By Shawn Macomber on 6.23.04 @ 12:06AM
American eugenics comes into its own.
WASHINGTON -- After a lengthy incubation, the sick dreams of
Margaret Sanger are finally hatching. Against the excuses of her
modern defenders, it should be remembered that the founder of
Planned Parenthood's main interest in the legalization of abortion
was not that women should be freed from the bonds of childbearing,
but that unsavory types should be cleansed from the larger
population.
In fact, Sanger only turned to abortion when her original plan
to "apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and
segregation" to those with "objectionable traits" -- sometimes
derided as the stronger epithet "human weeds" -- found little
support. Turned out folks felt a bit queasy about sending those of
certain ethnic backgrounds and with disabilities and mental
illnesses off to "farm lands and homesteads" to be "taught to work
under competent instructors for the period of their entire
lives."
Sounds a bit like a concentration camp, no? Then again, she was
a great admirer of the Nazi eugenics movement. Like Hitler, she had
a long list of folks she wanted to eliminate from society,
including "illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals,
prostitutes, dope fiends."
More to the point, Sanger considered non-Aryan people "a great
biological menace to the future of civilization." The same woman
considered a saint today by the pro-choice crowd warned supporters
in 1939 that they did not want "word to get out that we want to
exterminate the Negro population."
But look at the massive abortion rates in modern black
neighborhoods and set them against, say, the merely moderate rates
in white neighborhoods, and it becomes depressingly clear that
Sanger helped accomplish something both depressing and
far-reaching. If these high death rates were attached to a war, it
would be called genocide. When it happens in a Planned Parenthood
office we call it progress.
AND NOW, ABORTION ON demand, combined with ever more rigorous
screening of children in the womb, has provided the perfect
backdoor for other eugenic obsessions to quietly slip back into
American life.
According to a front page article in Sunday's New York Times, upwards of
500 medical conditions can be diagnosed by tests on fetal cells
"with more than 100 tests added in the last year alone." And, as
literally hundreds of science fiction novels predicted, those of us
who fail to measure up to the state of normalcy determined by
society-at-large are getting the axe in utero.
The results are fairly ugly. For starters, more Down's Syndrome
children are now aborted than born. Not for any lack of sentience
or capacity for joy or love, they simply move too slowly for modern
tastes. Unborn children at risk for cystic fibrosis, expected to
live 35 to 40 years, are also increasingly not worth the trouble.
Tragic as the disease might be, we never react to the death of an
18-year-old in a car accident by wishing they'd never been born.
Exactly how many years must people live before their lives are
considered worthwhile?
As with anything else, the moment parents are allowed to
selectively eliminate their children because of flaws, we have to
grapple with the fact that what constitutes an abnormality can vary
greatly.
Thus, the Times tells us the story of a woman who was
born with an extra finger, which she later had surgically removed.
So far she has aborted two children when ultrasound scans showed
they had the same extra digit.
Another woman in Manhattan recently aborted a female child
because she already had three daughters and wanted a son. Her
physician, Dr. Mark Engelbert, told the Times that he was
uncomfortable with the situation, but what could he do?
"My feeling as a physician was that I've accepted the
responsibility of being her health care provider," he said. "She's
not doing anything illegal, and it's not for me to decide."
That's just it, isn't it? Those who have accepted the barbarism
of abortion are forced to follow it all the way down. Any
uneasiness about the reason for a particular "elimination" must be
set aside for the greater good.
topics:
Health Care, Abortion, Law
