On January 28th, Joe Biden signed an order to provide US taxpayer dollars to pro-abortion groups in the US and around the globe. Biden’s policy and the left’s objective is to help legalize abortion in other countries on the “behalf” of the American taxpayers. His decision is unconscionable to millions of Americans who believe that elective abortions should be abolished.
International Abortion Debate
Women’s rights activists fill the streets of Buenos Aires as the Argentinian Senate approves first-trimester elective abortions. After over 30 years of protests by pro-abortion advocates, the measure passed with a 38 to 29 vote in the early morning hours of December 30th, 2020. Argentina became the third country in South America to legalize elective abortions.
As we end this terrible year, a historic moment, a ray of sunshine for #WomensRights in beautiful Argentina. Thousands of women gather in Buenos Aires to celebrate legalised abortion. pic.twitter.com/IQH35Rp5CN
— Elif Shafak (@Elif_Safak) December 30, 2020
After failing to pass in the Argentinian congress in 2018, the legislation once again came to center stage in 2020 with the support of President Alberto Fernandez. Anti-abortion activists are outraged, because, as we’ve found in the United States, repealing pro-abortion legislation is very difficult. Supporters often view elective abortions as a reproductive right once it’s not illegal to have them anymore. How elective abortions came to be viewed as a right rather than a means of population control is an act of intellectual contortion, of which only the most heartless leftists are capable.
Abortion as Population Control
In the early 20th century, Margaret Sanger established Planned Parenthood centers in inner-city neighborhoods to provide birth control and reproductive education to people who couldn’t afford to support children. She started Planned Parenthood as a mechanism of voluntary population control, conveniently placed next to the people she wanted to prevent from having children.
Sanger was a eugenicist. Eugenics is the study of engineering a more desirable human species by eliminating unwanted traits from the gene pool through selective reproduction. Sanger believed that eugenics and providing birth control to those she wished did not reproduce were different means to the same end. She believed that poverty is the result of laziness, which in her mind was hereditary. Sanger wanted to eliminate the genetic predisposition of laziness by giving birth control to the impoverished. She didn’t want poor people to reproduce. For the record, Sanger opposed abortion. She found it to be immoral and peddled birth control instead. Activists today fight for what even the eugenicist founder of Planned Parenthood felt was unconscionable.
Sanger wasn’t the only person to support eugenics and the elimination of undesirable humans. Forced sterilization, birth control, and abortions have been used to wipe populations from the face of the earth, or at least minimize their prevalence in the genetic makeup of society-at-large. Widespread sterilization programs were common around the world in the early 20th century. In Bangladesh, the government offered clothing or money (in 1977 about $1.10) in exchange for getting a vasectomy. China has in recent history limited the number of offspring its citizens can have to either one or two. Nazis, who were inspired by American eugenicists such as Sanger, were almost indiscriminate in their horrifying campaign to create the perfect human race. The Third Reich often sterilized Jews, alcoholics, and political dissenters if they weren’t executed.
Intellectual Contortions
Only in recent history have we viewed birth control as a right rather than a punishment. Sanger recognized that within the framework of a civilized and peaceful society, forced population control has limited effectiveness. Much better to convince the people you wish to eliminate that it is their right to abort their own offspring. She and her ideological followers convinced the poor that to claim otherwise is heresy.
Sanger, Kathrine McCormick, and others anticipated the hard truths that young, impoverished women face when they learn of an unexpected pregnancy. Planned Parenthood offers a solution to all the worry about upset parents, runaway fathers, and the exacerbation of money problems before the endless nights of rocking the baby to sleep even begin. All they ask is that participants go through a few logical “compromises” in order to shirk the responsibility of managing another human’s life.
Sanger’s proteges reconcile the elimination of unwanted children by telling themselves and each other that the body parts being ejected from a mother’s uterus don’t belong to a living human. Modern science informs us of inconvenient facts such as the existence of a heartbeat, the feeling of pain, cycles of being awake and going to sleep, and the reactions to hearing their mother’s voice shortly after exiting the womb. If we were to acknowledge that these occurrences are indicators of life, then we would have to view abortions the same way we view taking the life of any other human who shows signs of life. Imagine taking the life of another human because their life meant some inconvenience within yours.
Modern pro-abortion activists argue is that if abortion is illegalized, then women will get abortions anyway, and will do so outside of the safety of modern medical facilities. This perspective is strikingly similar to the notion that giving clean needles to drug addicts will result in healthier addicts. In fact, even legal elective abortions are performed at an abortion clinic rather than at a hospital. If something bad were to happen, the mother would still need to be admitted to a hospital. The difference within the legalization argument is that the state would be engaged in snuffing out the existence of the abortion clinics themselves rather than legitimizing and even subsidizing the snuffing out of unborn children.
After the work of establishing pro-choice propaganda as dogma within activist organizations is done, the target populations will continue to teach these lies to each other until the objective of reducing their numbers is nearly automatic. So-called women’s rights organizations have been radicalized to the point that pro-choice is basically a religion among themselves and the people they unwittingly oppress. Until we share these truths with society-at-large the lies started by the eugenicists of the early 20th century will continue to spread.
As long as the socialist oppressors of the left don’t have enough influence to drastically change life for millions of freedom-loving Americans, the United States will remain a global superpower. For better or worse, our national media has the potential to shape the political conversations of millions due to our cultural influence and economic superiority. Our ideas tend to spread, and for the past 50 years or so, elective abortions have been legal in the United States. Make no mistake, the people of Argentina and countries where abortion isn’t available by request are fighting for these so-called rights because elective abortions are currently legal in the United States.
US Supreme Court
Elective abortions were legalized in the United States when the US Supreme Court announced their ruling on Roe v. Wade in 1973. The decision in favor of Roe was based on the premise that the 9th and 14th amendments allow women the right to privacy when dealing with matters of medicine and reproductive health. The irony of this constitutional reference is that the 14th amendment prohibits the states from depriving anyone of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law. Here the Supreme Court used the 14th amendment to deprive millions of unborn children the right to life. Pro-life advocates accused Justice Harry Buckman and others who shared the majority opinion of judicial activism.
In late 2020 Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in as associate justice for the seventh circuit on the US Supreme Court. Pro-abortion advocates decried the confirmation of Justice Barrett on the grounds that she would vote to overturn the 1973 ruling on Roe v. Wade. To balance the scales, democrats have suggested they would increase the number of justices on the court so that they could insert abortion activists.
A Ongoing Tragedy
The ideological descendants of the 1930s eugenicists will continue to fight for rebranded versions Racial Hygiene. The spread of these ideas coincides with the propagation of other socialist ideas like stakeholder capitalism, social justice, and the existence of more than two genders. The paradox of having the right to do the work of eliminating one’s own children on the behalf of one’s self or society-at-large is a tragic lie spread by a few calloused individuals to disadvantaged millions. One day, free people will reflect on the voluntary abortions of unborn children with the same shame and horror with which we collectively assign the holocaust initiated by eugenicists in the 1940s. Approximately 125,000 abortions happen around the world each day.