
Enshrining a constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement.
As I have discussed previously, abortion is the pinnacle achievement of controlling which class or kinds of people are encouraged to breed and which ones are not.
In his opinion, Justice Thomas takes the country back to school on something so seemingly fantastical, many do not want to believe it. But when the facts are there for all to see, straight from the culprit’s own mouth, there’s no denying that abortion is a double-edged evil: it destroys both lives and consciences.
Justice Thomas begins with the legacy of Margaret Sanger and her dream of a better society which eventually led to the birth of Planned Parenthood (emphasis added):
The use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical. The foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement. That movement developed alongside the American eugenics’ movement. And significantly, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause. She emphasized and embraced the notion that birth control “opens the way to the eugenist.” (Sanger, Birth Control and Racial Betterment, Birth Control Rev., Feb. 1919, p. 12 (Racial Betterment).
As a means of reducing the “ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all,” Sanger argued that “Birth Control . . . is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method” of “human generation.” M. Sanger, Pivot of Civilization 187, 189 (1922) (Pivot of Civilization).
In her view, birth control had been “accepted by the most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.” Id., at 189. It is true that Sanger was not referring to abortion when she made these statements, at least not directly. She recognized a moral difference between “contraceptives” and other, more “extreme” ways for “women to limit their families,” such as “the horrors of abortion and infanticide.” M. Sanger, Woman and the New Race 25, 5 (1920) (Woman and the New Race).
But Sanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing “the elimination of the unfit,” Racial Betterment 11, apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics.
Whereas Sanger believed that birth control could prevent “unfit” people from reproducing, abortion can prevent them from being born in the first place. Many eugenicists therefore supported legalizing abortion, and abortion advocates—including future Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher— endorsed the use of abortion for eugenic reasons. Technological advances have only heightened the eugenic potential for abortion, as abortion can now be used to eliminate children with unwanted characteristics, such as a particular sex or disability. Given the potential for abortion to become a tool of eugenic manipulation, the Court will soon need to confront the constitutionality of laws like Indiana’s. But because further percolation may assist our review of this issue of first impression, I join the Court in declining to take up the issue now.
The term “eugenics” was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a British statistician and half-cousin of Charles Darwin…
Justice Thomas continues the history and meaning of eugenics in his opinion here. I encourage you to finish reading it and see that this is the philosophy that has been backed and continues to be backed by wealthy elites today.
Consider these facts: Nearly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are located in African-American and Hispanic communities; women with prenatal testing for down syndrome are encouraged to abort; and females are being aborted simply because they are girls. Is it just a coincidence that the founder of the nation’s largest abortion supplier, Margaret Sanger, was a racist and eugenicist?
st and eugenicist?
