Monthly Archives: August 2022

An abortion rights activist in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in response to the leaked Supreme Court draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on May 3, 2022. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Tucked away in a footnote of Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the Supreme Court proclaims that some proponents of liberal access to abortion have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.It thus implies that overturning Roe v. Wade will turn the tide away from this genocidal impulse.

In support of its claim regarding population suppression, the Court cites a concurring opinion from Justice Thomas in the 2019 case of Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in which he warns states to not become a tool of modern-day eugenics by permitting abortion based upon the race of the fetus (or other select characteristics, such as sex or disability). Putting historical muscle behind this caution, Thomas insists that the use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals [is] not merely hypothetical but that it had been a strategy of early 20th century birth control advocatesmost famously Margaret Sangeras a means of reducing the ever increasing, unceasing spawning class of human beings who should never have been born at all.

In sounding the alarm, Thomas relies upon, as Professor Melissa Murray wrote, a selective history of reproductive rights, which is associated with the movement to legalize birth control, with no demonstrable crossover support for using abortion as a means of ridding the nation of undesirables.

Further pushing back against Thomas problematic reading of the historical record, Professor Paul Lombardi, a leading scholar of the eugenics movement, stressed, Ive been studying this stuff for 40 years and Ive never been able to find a leader of the eugenics movement that came out and said they supported abortion.

Thomas, of course, is not the only one to assert that supporters of abortion rights are engaged in a nefarious eugenical plot, which currently is aimed in large part at the Black community. Perhaps most famously in this regard is the Black genocide billboard campaign launched by Radiance Foundation in 2010 during Black History Month as an integral part of its Too Many Aborted initiative. Deploying catchy phrases such as The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb or All Black Lives Matter, these posters seek to call out Planned Parenthoods eugenic past and unaltered racist and elitist DNA, and to alert the public that Abortion is the #1 killer in the Black community.

In accord with this claim, the majority footnote in Dobbs notes that the plot to suppress the size of the African American population by way of liberal access to abortion has been successful. As stated, It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect. A highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are Black.

Wholly ignored here, however, is the underlying reality, as argued in the amicus brief filed in Dobbs by the Howard School of Law Human and Civil Rights Clinic, that this disproportionality stems from disparate health outcomes and access to healthcare by Black women. It also gives short shrift to the fact that this disparity likely drives many women to choose an abortion rather than undergo a pregnancy that may put them at risk of death [and] are also intimately connected to the historical subjugation of Black women that has been endemic in this country.

As Murray argued, the abortion and eugenics linkage also promotes a masculinist vision of abortion, and in so doing, evinces a palpable distrust of Black women and their reproductive choices.

The Courts reliance upon Thomas concurring opinion in Box is marred by yet another deep flawnamely, that he inverts the historical record. It is not supporters of liberal access to abortion who have sought to harness it for eugenical ends. Rather, eugenics were an integral component of the successful 19th century crusade by elite physicians to make abortion a strict statutory crime, subject only to a life-saving exception.

Of deep concern, these activists feared that the increasing reliance upon abortionby respectable married women who were white, Protestant and native-born like themtocontrol family size would result in the loss of national characteristics with the eventual assimilation into those of our foreign population. As one prominent anti-abortion physician falsely forewarned, unless their women began fulfilling their procreative responsibilities, the best stock that the world ever saw, under what would be considered the best family training, the highest ranks order of educational influences and the purest religious instruction, would be replaced by a people of foreign origin, with far less intelligence and a religion entirely different.

Making clear that this was not mere idle speculation, in 1890, a fellow (they were all men) physician bemoaned the fact that the once cultured Boston, the proud city of the Puritans had become almost, if not quite, an Irish and a Catholic city, rejoicing in the possession of a mayor by the classic name of OBrien. Steeped in these nativist views, abortion was accordingly cast as an offence of a national and political nature.

The anti-abortion physicians laid blame for the precarious demographic state of the country squarely upon the shoulders of the modern respectable matron. They derisively proclaimed that she had been led astray by the contemporaneous womens rights movement which was spreading the foolish propaganda that women [were] born for higher and nobler purposes than the propagation of the species. They thus proclaimed that the future destiny of the nation rested upon the loins of our own women who were vested with a sacred obligation to reproduce an intelligent Christianity, and an intelligent and safe civilization.

Flying in the face of the effort by the Dobbs Court to position itself on the right side of history by linking abortion rights with the eugenic objective of eliminating the unfit, it was the anti-abortion physicians who, as James Mohr writes in his classic book, beat the old nativist drums on behalf of anti-abortion policies. It was they who, to again quote from Thomas concurring opinion in Box, but in support of the opposite proposition, sought to prevent the supplanting or absorption of the higher by the lower types, through the enactment of a strict criminal regime.

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SCOTUS Claims Abortion Proponents Are Motivated by Eugenics and Eliminating the 'Unfit'But History Says Otherwise - Ms. Magazine

Birth of the Abortion Industrial Complex (full series)The Race Betterment Club | Marie Stopes | Eugenics EvolvesSocialism and Mass Sterilization in India | An Empire Run on SexMarie Stopes International | The Future of Abortion Inc.

Eugenics Evolves

Prewar Germany was home to cutting-edge eugenic policies, drawing in countless British and American eugeniciststo their later embarrassment. Unsurprisingly, the eugenics lobby evaporated virtually overnight after the Allies discovered the Holocaust, permanently entangling the two in the public mind. But that movement didnt truly die. It evolved into population control.

The 1950s was the era in which social engineering became the pursuit of philanthropists and cosmopolitansliterally citizens of the worldrather than 1930s Darwinian scientists. Now absent the imagery of Josef Mengeletype murderers in lab coats, it had become fashionable for wealthy Westerners to help the worlds newly independent, postcolonial countries curb their irresponsible propagation. As an issue, population was the climate change of its day.

As early as the 1940s the Rockefeller Foundation had funded the development of cross-breeding plant technologies and practices, massively expanding food production in Mexico. This Green Revolution was a major philanthropic success launched in part to stave off poverty and communist influence abroad. But its grantmaking came to be colored by ecologist William Vogts influential and apocalyptic 1948 book Road to Survival, which warned that capitalism had caused a population explosion that would quickly outstrip the Earths natural resources unless humans adopted universal contraception.

Incidentally, Vogts popularization of overpopulation fears illustrates the common ancestor of todays environmentalists and abortion activists: He was simultaneously Planned Parenthoods national director from 1951 to 1962 and secretary of the World Wildlife Fund (now the Conservation Foundation). His writings inspired Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring in 1962, sparking a nationwide anti-pesticide campaign against DDT and ultimately the modern environmentalist movement.

Vogts alarmism has since been put to bed: Global population in 1951 was just 2.6 billion, one-third of todays 7.8 billion people, while food production has risen exponentially. Yet his theory of a global carrying capacity is still with us, only rebranded as limits to growth, sustainability, and planetary boundaries. Vogt, who came to believe humanity was doomed, committed suicide in 1968.

Rockefeller: Population Control Merges with Philanthropy

One of Vogts converts was John D. Rockefeller III, grandson of the famous Standard Oil co-founder and head of the familys two philanthropies: the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation. Rockefeller traveled extensively throughout Asia after World War II and observed food shortages and instability, conditions he blamed on Asian cultural backwardness and overpopulation, making the region ripe for Soviet communist influence.

In response, he founded the Population Council in 1952 with a $100,000 endowment. Modern civilization, the think tank concluded, had reduced the operation of natural selection by saving more weak lives and enabling them to reproduce, resulting in a downward trend in . . . genetic quality. Its goals, a boost in agriculture and a reduction of fertility, were supported by a Planned Parenthood director, reconstructed eugenicists, academics from Princeton and Columbia Universities, a representative from the United Nations Population Division (still around today), and Rockefeller Foundation population chief Marshall C. Balfour.

In the next installment, in the 1950s India implemented an unprecedented campaign of state-sponsored family planning at the insistence of international organizations.

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Birth of the Abortion Industrial Complex: Eugenics Evolves - Capital Research Center

In July, the world celebrated 200 years of Gregor Mendels birth, widely accepted as the father of genetics for his discovery of the laws of inheritance. His experiments with peas, published in 1866 asExperiments in Plant Hybridisation, identified dominant and recessive traits and how recessive traits would reappear in future generations and in what proportion. It was to lie unacknowledged and ignored till three other biologists replicated his work in 1900.

While Mendels work is central to modern genetics, and his use of experimental methods and observation is a model for science, it also set off the dark side with which genetics has been inextricably linked:eugenics and racism. But eugenics was much more than race science. It was also used to argue the superiority of the elite, dominant races, and in India, a scientific justification for the caste system as well.

For those who believe that eugenics was a temporary aberration in science and it died with Nazi Germany, it would be a shock to find that even the major institutions and journals who identified it in their names have continued by just changing their names. The Annals of EugenicsbecameAnnals of Human Genetics; theEugenics Reviewchanged its name toThe Journal of Biosocial Science, Eugenics Quarterly to Social Biologyand the institution that publishedAnnals of Eugenicsrenamed itself from Eugenic Society to Galton Institute. A number of departments in major universities, which were earlier called the Department of Eugenics, became the Department of Human Genetics or Social Biology.

All of them have apparently shed their eugenic past, but the reoccurrence of the race and IQ debate, sociobiology, thewhite replacement theoryand the rise of white nationalism are all markers that eugenic theories are all very much alive. In India, the race theory is replicated in Aryans being superior and fair as a marker of Aryan ancestry.

While Hitlers gas chambers and Nazi Germanys genocide of Jews and Roma have made it difficult to talk about the racial superiority of certain races, scientific racism persists within science. It is a part of the justification that the elite seek, justifying their superior position to their genes, not that they inherited or stole this wealth. It is a way to airbrush the history of the loot, slavery, and genocide that accompanied the colonization of the world by a handful of countries in western Europe.

Why is it that when we talk about genetics and history, the only story that is repeated is that about Lysenko and how the Soviet Communist Party placed ideology above science? Why is it that the mention of eugenics in popular literature is only with respect to Nazi Germany and not thatGermanys eugenic lawswere takendirectly from the US? Or howeugenics in Germany and the USwere deeply intertwined? How did Mendels legacy of genetics become a tool in the hands of racist states that included the US and Great Britain? Why is it that genetics is used repeatedly to support theories of superiority of the white races?

Mendel showed that there were traits that were inherited, and therefore we had genes that carried certain markers that could be measured, such as the color of the flower and the height of the plant. Biology then had no idea of how many genes we had, which traits were inherited, how genetically mixed the human population is, etc. Mendel himself had no idea about genes as carriers of inheritance.

From genetics to society was a huge leap not supported by any empirical scientific evidence.All attempts to show the superiority of certain races started with a priori assuming that certain races are superior and then trying to find what evidence to choose that would support this thesis. Much of the IQ debate and sociobiology came from this approach to science. A Bob Herbert reviewing the infamous tractThe Bell Curvewrotethat the authors Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein had written a piece of racial pornography, to drape the cloak of respectability over the obscene and long-discredited views of the worlds most rabid racists.

A little bit of the history of science is important here. Eugenics was very much mainstream in the early twentieth century and had the support of major parties and political figures in the UK and the US. Not surprisingly, Winston Churchill was a noted supporter of race science, though eugenics had some supporters among progressives as well.

The founder of eugenics in Great Britain was Francis Galton, who was a first cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton pioneered statistical methods like regression and normal distribution, as did his close collaborators and successors in the Eugenics Society, Karl Pearson, and R A Fisher. On the connection between race and science,Aubrey Clayton, in an essay in Nautilus, writes, What we now understand as statistics comes largely from the work of Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, whose names appear in bread-and-butter terms like Pearson correlation coefficient and Fisher information. In particular, the beleaguered concept of statistical significance, for decades the measure of whether empirical research is publication-worthy, can be traced directly to the trio.

It was Galton who, based supposedly on scientific evidence, argued for the superiority of the British over Africans and other natives, and that superior races should replace inferior races. Pearson gave hisjustification for genocide, History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilisation has been produced, namely the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.

The eugenics programme had two sides: one was that the state should try and encourage selective breeding to improve the stock of the population. The other was for the state to take active steps to weed out undesirable populations. The sterilization of undesirables was as much a part of the eugenic societies as encouraging people towards selective breeding.

In the US, eugenics was centered on Cold Spring Harbors Eugenics Record Office. While Cold Spring Laboratory and its research publications still hold an important place in contemporary life sciences, its original significance came from the Eugenics Record Office, which operated as the intellectual center of eugenics and race science. It was supported by philanthropic money from the Rockefeller family, Carnegie Institution and others. Charles Davenport and his associate Harry Laughlin became the key figures in passing a set of state laws in the US that led to the forced sterilization of the unfit population. They also actively contributed to the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act that set quotas for races. The Nordic races had priority, while East Europeans (Slavic races), Chinese, Africans, Indians, and Jews were virtually barred from entering the country.

The sterilization laws in the US were State laws. Justice Wendell Holmes, the doyen of liberal jurisprudence in the US, gave his infamous judgement on justifying sterilization, Three generations of imbeciles are enough. Carrie Buck and her daughter were not imbeciles; they paid for their sins of being black and poor. Again,Eugenics Research Office and Laughlin played an important role in providing scientific evidence for the sterilization of the unfit.

While Nazi Germanys race laws are widely condemned as the basis for Hitlers gas chambers, Hitler himself stated that his inspiration forGermanys race laws was the US laws on sterilization and immigration. The close links between the US eugenicists and Nazi Germany are widely knownand recorded (Edwin Black:Hitlers Debt to America, February 6, 2004). TheUniversity of Heidelberg gave Laughlin an honorary degreefor his work in the science of racial cleansing.

With the fall of Nazi Germany, eugenics became discredited. The response was to rename the institutions, departments, and journals with other names but continue the same work. Human genetics and social biology became the new names. TheBell Curvein the 90s justifying racism and a recent best-seller by Nicholas Wade, a former science correspondent of the New York Times, all trot out theories that have long been scientifically discarded. Fifty years back,Richard Lewontin had shownthat only about 6-7% of human genetic variation existsbetweenso-called racial groups; the rest, 93-94%, arewithinthese groups. At that time, genetics was still in its childhood. Later data has only strengthened Lewontins research.

Why is it that genetics and race, even class and caste pop up again and again when we discuss social issues? Why is sociobiology, with its roots very similar to eugenics, still maintain a degree of respectability? Why is it that those criticizing Soviet science and its sin of Lysenko 80 years back are still held out as a rejection of science? While eugenics and race science continue to masquerade as science?

The answer is simple. Attacking Soviet science as an example of ideology trumping science is easy. It makes Lysenko the norm for Soviet science even though Soviet science did correct its one mistake. Genetics as framed by race science in the US, the UK and Germany, had also its followers in Soviet Union. Lysenko used such divisions to advance his career and this did damage Soviet science. But why is the history of eugenics, with its destructive past, and its continuing presence in Europe and US overlooked? Even though it has persisted for more than 100 years? And continues under the modern garb of an IQ debateor sociobiology?

The reason is that it allows racism a placewithinscience: changing the name from eugenics to sociobiology makes it appear respectable science. The power of ideology is not in its ideas but in the structure of our society, where the rich and the powerful need justification for their position. That is why race science as an ideology is a natural corollary of capitalism and G7, the club of the rich countries who want to create a rule-based international order. Race science as sociobiology is a more genteel justification than eugenics for the rule of capital at home and ex-colonial and settler-colonial states. The fight for science in genetics has to be fought both within and outside science. The two are closely connected.

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Mendels genetic revolution and the legacy of scientific racism - Peoples Dispatch