Ross Douthat, like Clarence Thomas, is heavily influenced by Opus Dei, an organization that is even more anti-women than the Catholic Church in general.
57
We need to face up to the fact that most of the uproar in this topic has long since moved from morality, to politics.
Yes there are many people in the anti-choice side who are actually convinced that abortion is a moral outrage, but the frenzy we have seen since the '80s has become a tool for those politically sterile people who, with nothing to offer the majority of the nation, need the curtain of the culture war to conceal their ineptitude.
39
Justice Thomas' solution to the risk of eugenics thru expansion of personal reproductive rights is to grant States' absolute rigth regulate reproductive rights. But doesn't that gives the States' right TO conduct eugenics?
22
The right in America is busy digging deep down into random statements, political comments and even outdated philosopher's writings to try to prove there is evil actual and intended in positions taken by liberals, progressives, Democrats and anyone else who speaks for any further development away from the values of 150 years ago.
Even today, the Washington Post features a long screed by the nearly 80 year old George Will arguing that progressives want to destroy the entire notion of individual action and freedom. Will hangs this "thesis" on the thin tread of an off hand statement by Obama when president and a quote from Elizabeth Warren.
https://tinyurl.com/y5yg9yoh
Who said that progressives are always pure of thought and never a stray and unfounded notion crosses their minds? While some collectivist ideas surely seep into what is called the left, to imagine there are secret overarching ideas being pushed is a giant leap too far.
Abortion is first and last about the mother's right to choose what happens with her body and her life, placing primacy on those existing in the 360 degree world over those who might arrive without proper care, parents, housing and other essentials. There is no secret scheme behind it other than that of allowing women to move, and stay, beyond the time when their bodies were considered mere vessels for the needs of others and society.
Science and medicine leapt beyond the old ideas of human necessities and, no matter what, we aren't going back.
31
This column and Thomas's "Dangerous Idea" are rubbish. The analysis is conjecture, not history. Even the title of the column is misleading. A disgraceful and thinly veiled attempt at divide and conquer.
32
When white anti-abortion racists, in any party, remember the continued rapid increase in black, brown, yellow and red folks....they may backtrack realizing that abortions may just be the thing to keep them barely in political power...or they will keep gerrymandering to keep their political power, or maybe look on the bright side: keeping the white working and middle classes employed in the growing prison business.
9
Ross,
It is the Republicans who in 1964 adopted the philosophy of pure reason. It is the philosophy of pure reason that animates those that claim to be conservative. Pure reason is not only unhuman it is inhumane.
It is the Freedom Caucus that threatens all my Freedom.
15
Again...I really think I’ll pass on any long lecture from the likes of Clarence Thomas.
It’s got something to do with his attacks on affirmative action when we all know darn well that he wasn’t nominated because he came halfway up to Thurgood Marshall’s galoshes as a jurist, with his adoration of porn and attacks on Anita Hill together with his endless moralisms, with his repeated conflicts of interest alongside his stonefaced gall about doing the right thing.
But then, I also pass on Ross Douthat’s little scoldings and the whole passel of right-wing lunatics from the, “Daily Standard,” and similar that he’s taken to palling sround with.
I get it, okay? You have Religious Views. You want them imposed.
By the way, we ARE clear that these selfsame people are going to go after marriage equality and contraception next, assuming that they haven’t already, yes?
And we ARE clear that for all their moral pieties about eugenics, this IS the side that endlessly drones on about how Decent White People is a-bein’ outbred?
Thomas’ little screed isn’t some kind of intellectual pinnacle, or even molehill. This is the George Gilder Wingnut Wing, sounding off yet again about sexual suicide...their term, not mine.
43
"This stage ended with the Second World War and revulsion against Nazi eugenics. " When in doubt, find some way to link your opponents to the Nazis. Works every time.
27
I come back to the basic issue: what is the interest of the state in taking away a right (that is, control of one's body) in this case? Is to protect "human life" (whatever that means) when that same state spends billions a year figuring out ways to eliminate human life in multiple ways on both citizens (capital punishment, policies that reduce longevity) and non-citizens (war, carbon emissions).
The fact is there is no competing reason. We have plenty of people particularly given the fact the planet is unlikely to be able to sustain its current population anyway unless man-made global warming is addressed. And increasing the population is probably the last thing we need. As our beloved president said about of immigration problem "we have too many people!" (Sorry I couldn't help myself.)
Unless someone can tell me when a fetus passes the Cartesian threshold of "I think therefore I am", then a fetus may be "human life" but not a human being. There is a big difference. If you follow that logic then it may well be that restrictions on late stage abortions might make sense but, again, not at the expense of the mother's life.
So again, what is the state's interest in removing a woman's right to control her own body? It seems to be those interests are purely political to appease a religious minority which is expressly prohibited by the constitution.
Sorry, Ross, the origin story of Planned Parenthood is beside the point.
30
I am not sure but that Mr. Douthat’s carefully couched diatribe is not more insidious than Thomas’s misguided though clear dissent.
Only progressivism by his logic must heed to the sins of the past, in this case the specious eugenics argument, but he fails to include the same warnings to reactionaries who typically see no need at all to have any further Affirmative Action or any continued Civil Rights or Voting Acts protections and certainly not reparations to African Americans because all that is clearly “in the past” even though racism is still clearly present, unlike eugenics. However allowing a reactionary, theocratic return to patriarchal control of women because it might be tied to the past curse of long vanished eugenic thought?
Well, Thomas and Douthat see that as fine apparently.
21
I was a Catholic high school principal in 1975 when a pregnant student from another part of the country applied for admission to the junior class. I called the entire junior class into the auditorium and we discussed the situation. The class unanimously supported a decision to accept the student, and we went on to discuss how she would be treated.
She attended our school most of the year. She had her baby, gave it up for adoption, and left us. We were all sad to see her go.
Her parents came to my office in tears to express their gratitude for how their daughter was treated, accepted, how she flourished.
Throughout the entire process the only adults who complained about her presence in our school were devoted right to lifers nervous that her female classmates would catch motherhood from her. (I think that was their issue.)
This particular kerfuffle was dekerfuffed by a formidable mom who was known in the community as a right wing Catholic with the strongest possible anti-abortion views. She told me in no uncertain terms that any parent who objected to this girl’s attendance at our school should be sent to her to be straightened out.
The real world, Mr. Douthat. And not a single eugenicist in the whole crowd!
13
Is there a single NYT reader ready to say that it is fine and dandy and should be legal for a mother to terminate the pregnancy of a fetus on the basis of sex-selection (e.g.. she wants a girl more than a boy, or vice-versa), or race (e.g. the baby is mixed race, and she wants only white) after, say, 18 weeks of development in the womb? If so, say so. Because both those things strike me as sexist and racist as can be.
3
Clarence Thomas had an idea? Sorry, but his eugenics comments just sounded like and unhinged rant to me. Going by his argument, taking a pre-natal vitamin, or not drinking or smoking while pregnant could be considered attempts at Eugenics.
20
Planned Parenthood is in the abortion business as the Catholic Church is in the forced-birth business.
11
The surest way to get ultraconservatives to soften their objections to abortion is to demonstrate that the brown races will proliferate without it.
18
It's cute how Mr Douthat gets up on his hind legs about Justice Thomas' reactionary and fantastic views about abortion but gives him a pass on his fantastic and reactionary views about LGBT rights.
21
Douthat, I guess you’re ok with women dying unnecessarily? Clarence Thomas and the rest of the anti-abortion mob seems to be. Eugenics is just another canard this crowd wants to use to frighten the fence-sitters in this debate. Abortion is never going away even in states where it is outlawed. Women are going to die and be seriously injured in “back-alley” and self-inflicted abortions. Women are going to go to prison for trying to have control over their own bodies. Children are going to lose their mothers, mothers and fathers are going to lose their daughters, husbands are going to lose their wives because anti-abortion fanatics want control. And don’t for a minute claim you and others of your ilk are “pro-life”. You are anti-abortion, anti-choice, anti-freedom, anti-feminist and pro-control. “Pro-life" is just marketing. You are no more “pro-life” than everyone else.
Understand this: abortion is not a procedure that any woman is happy about undergoing. It is a solution to a problem, like any other medical procedure. Trust the women to make the right decisions for themselves and you and your holier-than-thou kind keep out of it!
32
Speaking of Clarence Thomas...
Republicans -- especially their leaders -- are an odd beast. Most are Christians and therefore, one would surmise, believe in an afterlife. Yet Barr (and Bush II, etc.) spew nonchalantly that “everyone dies” and that immortality does not have to include “odes sung about you over the centuries.” Translation: Who cares if I'm a Jerk in my mortal existence.
What's more, in addition to acting like stuck-ups -- and loving it -- these Jerks constantly go around touting "family values" -- and dismissing them.
Meanwhile, these beasts are lately swarming like killer bees to shut down abortion clinics on an outright lie that the basis for their aggression is not to kowtow to the pro-life movement, but rather, to help safeguard women's health.
To these beasts, next to self service, public service is a nuisance.
Here, in 21st century America, if I had 3 wishes, I'd use the first to peer inside the Warped Brains of Republican officials, so that I could see what makes these beasts so bestial.
15
Such good testimonials here. They serve to remind us that Roe was decided on the issue of privacy and the freedom to choose.
I kept thinking of how the President views this issue. I may be cynical but I am afraid I believe he sees the issue in purely electoral ways. Does it help him get reelected to favor abortion bans? If yes, then he does.
And then I began to wonder how many abortions he financed over the years. He won't be talking about any of them if they exist in his background. It's like his taxes.
21
Get your religion, your history, your prejudices, your man-ness, your idea of what I have to do or not do, OUT OF MY BODY. Give me my independence, my right to myself, my freedom, my me. Get you away from what goes on with me. You are not me, you cannot decide what is best for me as a sentiment adult human being. I am done, past done, with men telling me what to do with my body whether for pleasure or control. Just go away. Excuse me if I am not being quite clear enough. If you need further clarity, just let me know because I have more words that you don't want to hear. In the meantime, just stop with your patronizing.
31
"The Thomas argument, common inside the pro-life movement but startling to many, is that the present “reproductive rights” regime may effectively extend older eugenic efforts to reduce populations deemed unfit."
If this argument is "startling" to you, you live in a liberal bubble.
1
It is a liberal tenet that disparate impact by race is equivalent to conscious or unconscious bias and inequity.
Planned parenthood has a disparate impact in increasing abortion rates among people of color- effectively population control.
Ms. Sanger was an avowed advocate for eugenics-
Planned Parenthood is her successful legacy.
4
It is?
Wow...hadn’t known. And I got the card, the t-shirt, the Decoder Ring, and EVERYTHING when I took the blood oath.
16
What exactly is wrong with eugenics? This world is massively overpopulated. We need abortion, female education and other birth control measures to bring it down before the total destruction of this planet is complete.
6
This is a foolish discussion. The attempt to draw a straight line from a now-antiquated movement to a generations-later current-day policy position of women's health care providers is disingenuous. If the author could find similarities in the stated positions of today's womens' rights advocates and those of long-dead eugenics proponents, he would earn some credibility. But all he can do is trace a long history of loose association while ignoring the evolution of social thought.
This reminds me of the conservatives' failed attempts to argue that the Democratic party is racist because the strongest opponents of the Civil Rights movement were long-dead Southern Democrats who then actually migrated to the Republican party after the 1965 Civil Rights Act was achieved by (mostly) Democrats. It is grasping at straws in the most desperate and pathetic manner.
27
Abortions will happen, legal and safe, or not: The choice is whether to make safe abortions available to everyone, or only to the affluent.
Abortion is a deeply personal and often painful decision.
Politicians and religious leaders who are using abortion as a wedge issue should be ashamed of themselves.
19
Clarence Thomas? Who on earth tries to bolster their argument by citing Clarence Thomas as an authority on law or morality? Justice Thomas's oddball ideas about "natural law" and "originalism" make him unfit to be a Supreme Court justice. I do not care what Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas thinks about abortion or any other issue.
27
Yet abortion is now a universal good. In a world where the smallest share of individuals now controls essentially all the resources, and where each new child moves us closer to ecological collapse and the societal collapse that will accompany it, there is no greater freedom than opting not to reproduce. Avoidance of pregnancy is of course the central goal, but there must be methods available to resolve it safely and effectively when it can't be avoided.
Clarence Thomas, like all other social conservatives, simply wants to make sure that an elite patriarchy continues to have jurisdiction over a woman's womb. It has always been thus, and the likes of Justice Thomas will seize upon any seemingly viable argument with this goal in mind. It bears mentioning, too, that Clarence Thomas has been repeatedly proven to be an ignoble man, along with the other loathsome Catholic ideologues currently befouling the Supreme Court.
16
African Americans have suffered so much injustice in this country, including not only slavery, Jim Crow laws, discrimination in housing and employment and atrocities like the "Tuskegee experiment," but also misguided and racist efforts at eugenics and forced sterilization, that it's hardly remarkable if they are suspicious, or even paranoid, about subjects like birth control and abortion. When I decided to have a vasectomy I had to read and sign an "informed consent" form and wait a couple of days, because some feared that black men were being urged to have the operation for racist reasons. That said, nowadays abortion is a matter of choice -- a woman's choice. If a woman decides that she is not prepared, financially or emotionally, or for any other reason, to bear and raise a child, her choice is her right! Justice Thomas's argument is not something I'd expect from an educated person, much less a jurist. Mr Douthat's efforts to sidle into some sort of defense of it are merely signs of his own agenda.
17
Why on earth would we want to bring into this world more poor people? For globalism to succeed there needs to be a global One Child policy in effect for the two centuries.
3
Could the issue be summarized as:
I believe my personal beliefs should trump your beliefs about what you do with your body. And I will pass draconian laws to punish any who dare to assert their rights over what I have decided you can and cannot do with your body and to punish anyone who stands against me in support of the choices you make about your body.
12
While the mendacity at the base of eugenics fades, Ricardo and Malthus may yet hold up.
The reason abortion disproportionately affects the poor is because of the high cost of birth control.
If you are genuinely against abortion, then demand universal, free birth control, sane sex education, secure adoption unbound by red tape as safely possible, and income equality.
I would never feel comfortable making this decision for anyone else.
13
I had a hard time taking this essay seriously. Does this person have any personal experience of what Planned Parenthood provides to women? I strongly doubt it. This is yet another overly intellectual, far from real life exposition. So what is the author telling us, that the murky history of abortion rights weakens the pro-choice argument? Oh come on!
12
The reason abortion rates are higher for minorities is because abortion rates are higher for poor.
There percentage of minorities who are poor is greater than the percentage of white who are poor.
Worse, for each poor woman with an unwanted pregnancy who gets an abortion, there is another who does not.
So Republicans will be increasing poor minorities. And poverty correlates to welfare and prison.
We should be getting more birth control to poor women and avoid unwanted pregnancy.
It is so obvious.
But Republicans are not really trying to solve the problem.
They are giving their base something to fight about and vote Republican.
Then Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy and increase the deficit all to be paid for by us, our children, and our grandchildren.
I wouldn't mind if Republican voters got fleeced but I am getting fleeced, too.
14
We all know and many have said, if men got pregnant, this wouldn't be an issue.
20
Big difference. Eugenics was all about other people forcing women to have an abortion or get sterilized. Abortion rights are about the woman wanting her choice to do it. Forcing vs. wanting. See the difference? Big difference.
Anyone trying to imply they are similar is trying to use fear of eugenics to confuse people.
16
We are hardly going to listen to Clarence Thomas's view on women's reproductive rights. Please don't insult us any further. Planned Parenthood was there in the 1970's and much needed as a place young women whose own mothers couldn't or wouldn't discuss birth control, reproduction rights, or sex at all, mostly due to Catholicism's hard line and many other religion's as well. The silence was harmful and it didn't prevent anyone from getting pregnant before they were ready. Nor did stop anyone from having more children than they could handle. To have a place to go to become informed and protect oneself even if one was not yet engaging in sexual activity was a good thing. Perhaps a young woman needed to know how not to become pregnant before she was ready. Barring abstinence, which was certainly an option, young women passed dangerous myths along that proved not useful, rather, harmful. Knowledge is power and why wouldn't you want to empower young women? And don't forget incest and sexual abuse. It's an ugly world sometimes. So whether you take a Pill or find out you're normal and get informed for the future, Planned Parenthood served a purpose then and now. To say otherwise, it a disservice to all women who might face a choice that is only ever her own, and ultimatlely, no one else's. So stand with us, or do step aside.
14
I think the solution is obvious. Make “morning after” pills readily available to everyone, on anonymous request. Scientists have determined that they are not equivalent to abortion, but they do terminate a pregnancy. The US was created as a secular nation by founders who saw little merit in mythology.
6
How cleverly you get it wrong. Racism in practice means that a class of people are left without choices. (We see this most clearly in the Republican effort to exclude minorities from voting.) The attacks on abortion rights, along with efforts to eliminate affordable access to contraception, are limitations that most acutely affect racial minorities and the poor—groups that, due to persistent racist practices and ideologies—often greatly overlap. You've got it backwards, Ross; for the racism is, in effect, in denying reproductive choices. In this case, religious dogmatism that makes certain people feel righteous happens to coincide with a broader desire to preserve white dominance.
11
I really find this historical overview tying abortion rights to the history of eugenics to be a specious argument. History should give one pause--that is true--we should never forget history and our moral judgments should always be made in the light of history. But the logical fallacy here is the historical connections the author makes have any really bearing on the case for freedom of choice for those of us who advocate for the option of safe, accessible access to abortions that we as individuals can choose.
Eugenics as nothing to do with that decision but when you deal in monolithic abstractions like "progressivism" and "liberal technocracy" you spin a comforting pseudo-history of connections that is based on a genetic fallacy, sorry.
Mr. Douthat clearly wants to doubt and creates this simplistic genealogy to confirm his skepticism. Fine. But it has little bearing on the moral and ontological arguments at the center of the current debate and whether we want to allow anti-abortion laws based on a arch-conservative American style theocracy.
7
If Republicans spent as much time working to give women birth control as they spend working against women's reproductive rights, they could probably reduce abortion by 80%.
But there goal is not to fix the problem, it is to get their base riled up and to vote Republican.
And it works.
Then Republicans cut taxes for the rich and increase the deficit.
With this latest Ryan / McConnell / Trump tax cut, the deficit will be going up from $600 Billion to $1 Trillion.
It is probable that in the next 5 years we will be spending as much on interest for the national debt as for defense.
And this is after 8 years of Republicans relentlessly railing against the debt under Obama.
Every Republican senator voted for it. Not one Democratic senator voted for it.
Perhaps Mr. Douthat can write a column about deficits and job creation under Reagan vs. Clinton and W Bush vs. Obama.
11
If abortion is legal and is not murder -- that is, the fetus is only a potential human life at best, not a fully fledged person with the individual constitutional rights appertaining thereto -- the argument about motives is irrelevant.
If a woman wants to abort a pregnancy of the 'wrong' sex, or a biracial pregnancy, or a pregnancy that may result in a handicapped child regardless of the nature or severity of the handicap, or just because it's inconvenient or she doesn't want to be a mother -- you may personally judge her motives according to your own conscience, but you don't get a veto.
Eugenic choices are baked into all our reproductive decisions -- our choice of mate, our decision perhaps not to have kids at all. The latter was my choice, as I have an autistic sibling and do not wish to risk passing it on, as no one knows whether any aspect of the disorder is heritable. Would Justice Thomas, or Mr Douthat, deplore my decision, which is undoubtedly 'eugenic' -- and in the Brave New World, would they force me to have a child for the sake of 'diversity'? For arguably that is where the vetting of motives leads ...
14
Your statement that "Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business" is a pretty despicable mischaracterization of what they do.
You know full well that they are a nonprofit and that abortion-related services are a small fraction of the health services they provide.
You should be thanking them for their outstanding work to *reduce* abortion - far more than any organization that you are likely to be associated with.
20
I used Planned Parenthood from age 20 (because I had left college) to age 26 when I finally got a job that offered healthcare.
Before that, no one offered me healthcare EXCEPT Planned Parenthood. I did not need any abortion services but I got my birth control pills, a yearly breast exam and a yearly Pap smear.
They were mostly concerned about my health and my overall healt. They asked each year if I felt in danger, did I want STD screenings, was a practicing safe sex, etc. They were a God send. And I was not from a low income family. I just found myself in an age group that does not have easy access to health insurance.
The misinformation put forth by such irresponsible people in this country is looking to close down what is sometimes a woman’s only option FOR HEALTHCARE. SHAMEFUL.
38
I once worked for mental health in an almost exclusively white and rural area.I heard the stories of many young white woman seeking one.You always bring the opinions of older,male, religious fanatics into the discussion.The reason these women wanted an abortion was always economic.They knew they couldn't afford to raise a child without a father;with a low paying job;with the likelihood that child would be physically abused;without the possibility of an extended education.They were right.Many of them did have children when they were better off. Their decision to have an abortion was their OWN decision which was not informed by some 100 year old eugenics movement.Once again you demonstrate that you live in an intellectual ivory tower based on your own privileged life.You have no contact with the young and economically disadvantaged women whose lives you want to control.You embrace religious ideologies that are older than any eugenics movement. I wouldn't be surprised if,in his heart,Clarence Thomas believes the woman who work in Planned Parenthood are actually witches.Nothing coming from his feeble legal mind would surprise me.Finally..have you ever known a women who decided to have a late term abortion?I have.On I know well had a fetus who would have been born without a spine.Do you think she wanted to have an abortion? She now has two healthy children.You and your fellow ideologues are just plain cruel.Or, maybe you're informed by Donald Trump on the subject.
32
You hit it on the head with “feeble legal mind “!
8
The most interesting aspect of all this, and one that Douthat surely understands but prefers not to mention, is that ethnic Catholics used to be part of the liberal coalition that built so much of the modern United States. By using abortion as a wedge, the right peeled away much of this demographic, and today we witness the sorry result. I keep hoping enough Catholic voters will come to their senses and reject the poisoned chalice.
15
Thomas, a “strict constitutionalist,” knows perfectly well that when the Constitution was written abortion was legal prior to “quickening.” Scalia, known to pore over our Founding Father’s documents for subtle hints as to the mores of the time, knows this. There is no originalist basis for opposition to abortion. Just five Catholics squirming at the idea of consequence-free sex.
25
The danger in the Roe v Wade decision is that it based on misreadings of the Ninth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Ninth Amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” But the Ninth Amendment does not make unenumerated rights constitutional rights or empower the Supreme Count to determine what those unenumerated rights are. If Supreme Court justices can add new rights to the Bill of Rights as they see fit, what is the amendment process for?
The Due Process Clause says that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Roe v Wade decision located a “right to privacy” in the term “liberty” and asserted that the right to privacy gives women a right to an abortion until the third trimester. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment obviously meant that states cannot incarcerate person without due process, but this doesn’t matter. A person arrested, charged and convicted for violating a state anti-abortion law has received due process.
By that logic we can assume that Thomas' opinion is tainted by his anger against Ms. Hill.
7
To hear R.D. tell it, the world does not have a population problem. Or that to try to mitigate it with birth control would be a ‘bad’ thing to do.
Overpopulation / overconsumption is destroying the life of the planet. It is at this moment 7,708,190,355 and rising.
I recommend free birth control (including the 'pill') and free abortions to whoever wants and / or needs one.
16
I am a lot older than Douthat -- old enough to by have heard or read every argument about abortion rights from left and right during the decade leading up to Roe in 1972. I never once heard any pro-choice liberal use eugenics as an argument. On the other hand, during that period and earlier growing up in New England I heard a lot of racist rightwingers complaining about how many babies Black people were having. I think Ross and Justice Thomas should take a closer look at their pals.
19
I read these comments, and they underscore our inability to grapple with competing interests and arguments. We are so polarized into one camp or another that we can't even consider that our positions may be problematic or have unintended consequences. I am pro choice, and I am concerned about how systemic racism manifests in abortion rates among minority groups. I believe men in power seek control over women's bodies, and I can understand a moral opposition to abortion as akin to other moral beliefs that form the basis of legislation, whether religious or humanistic. I can both hold a position and question it. We are a society governed by fears of what we might lose. That kind of thinking perpetuates hierarchy, which is great so long as one is on the winning side.
7
"I believe men in power seek control over women's bodies, ..."
No, they believe abortion is wrong. And why are you ignoring WOMEN who OPPOSE abortion?
Senator Joni Ernst.
Senator Martha McSally.
Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.
Senator Deb Fischer.
(Possibly more, but that's enough to make my point.)
See, also:
There’s a Record Number of Pro-Life Women Headed to Congress
By Marjorie Dannenfelser
November 6, 2014
National Review
2
Why do conservatives keep harping on abortion?
Because it's emotional and divisive. It works.
Clarence Thomas doesn't give a hoot about children, but he does care about keeping the GOP in power. Abortion is a strong wedge issue, enough to keep a lot of religious people voting for the anti-abortion (GOP) candidate even when that candidate is against all their other interests.
Ross Douthat may have a more sincere (Catholic) motivation for his anti-abortion screeds, but he is certainly not above using abortion as a political crowbar.
He is willing to make any number of misstatements and intentional misrepresentations to paint the pro-choice position as racist, sexist, and elitist. He speaks of "Sangerian feminists" without any evidence that such a group existed or that, if it did, it has anything to do with current arguments for or against abortion. He draws on the political views of Margaret Sander as if she were Moses and Planned Parenthood were run like the Catholic Church. Which, thank God, it is not. And the talk about "population-panicked progressives" assumes the existence of a made-up group promoting abortion for population control.
Peer-reviewed research shows that birth rates go down when prosperity goes up. Abortion has nothing to do with the number of children born, except that women (and men) who are free to plan their families have much greater opportunities to become prosperous.
And general prosperity, for the GOP, is poison.
20
Hey Ross, Have you read "The Cider House Rules" by John Irving? I would guess probably not. You probably did not even see the movie which does nothing to address the graphic horror of back-alley abortions, the way the novel did. Your Catholicism is deluding, controlling, and dividing you from the reality of 21st American and your hypocrisy in supporting the Republican-led War on Women is a disgrace.
18
Any man who believes that he is more qualified then a woman in regards the woman's health is a fool trying to play as a god. The believers in eugenics were similar fools believing they were gods.
14
Until people like Douthat and Thomas start talking about the religious efforts to eliminate access to birth control, neither has any place opening their mouths to talk about abortion. Take a minute to read the Thomas Edsall oped from a few days ago. It is and always will be a story of men, through propaganda and power, holding their heals to women’s throats.
15
Seems like Thomas is bent on making disrespect of women as one of his legacies. Before he was forcing them to endure his disgusting behavior, now he wants to force them to endure unwanted pregnancy. It is not about eugenics or protection of children, It is all about his vile wish to keep women as second rate citizens who are denied the right of decision over their bodies. His disrespect for women especially black ones so great that he claims that the black women involved in eugenics when they don't want to have a child.
8
Clarence Thomas now intrudes eugenics into the abortion issue himself resurrecting a vile societal element from previous eras. One that once had the support of certain sectors of the scientific, medical and social sciences community. Public figures such as the fascist sympathizer and aviation hero Charles Lindbergh was a proponent of eugenics even traveling to Nazi Germany to consult with its key figures in Nazi Germany.
That was then. And so now in the 21st century Clarence Thomas, allied to the political right wing, presents a specious argument positing abortion rights can be equated with support of eugenics. This should alert Americans to the cunning of right wingers determined to subvert abortion away from its central issues.
For what the self proclaimed pro-life movement is about is twofold. It asserts patriarchal authority and is emblematic of an elitist society. Banning abortion victimizes the low income and impoverished. For in all the past yesterdays, the realty was that women with adequate finances had the ways and means to source out safe medical abortions. For all others it was the back alleys. What Clarence Thomas is doing is gearing up America for what's up ahead. Reconsideration of Roe vs Wade by the Supreme Court.
6
I have no doubt that legalisation of Abortion
will lead to the legalisation of mandated Euthanasia.
Again and again - read the comments to this column
- those who support non-medical abortions speak of:
Poor Mothers who cannot afford to have another child.
How no child should be un-wanted,
How no child should be disabled.
and now - God Help Us All -
How no child should be the wrong Gender.
Old age be-speaks poverty, isolation, disabilities.
Soon there will be restrictions on what medical
treatments you may receive past a certain age,
what treatments anyone who is retired can receive
and the duty of the elderly to stop being a burden on society.
Just as we are told that the embryo/fetus/babe in the womb
is not a human and thus not a person. we shall soon be
We shall soon be told that the elderly are:
Non-productive members of society.
A drag on the economy.
An imposition on an overly crowded world.
An inconvenience to their children...
90 % of all Abortions are for non-medical reasons
which means they come down to the child being
conceived at an "inconvenient" time.
While there are some who will seek to be euthanised,
perhaps 10 % due to their medical conditions, I have
no doubt the other 90 % of euthanasias will be against
the will of those undergoing the "Procedure" just as
90 % of the humans in the wombs have abortions carried
out upon them when there is no medical necessity.
4
We can not say what will be in the future but right now we are hearing all the time how precious of every human life, and yet we force the individual, not communal, sacrifice for this precious lives. And every time, when there is discussion about better access to health care, child care, maternity leave, access to mental health care, all what we are hearing is that the US is not a socialist country and therefore we could not afford these services. So, prove it, that anti- abortionists really value the human lives. Let's us see how they crusade with same zeal for free healthcare, for maternity leave, for cheap/free child care, for free care for old and disable. When society could afford such services, we can talk about morality of abortions.
7
@John Brown
Complete nonsense.
Yet another interloper introducing an unrelated topic into a discussion, to muddy the issue. With lies.
7
Sanger's motives in advocating birth control & creating the Margaret Sanger Clinic, later known as Planned Parenthood may have been questionable. However, her organization was enormously helpful to the overburdened immigrant women who were given birth control devices, and has been enormously helpful to poor women of all races & ethnicities during the past century. Sanger's original (feminist) supporters were the wives of affluent men, progressives, who themselves often procured birth control devices from private physicians, but believed that poor women should have the same access to birth control that they enjoyed. My grandmother was one of those women. They were frequently the same women who supported a woman's right to vote.
14
Douthat misses the issue. Women cannot enjoy the full rights of citizenship inherent in the liberty bestowed by the constitution if they are denied the control of their bodies free from the coercive mandate of the state. Either women have full social and political equality, or their liberty is compromised by anti-abortion legislation. There is no middle ground. These are the stakes. Absurd comments by Thomas not only muddy the issue, but only serve as yet another example of his intellectual limitations.
14
Mr D tries so hard to appear sympathetic with regard to issues regarding women’s health, bodies, choices. And while seeming to disagree with Mr Thomas, he turns around and finally agrees with Mr T’s dubious analysis. Or rather to scold progressives for their criticism of the analysis. All the while trying to be the ever-clever referee of moderation. Sorry, no sale here.
9
@Diane
Douthat knows better, too … he knows full well Thomas's arguments are almost always intellectually weak.
3
That Mr. Douthat thinks Planned Parenthood clinics "are in the abortion business" shows clearly that he has taken not time whatsoever to find out even the slightest bit about what that organization does. Planned Parenthood is in the WOMAN'S HEALTH business. The vast majority of their work involves heath clinic visits, cervical exams, pap smears, options counseling, cancer and STI screening and the like. Less than 1% of services provided at PP clinics nationwide are abortions.
Please take the time to do the research Mr. Columnist.
13
'That Mr. Douthat thinks Planned Parenthood clinics "are in the abortion business" ...'
Douthat could have made his point more clearly, but he means that PP is biased toward abortions over adoptions.
The linked Weekly Standard essay, which you don't seem to have even looked at, is very clear:
"The reality is that adoption is clearly given short shrift [at PP], not only in the numbers, but in emphasis as well. "
3
@DKF
This essay is ludicrous and biased. Ross should feel ashamed for relying on it.
The article sets for no basis whatsoever to make the logical conclusion that because PP performs many more abortions than adoption referrals that adoption is given the short shrift. None whatsoever. The reality is that there are many, many, many fewer adoptions than either abortions or births where baby goes home with its parents. That’s because the vast majority of women simply have no interest whatsoever in gestating a baby for 9 months, giving birth, and giving it away if there’s any better choice.
Do we assume that ob/gyns are giving adoption the short shrift because most women who come for prenatal care don’t put their kids up for adoption? No.
PP provides medical care and counseling regarding reproductive health. Adoption isn’t medical care. Adoption is a choice to deal with an unplanned pregnancy, but it’s not actually medical care. It doesn’t provide pediatric care either, and yet no one accuses it of giving it the short shrift. Most women simply don’t want to adopt out, or come to PP to discuss adoption. We don’t come to waffle house if we want kale smoothies, either. This article’s conclusion relies on the flawed assumption that women come in to PP open to each option and that if there was no bias on PP’s part, an equal number of patients would want abortions v. keeping the baby v. adoption. So, so, so false and wrong.
16
I agree with your points but resent the negative spin on adoption, which has been a wonderful experience for many, through out history.
2
There's a plus side to Thomas' opinion: he shows how cynically he uses the pretense that his jurisprudence recognizes historical and sociological facts. The GOP Court's majority does this regularly, for example by pretending to to believe Republican claims that the Muslim Ban was motivated by national security, that the citizenship question on the census was motivated by concern for the Voting Rights Act. Thomas pretending to believe his own argument is just one more example of the bad faith of the majority.
10
"In theory the high abortion rate in black America is just the result of countless individual decisions."
How ‘bout a deal, Ross? My side gives up its individual based explanation of the abortion problem and your side gives it up in its explanation of the the gun violence problem.
2
I'm not so sure. Aren't there historically more abortions among minority groups? Isn't that a type of eugenics?
2
No, it is not. It is about a woman making decisions about her own body, her future, her own situation and what is best for herself. No one has the right to tell her what to do with her body and her life. No one.
7
Please note that each year Planned Parenthood performs hundreds of thousands of abortions on black women, which has reduced the black population by many millions over a period of 20 years (and millions more over a longer period). Given these huge numbers, some black people—and others—view this population reduction as genocide, a conscious effort to shrink the black population.
Indeed, as the article notes, even Ruth Bader Ginsberg said this issue can be seen in terms of “... a desire to subsidize abortions for ‘populations that we don’t want to have too many of’”).
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck—it is eugenics.
3
The Left devalues life from abortion to euthanasia, since their dominant worldview is materialist naturalism, i.e. we're all just atoms colliding in the void, with no possibility of spirituality or transcendence.
What do you expect ?
2
Would someone smarter and more trained in logic than I am please, please refute, point by point, Mr. Douthat's flawed reasoning throughout this piece. He poses some interesting questions about theory / practice, etc. etc. but his answers are all wrong, and the piece is full of red herrings.
For example, he states that the "liberal left" should look at the question of "whether the eugenic past still exerts a structural influence on the present," implying that the answer is yes, when in fact the answer, in this case, is no.
I believe that the perspective of the Supreme Court, as a group, is quite different from, say, legislators in, say, Alabama: I believe that the word "abortion" gets a Pavlovian response from those older white men, likely an image of some young "women's-lib" white woman with flowing hair threatening their dominance, and if they actually stopped to realize that black women, women of color, women of all kinds in all socio-economic groups have abortions, they would be quite content to let those embryos go.
3
This is just as specious as the pretext of the Voting Rights Act on the citizenship question. Find some way to justify enslaving women to their wombs, so you can cement control over them (and so some of them can cement the doors on their own gilded cages). And, Bonus! It will have the most effect on women in marginalized communities, miring them and their families in poverty, so they can be more easily corralled into ghettos, rendered unable to thrive—and pushed right off the margins, gone from the map altogether. Problem solved. Makes eugenics and the Lebensborn seem sentimental by comparison.
10
These eugenic "fears" would have more traction if those advocating them (GOP and others) also advocated for universal child support and free education through university. So easy to say do not kill a fetus, seemingly so hard to support living children and families.
17
Why is it that Douthat and so many conservatives are sophistical--should I say Jesuitical?--in their arguments? Is it because they start from principals based on faith rather than reason? Unfortunately faith is not a good basis for public policy, as our founding fathers so forcefully recognized and many of us have forgotten in America today.
11
"in practice, liberal technocracy still has a “solve poverty by cutting birthrates” bias inherited from a population-panic age, and abortion-rights rhetoric still has a way of sliding into Malthusian fears about too many poor kids in foster care. "
No. Mr. Douthat needs to get an education in ecology before assuming anything about "liberal technocracy" (whatever that is). Furthermore Mr. Douthat would well to investigate the origins of his pro-unlimited population increase ideas. "Be fruitful and multiply" is a rather pathetic foundation upon which to build a philosophy.
10
There are contradictions and even hypocrisy by those who claim to oppose and those who support the right to abortion.
.
Those who oppose killing children when they are inside their mothers frequently will to make an exception for rape and incest. Why is that? If those against-abortion believe it is wrong to kill thsee children, how they are conceived is irrelevant. No one questions the humanity of a person who was conceived through rape or incest. The only logic for the exception is political. It's just a way to reduce opposition by those who favor the abortion procedure.
.
Those who support the right to abortion refuse to even mention the possibility that the thing inside the mother is a human being. They are the first to assert opposition to anything that might deprive a person of their "human right" to choose.
.
The question for all of us is how to weigh the "right to choose" versus the right to live".
.
What is the answer?
2
@HH
The answer is clear - there is no answer that suits everyone because it is a question of personal/religious belief. That’s why every woman needs to be free to make her own decision.
10
Ah, yes, one forgets about Clarence Thomas. One tries. It's easy to forget someone who sits like a lump on a log, decade after decade, without much opining about anything.
But suddenly, from out of nowhere, here he is and he knows all about women's economic, social, ethnic, racial, political status.
Just knows, in his heart if there one be, that he's right. Just like "pro life" radicals, he just knows. Doesn't need support for the notion that women abort to, say, get that perfect baby, maybe Aryan, maybe male. Doesn't need to know anything about anything to opine that abortion is just plain bad.
Women get abortions for no other reason than that they do not want that child at the time of life.
It doesn't matter to anybody else why. It may for economic reasons, maybe she fears the shame of being a single, unmarried women, in this still benighted society. Maybe she hates the father. Maybe she simply can't care for a child for the next 18 years.
But Justice Thomas knows what's best for women. He knows they need him and his evangelical, Christian, religious like to tell them what they can and cannot do. With their own bodies.
Some Justices are blind.
17
Douthat is inventing a non-existent problem.
There is neither racism nor eugenics in the desire to empower women with control over their own bodies.
Abortion among the poor has nothing to do with "weeding out inferior races," but with giving women the right to keep their families within affordable limits.
Douthat is constructing a make-believe motivation without a drop of evidence, simply to indulge in his favorite fantasy game: maligning progressives.
15
The New York Times is preaching to the pro choice crowd as usual. They do not need convincing that abortion on demand or at any other time is wrong. They seem to favor it.
Those of us who are opposed to abortion will never see it as just or moral. We are definitely a minority on this comment board. Being pro life is not always easy. A friend of my sister's screamed at me when I told her I took the pro life position. My sister to her credit sided with me.
I have my reasons for being adamantly pro life but they are personal and private. And I have never had an abortion for those who may be wondering. I cherish life, babies and feel life begins at conception. My opinion is not open to debate with me. I am 100 percent pro life and I promise I will never judge a woman who has an abortion. That is not for me to do. I wish the pro choice side would give me the same consideration.
I hope the NYTimes prints this.
6
@KMW No none is advocating "abortion on demand". And you, of course, know that. That false notion simply distorts the issue.
13
This is a long piece based on good historical knowledge.
People on the other side are capable of writing long pieces just as strongly based on history.
What the lesson at the end of the day? Long detailed pieces in support of the author's opinion prove that the author is capable of writing long pieces. Nothing is proven and no minds are changed.
4
@J..... J ,I disagree. I think Douthat has summarized well, the competing assumptions underlying the issues in the current Abortion debate. Knowing things is good.
Finally, some intellectual diversity. Merely reiterating for the ten millionth time, that it's all about a women's right to control her own body does not make it so.
4
Read Daniel Okrent's excellent book, "The Guarded Gate," about the Eugenics movement in the United States and how it destroyed immigration in this country for over 40 years.
4
Abortion today is largely an issue of personal autonomy. Can a woman choose. Eugenics of the 1920, on the other hand, was a decision handed down from some authority, as to whether a baby was good enough.
6
Thomas's comments are, in a way, a concession that "life begins at conception" has not in itself, been a winning argument. And if protection of a young life isn't persuasive enough, what is an anti-abortionist to do?
Well, the rabid anti-abortionists, like all good propagandists, enter into a sort of fantasyland, conjuring up other horrors, that the die-hards will happily convince themselves are real, and gleefully parrot, and which may find a receptive audience in the ignorant.
Thus, we get eugenics. We get the sham hospital admitting privileges and surgical center requirements. We get abortion causes breast cancer.
Fortunately, we still have abortion opponents like Mr. Douthat, who will call out this nonsense.
6
When C. Thomas was interviewed by the Senate for a seat on SCOTUS, the American Bar Association released a paper stating he was unqualified for the position. Still, the Senate approved him.
He survived a bruising confirmation hearing and lied about his unacceptable comments to women that we considered by those women as provocative. He labeled all of these charges "A high tech lynching". The result is Thomas remains an angry, bitter and always seeking revenge.
With his comments about eugenics and his irrational comments, he appears to demonstrate an impaired mental capacity (as the ABA stated, 'unqualified'). Is it in the best interest of our nation to have such a person on the Supreme Court?
10
Nice rewrite of history, Ross. Why am I not surprised?
From Snopes-
"What's True
Ginsburg once said she believed that others' concerns about overpopulation might have influenced the high court's decision in Roe v. Wade.
What's False
Ginsburg did not say she personally supported Roe v. Wade because it could help limit the population growth of "undesirable" communities."
"The group Ginsburg referenced during her appearance, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), was founded in 1968. From 1975 to 1977, ZPG was headed by anti-immigration activist John Tanton, who advocated for what he called “passive eugenics.” In that context, and given her record, Ginsburg’s original remark was a description of ZPG’s philosophy and not her own."
Surprise again- one of your own team!!
Again, why am I not surprised at your disingenuousness although one would hope for better vetting of editorials written by columnists employed by the from esteemed New York Times.
16
Thank you. Nicely debunked!
4
Or if you’d like to see Thomas and the Right’s little combo of massive tax cuts for the wealthies, war on welfare, and how to shove women back in their proper place...
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/26/business/george-gilder-s-hymn-to-getting-rich.html
1
One colossal issue in discussing the rates of abortion in demographic groups is that the data used are the data reported by “clinics” that must report data to regulators in a Byzantine system of control of women’s health.
If you think for a second that a woman who has the means and access to a gynecologist can’t quietly and privately have a procedure - a D and C - or obtain a prescription for mifepristone, you are deluded.
I remember when Sen. McCain ran for the GOP nomination in the 2000 election: in New Hampshire, the candidate was asked what he would do if his daughter was pregnant. He stumbled and came up with something about how she would need to make decisions with the support of her family. That honest response was, of course, “corrected” later, however, it has stayed with me because that is how it will always be for those with means and privilege.
The women who are prevented from privacy and access are those who are punished by laws designed to keep them subordinate and force them into a specific outcome. The women in Mr. Douthat’s life and those in Justice Thomas’ circle would never, ever have free will denied them.
7
Restricting or banning abortion is about keeping the underclass, the underclass. The same was true in Sanger’s day with contraception. The elites had access to contraceptives, it was about denying access to the poor, the masses to keep them in their socioeconomic place. Abortion will never be unsafe or inaccessible to the elites even if abortion is banned. No, abortion and contraception have always been about not letting the masses ascend heaven forbid into the upper crust, and keeping them where they are. It’s called Conservatism.
9
I believe the religion plays the major role in a decision to have an abortion. Some religions say it is wrong. Some religions don’t want you to use birth control since it is akin to abortion. Since we are not a theocracy, the decision should not be dictated by the state. Last time I heard, there is separation of church and state. Let the potential mother and father use their morality and religion, if they have one, be their personal guide. Keep the state out of it. If the potential parents can’t agree, the decision falls to the women who will be saddled with the responsibility.
6
"I believe the religion plays the major role in a decision to have an abortion."
Explain why an atheist could not be opposed to abortion.
Whether it's some benighted racist Malthusian telling someone they may not carry their pregnancy to term and will be forced to undergo an abortion and sterilization procedure-
or some benighted Christian moralist telling a female she must carry her pregnancy to term against her wishes, because that's what Jesus would want (I gather the word abortion isn't mentioned anywhere in the New Testament or in Church writings long after the Romans controlled Jerusalem)-
the commonality is that it's the government with a capital G telling women what they may, or must, do with their bodies. That capital G is usually a white male empowered with a capital P.
We won't even go into the irony of those Calvinists that claim to hate poverty and the burden it puts on government want to force poor women to bear more babies should they find themselves pregnant.
7
Wouldn’t politics in this country be different if there were 10 million more African American voters?
3
The question is who is going to institute eugenics. The mothers of unwanted children. Sad to say men and women have unprotected sex and off the women goes to the abortion clinic to put a stop to the pregnancy. Its been stated that abortion has lessened the criminal populace because unwanted children weren't born. Children that would have been born unwanted into an unloving world. Thomas and his friends love embryos and hate underclass children who seem never to get out of their circumstances and are patronized, in their minds, by liberals. A Thomas biographer opined that the Dred Scott case was terrible Supreme Court decision. But Brown v. Board of Education was just as terrible because it spoiled the color blind delusions of American juris prudence. Plessy v. Ferguson was the perfect decision.
1
" In any other area, the left would look at a history like this and ask whether those formal convictions are the only thing that matters, or whether the eugenic past still exerts a structural influence on the present."
We are, just not in the ways that you, a conservative who wants to play a “gotcha” game, want us to.
Anti-choicers who make the “aborshun is RaCiSt!1!” argument look at “facts” like where planned parenthood facilities are located and conclude that PP is “targeting black babies for extermination” (as if black women don’t have agency and are as compelled to pop by an abortion clinic like one might impulsively go into an ice cream store on a hot day). The left, however, is paying attention to what racist structural influences exist in the present that actually prevent women from feeling able to raise their children. For example, intergenerational poverty, incarceration of black men, unequal job opportunities for minorities/women, barriers to access to contraception….Like always, progressives are attempting to address the root cause, rather than just force women to have babies and then dust off their hands.
We very much acknowledge that there are lingering structural inequalities that grow out of very racist beliefs that can definitely make motherhood more difficult or less appealing for minority women. We just don’t believe there’s a conspiracy by planned parenthood, or the “abortion industry” to make minority women have abortions.
9
There is a lot to unpack here. From the way this article skated away from the effects that structural racism might influence women’s childbearing decisions vis a vis poverty to Mr Douthat’s refusal here to acknowledge his substantial past writings that clearly show his religious beliefs influence his thinking on this subject. That’s fine, but insinuating that pro choice people have the blood of Nazi policies coursing our veins is as insulting as me suggesting that he takes orders directly from Rome.
Bottom line, he’s a conservative who would place the government into the bedrooms and doctors offices throughout the land and force one sex to bow before his moral demands. All the rest is intellectual window dressing.
11
Every attempt at restricting abortion is, de facto, an attempt to limit the health care that a woman can choose from. A woman, like a man, has the constitutional right to life- and the decision to control the medical choices that impact her body. If YOU have a religion that tells you to ignore that woman's autonomy I suggest that she has ALREADY chosen not to believe as you do. Stop trying to pit religion against science. The issue is access to medical care and privacy. Not your religious beliefs.
7
I assume he’ll write about the strong anti-abortion beliefs of white supremacists next. Is there a link to the contemporary religious conservative movement’s anti-abortion fervor? (No. He won’t.)
Yes, there is a history of eugenics and, yes, today abortion rates among women of color are higher than among white women. Poverty seems the obvious reason. He shows no actual link between the history and the current rate, and I see no evidence that anyone on the right wants to address the poverty.
Abortion of fetuses having genetic or congenital conditions incompatible with life do raise the specter of eugenics, but I do not believe that is a slippery slope that American women are headed down based upon what I know of current abortion rates and the experiences of my friends and acquaintances. There is a world of difference between Down Syndrome and conditions incompatible with life, and I trust doctors, medical ethicists, and parents far more than politicians to make fraught decisions about those pregnancies.
3
I am a scholar of this time period in American History. There are so many factual elisions in this column that it makes my stomach turn. Social Darwinist eugenics played a dominant role in the cultural discourse for figures like Sanger and she existed in an environment rife with racist pseudo-scientific theories that justified some abhorrent actions. Despite this, most progressive women were well aware that the ability to control childbirth was the largest barrier to women’s equality and many supported abortion. Not only that, they also recognized that lack of childcare was integral to women’s advancement and they campaigned for it hard. Unfortunately, the movement toward providing birth control and childcare options was eclipsed by larger progressive issues in the American fin-de-siecle as women were told to wait...wait...and then wait some more. Well, I for one, am done waiting and I am not going to stand idly by as my rights to bodily autonomy and equality under the constitution are systematically stripped from me. Douthat thinks he’s smart, and he often deploys his nostalgic accounts of Victorian manners and a myopic retelling of American history to dazzle us with his ability to draw lessons from our past. Those of us who truly know history know better and we will make sure that it does not repeat itself.
18
"In practice the medical system strongly encourages abortion in response to disability, with predictable results."
Republicans continue to dismantle all health care systems for disabled people on Medicaid or other services. Iowa gave the Medicaid money to 3 private companies to manage and they don't pay the medical claims, refuse to pay for patient's medicines and refuse to listen to doctor's advice and many disabled people have died as a result. The companies are walking away with fistfuls of money as a result.
11
Douthat has to do this on every position? Always points out the splinter before the beam, on principle? What did the 60’s and 70’s do to him exactly?
10
@AH He's a theocrat who understands that directly stating his views would not sell well, so we get this stuff.
5
Abortion should be available to women who do not want to be pregnant. It should be a crime either to force a woman to abort or to deny a woman the right to do so. That said, I also do not accept that the fetus has no status relative to the woman's decision process. As the fetus matures, I believe that a pregnant woman should become less willing to abort, until toward the end of gestation the abortion option should be selected only under the most extreme circumstances. I do not think that knowledge regarding the medical status of the fetus changes things all that much: this is simply additional information that can be used by the pregnant woman to make her decision. The same thing applies to pregnancies that are the product of rape or incest—again, this information, along with other information, will become part of the decision process. There are gray areas when the pregnant female is not mentally competent to make medical decisions, due either to mental status or age. Luckily, there are “medical decision maker” laws in general medicine that are clearly applicable.
3
Douthat writes "None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal. That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life..."
That "unborn life" is doing a lot of work there to make the misleading transition between clusters of cells that are not viable outside the womb and babies.
So let me ask you, Mr. Douthat, a couple of questions. Experiments have shown that of order half of all fertilized eggs either do not implant in the womb or otherwise do not develop much further. So what should we do about this "unborn life"? Should priests read last rites at each menstrual period, just in case? What are their souls like, in Catholic doctrine, and what happens to them? Do they go to some kind of amniotic heaven or purgatory?
Your use of "unborn life" is simply a sneaky maneuver to avoid addressing the fact that fertilized eggs etc. are not human beings even if they can potentially become human.
16
@Lee Hartmann
Why this emphasis on the word "unborn". We are only referring to the geographic location of the infant. When a person is born it simply passes throught an opening from inside a woman to the outside. The even that created the person ocurred 9 months earlier.
.
The only relavent question is: Is the thing a human being or not.
.
If it is not a human being, then by all means the woman can keep or discard the thing as she chooses.
.
But - if it is a human being then we all have a legal and moral obligation to share responsibility when deciding its fate - even if it means intruding on the physical autonomy of the mother.
1
@HH And this is what Ross wants; Catholic doctrine imposed on all of us by force of law.
8
@HH
This description of pregnancy is so ignorant that I wonder if you're serious. It is so glib and dismissive that I am appalled and offended.
There is nothing simple about pregnancy and birth. Fetuses do not "simply" pass through the woman's body. Women die from giving birth. The can be rendered permanently injured or disabled. And fetus undergoes several physiological changes at birth that allow it to live on its own.
It's not simply a matter of location. The fetus has physically attached itself to her body, taken control over her blood vessels and diverted them to its own use, it is sending hormonal signals throughout her body that influence her physiology so her body provides resources for it, and its presence there impacts every one of her organ systems for 9 months until she goes through the physical trauma of birth. She is made ill for months. She may suffer life threatening health effects from pregnancy. If it's simply a matter of geographic location, then how do you explain preeclampsia? Gestational diabetes? Hyperemisis gravidariaum? Placental accretia? I'm sure you have good answers for this.
A viable baby is created via 9 months of gestation. If what you said was correct, then the fetus would never need to be attached to the woman's body at all.
If the "person" was created 9 months later, then why can't I simply remove it from my body at 8 weeks and let it live? Oh right, because it hasn't been created yet.
14
Ross Douthat's opinion piece leaves out the important fact that Republicans who oppose abortion do not support public funding for women's health and contraception. These would reduce abortion rates among poorer women who are disproportionately women of color. Women of color are not having more abortions because of eugenics (as much as the history of sterilization abuse disproportionately hurt women of color in the post-WWII era). Poor women and women of color have less access to high quality reproductive health care and contraception which results in more frequent abortion. These are the same women who would suffer the most if abortion were illegal (and who already have less access to legal abortion).
18
In a perfect world, there would be free birth control, morning after pills, and no unwanted pregnancies, therefore no need for abortion. Since we don't live in this perfect world, the anti-abortion enthusiasts should adopt every unwanted baby as soon as it emerges, including those with physical and mental deformities. Problem solved.
14
Mr. Douthat .. its not nearly as complicated as you want to make it. If you don't like abortion, don't have one. If you don't like contraception, don't use it. If you don't like gay marriage, don't marry a gay person. In all these matters, keep your religious dogmas to yourself and out of our secular government .. practice it as you please in your own life and home, but stay out of mine. Yes, its that simple!
25
Clarence Thomas is not, and never was, qualified by experience or knowledge to be a member of the U.S. Supreme Court.
He now shows his stripes as nothing more than a right-wing liar who will do anything to take away women's rights.
17
I do not care to hear from any more men on the question of abortion rights. Men should have absolutely no voice in a woman's right to control her own body and reproductive health. Nor do I want to have anyone who practices a fundamentalist form of religion, including Catholicism, push their beliefs onto me about what constitutes a viable human life. And for all of you who feel you need to justify your decision to abort, you do not. It is entirely your body and your decision.
23
Is abortion a constitutional right? If it isn't it will be thrown back to the states to decide. If it remains as such states will not be able to ban it . The whole thing turns on the constitutionality of the right to an abortion, which has already been decided. I doubt the USSC will reverse. I also don't see what it has to do with eugenics.
4
I wish more citizens of the world had "population-panic" - overpopulation will be our downfall. Instead of living in harmony with our environment, we are an invasive species spreading out of control.
4
"But the complicated history and the contemporary patterns are still important signposts — pointing toward a more skeptical view of progressivism’s progress, and away from the all-good-things-are-liberal-things take that many of Clarence Thomas’s critics instinctively believe."
Choice. Life. Eugenics. Progressivism. Etc. All compelling issues worthy of the type of discussion going on here today. That said, the above quote provides some insight into Mr. Douthat's worldview. It is simplistic, obvious and advances a bad faith argument. No rational liberal would ever make such a claim and irrational liberals aren't worth engaging. My advice, Mr. Douthat: grow up.
9
Is it not also true that the politics of "welfare reform", low wages and austerity all work to promote low child survival rates and serve the same function of eliminating the poor and minorities? Is it not also true that these policies operate at a much cost in terms of human suffering?
And of course these policies, as advanced by Republican pro-lifers have explicit racial content provided by the science of human diversity and even by the obsession of some pro-lifers with the extinction of the white race.
2
No woman should be forced to bear or raise a child against her will. Period. Whether the embryo or fetus is “normal” or compromised, she should not be burdened with having to arrange adoption, care for a child she did not want or justify her decision.
Eugenics is a convenient red herring propagated by conservatives like Thomas and his wife, who is very active with right-wing Christian “pro-life” groups.
Apparently, Douthat agrees with this “dangerous idea.”
7
This was a nice little piece on history, short and sweet on facts, but it fell way short of moving the needle on the discussion.
That Clarence Thomas, or any anti-abortionists would rely on a false reading of history is not shocking. Its the Republican way of arguing any point. Make history fit your POV, while dumping all the history that refutes it. Its the Fox News playbook. Its Trumps "energy drink."
Its laced with fear-mongering, and the exclusion of rational argument on "what is," preferring "what sorta was."
Abortion was always a last resort option. It still is for most women. Its not a flippant choice. Its a hard one! One most women would prefer not to make, to avoid altogether. But its theirs to make, and should only be theirs to make.
And that little kernel of reality is wholly lost in today's scream fest. Its a hard choice. It might be an inevitable choice, but that doesn't lessen the difficulty.
Also; Mr Douthat once again spews the Right wing propaganda on PP. Just cant resist a little slip of the dagger. A pot-shot.
PP is not in the business of abortions. It provides them for sure, but its not the whole or center of their "business."
To say they are is to miss the whole of the points of the Pro-side. PP provides health services to many women, where such services are often difficult to come by, or not at all.
Yes, very often they're located in poorer and minority communities. But that's because in the whiter, richer ones such services are plentiful.
17
Ross’ goal is undefined and his presumption, that abortions are involuntarily when government doesn’t regulate them, is preposterous.
Eugenics? Doesn’t work. As rare as Thomas speaks, he should still refrain more.
Forcing poor women to raise children with disabilities or lack of financial support or as a product of incest or whatever? This is the plan for lifting people out of poverty? Sure, let’s add to the burden. That will surely improve things.
Let’s return to the era of orphanages and workhouses, because conservative ideals are no longer about slowing progress, but literally going back to public policy that is cruel, destructive and broken.
5
The real issue is the higher poverty rate among people of color and the way white, male dominated corporate/political powers maintain that cycle of poverty and hence dominance. The pressures of living in poverty cause higher abortion rates among these "racial minorities". To even imply that there is some linkage with the eugenicists of the past is nothing more than an attempt to smear modern providers. Help lift all people out of poverty and the abortion rate will go down.
6
Surely we have to ask whether, in an age of increasingly public expressions of white supremacy, much anti-abortion activity is intended to keep white women from having abortions. Maintaining and increasing the white population also long has been linked to efforts to prevent "miscegenation" and condemn homosexuality. White supremacists want white women to play their proper role in white dominance by marrying white men and popping out lots of white babies.
4
Sorry. The pro-choice movement has nothing to do with eugenics, race or anything other than a woman is pregnant and does not want to be - for whatever her reason.
9
I never thought I'd see a highly readable and balanced article by Ross Douthat. Very reasonable history of abortion in America. It made me realize things I hadn't thought of. I'm still pro-choice but I appreciate a calm thoughtful article on the subject. Thanks.
1
@Tim Gause You might want to read some actual history regarding these topics rather than swallowing Douthat's polemics as if they were definitive.
5
I don’t buy the eugenics angle where it supposes minority women have more abortions due that. Perhaps it has more to do with poverty prevalence where the means for raising a child are much less.
Perhaps if “pro-life” meant more than “pro-birth”, we might have a legit discussion. But until the opportunities are the same regardless of background, the eugenics argument is about as ill informed as a client change denier or anti-vaxer.
Mr. Douhat ought to stay out of the adoption discussion until he is more informed. Take it from someone who is adopted and an adoptive parent.
6
'...But in practice, liberal technocracy still has a “solve poverty by cutting birthrates” bias inherited from a population-panic age...'
Anyone who doesn't believe that overpopulation is one of the most important problems of our era is living in a fool's paradise.
The question of undesirable populations is somewhat circular; in the context of population reduction, any population that continues expanding rapidly is undesirable regardless of their skin color.
3
Planned Parenthood is not in the adoption business, that is true. If they were, foster care would be much more effective and compassionate. They are not in the space ship business; if they were we would have colonized Mars already. Instead of attacking them for what they are not, perhaps understanding and supporting them for what they are would be a better use of newspaper space. It is contraception that has freed millions of women to have healthier, more successful and yes, smaller families. The phony right wing smear about abortion as eugenics stoops to the level of a Clarence Thomas but is beneath the intellectual honesty of an open mind. Oh wait! It's that church thing again. Douthat and Thomas are con-specific. without the differentiation one would hope to find in robust debate. Anti-choice propagandists use the spaghetti method in their arguments: throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. If it doesn't, keep cooking.
14
How convoluted can an argument get! Clarence Thomas is a sad, sick man.
The problem is women’s health and well being and OLD MEN should not be able to deliberate on that with a strong counter view.
The Republican Party and conservatives everywhere have blocked legislation protecting women several times and now we need to change that!
VOTE for your right to have fair representation!
12
Nice try, Mr. Douthat, but I caught that “moral status of unborn life,” bit there at the end. As much as one appreciates a good tautology, it’s the same old same old: just like any other screamer outside a health clinic, define the terms your way and declare vic’try.
But holding Clarence Thomas up not only as a moral exemplar, but an intellectual hero...seriously? Since if we’re going to trace present-day ideas back to their origins and then slyly mention the “genetic fallacy,” so we can pretend we’re not, what are Thomas’ beginnings?
Harassment, porn, lying, conflict of interest, and so on. That takes care of the moral authority joke. And as for the intellectual luminary bit...oh, my. Thomas on eugenics, a staunch supporter of the likes of George Gilder, which shows up throughout Republican ideas on immigration and Planned Parenthood since Reagan. The explicit theory is that white women need to have more babies, or here comes the tide.
By the way: given your politics and beliefs, you know we know that you’re saying you’ll go after contraception next, yes? That’s the real reason Margaret Sanger’s here.
8
People decide for themselves how to raise their children. That's individual choice. If the government were to dictate how to raise our children, it would be fascism. If an individual woman decides to have an abortion, it's individual choice. If the government intrudes on that, it's eugenics. The difference is quite clear.
5
Fascinating but likely wrong. Any links between eugenics and current abortion are overwhelmingly spurious ones. This begs the question, what common force is acting on eugenic-like rhetoric of today and abortion to generate this association?
1
Douthat writes "None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal. That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life..."
Moral status of unborn life? What a joke. Please provide an operational definition of the word "moral." You will not find one, as it nothing more than a personal term used without any signification; no one else will understand what you mean by that term no matter how much verbiage you throw at it. It is personal superstition and has no place in political discourse.
Clarence Thomas wants to impose his personal superstitions on the entire nation and does not belong on the supreme court; his day past with the turn of the 16th century. (This could have been said for Scalia as well, whose arguments showed he could not think rationally.) Same for Douhat, whose term moral is nothing more than an ape call. These morals (whose morals?) he wants to subject human primates to, when did they suddenly become paramount? Before or after humans split from chimps? (Note that the genetic observation that humans and chimps split in the past does not require evolution, but is an objective observation in the same sense as Galileo's observations with a telescope that showed, among other things, that certain planets had phases and therefor orbited the sun, not the earth, and did not require a belief in Copernican theory.)
4
I see several comments here that men should "shut up" when it comes to abortion. Ok, fine. But if men need to shut up then women who have never had an abortion should also shut up as your views on abortion are as theoretical as that of any man.
1
Something tells me that when the immigration cases come before the SC, justice Thomas won’t be concerned about Eugenics. Like most of the Justices of the recent times, he’s just playing word games to push the party line.
4
So Douthat’s argument starts off by saying of course Thomas is wrong but ends with saying he’s not wrong and that we’re jerks for automatically seeing it that way? Am I getting this right?
Douthat’s “both sides”/whataboutism arguments can be so unbelievably weak sometimes.
2
Planned Parenthood, ACLU and Woodrow Wilson's policy of removing Black Americans from civil service jobs are all related.. All Rooted in the then developing Communist movement..the sanctity of the individual superceded by the 'masses', justifying the elimination of the inferior for the common good. It's no coincidence the ACLU and PP are still decidedly leftist and anti Christian.
1
"But in practice, liberal technocracy still has a “solve poverty by cutting birthrates” bias inherited from a population-panic age, and abortion-rights rhetoric still has a way of sliding into Malthusian fears about too many poor kids in foster care."
Spoken like a true believer.
Yes, ignore the fact the fact that half of all births in the USA today are paid for with some sort of welfare benefits.
Ignore the fact that the waves of immigration pouring into this country and crossing borders across the world are caused primarily by the unbelievable numbed of human beings being born.
Overlook the wholesale destruction of forests, oceans, needed to rob the earth to feed the ever growing numbers of people; the real cause of climate change is simply too many people.
without linking sex to birth and family, one gets the runaway hedonism that envelops large chunks of society today. And with it the looking at people as objects and self gratification as the ultimate aim of life.
This talk coming from the anti abortionists would have some meaning if the principle advocates showed a reverence for all life, or a concern for those after they are born.
But they argue against abortion really as a means to hinder the collapse of a more general sense of family and community which I agree happens when sexual desire is dismissed as a simple one sided desire to be satiated.
How clever to link a desire for a healthier population to Hitlers genocide.
1
As many have noted, the anti-abortion* folks hold that life is sacred from the moment of conception to the moment of birth. Once born, they blame the mother for irresponsibly giving birth to a child she could not afford to raise.
Note, please, how often the anti-abortion crowd both refuses to fund birth control access for the poor, and also claims that women have babies solely to get more welfare money.
In short, the anti-abortion crowd may fool themselves into thinking that they value life - but the rest of us know they're simply seeking to use government power to run women's lives. For a bunch of folks claiming to object to government telling people what to do, they're sure eager to use government power to legislate their own religious views.
*(I'm old enough to recall when Pat Robertson decided that "pro-life" was a better label for marketing purposes)
8
I should think more minority women choose abortion because they, on average, have less wealth than white women, making it more difficult for them to access certain contraception options, not to mention raise a child. They may also have less of a support system, if other family members are also struggling financially, and are probably more likely to work in jobs that offer minimal or no benefits or accommodations for pregnancy.
I can't say I've heard much from the anti-abortion crowd about the much higher maternal mortality rates among minorities, again due in part to poverty and lack of access to care (as well as racism). Closing clinics has already increased maternal death rates, and the more recent bans will do more of the same. This has not been a notable concern for those that profess to be in favor of life.
I am in favor of reducing the abortion rate, but criminalization is a crude cudgel that causes unnecessary suffering and doesn't address the root problems: unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and limited access to care and support for mothers.
5
How about this thought: GOP wants to make abortion unsafe and illegal for the masses so that the masses will overpopulate In their ranks, providing endless sources of cheap labor and military cannon fodder.
2
The danger in this "dangerous idea" is the convoluted thought created to reach a pre-determined conclusion. It would be laughable were it not so malicious.
What is truly "dangerous" is the damage that obvious partisanship does to the reputation of the United States Supreme Court.
4
The eugenicist's argument is that certain people are genetically, i.e. permanently, unfit to contribute to the population. The pro-choice argument is that all women may find themselves in a position in which bearing a child would a poor choice for themselves and thus for the imagined child. Imagine a 17 year old who has not finished high school recognizing that she doesn't have the resources to raise a child. She might choose to spare the potential child a disastrous upbringing. Ten years later with a degree and a job she might well be ready, and even eager to raise a child in a healthy caring manner. The eugenicist would say, "No, you're still the same inferior human," while the pro-choice advocate would still leave the decision up to the woman. Which of them, Mr Douthat, favours the equal treatment under the law on which the U.S. was founded?
7
This column distorts history.
Margaret Sanger's primary motivation was the emancipation of women, and gaining control over childbirth was a crucial initial step in that cause. She, however, was intellectually curious and keenly aware of the the move to "improve humanity" through control over reproduction, which is what eugenics meant before W.W. II. This was a very popular movement among many, including progressives, in this era before WWII. She and others were attracted to the idea that reducing or eliminating genetically based disorders could be accomplished by gaining some control over reproduction. It was a preventative strategy that was viewed as a civilized way of applying science and she spoke of it in some public statements. (how bad that science was was not appreciated then). This was not a driving force for her, however.
Eugenics was a major reason for the support that she garnered for Planned Parenthood from many conservatives. It is hard to fathom now but numerous Republicans, especially the wealthy, "white shoe" New England brand, were staunch financial backers of Planned Parenthood and this was apparently for eugenic reasons that most would find disturbing today.
11
The obvious implication of abortion being denied in all cases, no matter what reason, as protection of future human life, would be to turn the Catholic Church traditional position on the mattter, and ban contraception altogether, turning it into a crime. Otherwise, parents who have unprotected sex with conception as a target, and protected to prevent it, are as "culpable" effectively as a woman who seeks termination.
The problem with extreme positions is that they lead to absurdity.
My Irish Catholic grandmother died in childbirth with her fifth child in 1916. My mother was almost seven and was the oldest. Thomas and Douthat have something in common - both are men. They view this discussion as academic. Thomas has no children. Their ignorance of women's lives is surpased only by their arrogance.
Maternal mortality is a major problem in this country; more than in any other industrialized nation and many so-called developing nations. Any woman who has had a child, lost a child, compared life stories with any other woman, knows that controlling fertility is critical to a woman's health and the health of her exisiting children. PERIOD. This post is by Joanne Roll ...the account is in my husband's name.
13
@Groll
Men are clueless. Maybe women make pregnancy and childbirth look too easy ? I've been mentally tallying up the pregnancy/delivery complications which close family members have experienced over the last decade or so. Fortunately, all of them had access to good and timely medical care and no one died or was permanently disabled. These were all basically healthy women with wanted pregnancies. Nevertheless, if the care they needed was not available for any reason, some of them would not be here, or would be disabled, today. Here's just a few of the complications :
1) Placenta detached prematurely post-delivery -- causing hemorrhage and emergency blood transfusions. 2) Placenta retained post-delivery, requiring manual extraction. 3) Erosion of vaginal/anal wall due to pressure of baby's head in late pregnancy and during delivery, causing a fissure which required surgical repair. 4) Failure to go into labor, resulting in past-due dates and induction of a big baby before placenta failed. 5) Development of ovarian cyst during pregnancy as a result of surge in maternal hormones, which required emergency surgery to prevent rupture of cyst (similar to a ruptured appendix).
Just a sampling of fairly common problems. Nothing overly dramatic like emergency c-sections without any anesthesia except novocaine injected ahead of the scalpel, which an ob-gyn friend described doing during a dire delivery. Come on guys, imagine going through that !
4
A very theoretical discussion that fails to penetrate the civil rights issue of men (mostly) deciding what women do with their bodies. I've yet to read any op-ed writer discuss the Right implementing programs that would encourage women to have babies that right now they can't afford to raise. The Right says it's pro-life so incentivize birth by offering to pay for all hospital costs and, I don't know, let's say, the first five years of the child's life.
5
Mr. Douthat's argument actually supports the opposite. The pro life movement seeks to use government to mandate reproductive decisions to promote a religious dictate much like the eugenics movement sought to use government to promote a immoral policy preference.
Clarence Thomas's argument in the abortion debate demonstrates that he doesn't know much about history or the ethics and professional standards that inform trained historians. It also demonstrates that lawyers in general are not historians in the most fundamental way. Lawyers--and especially those that argue cases in court--try to find precedent to support their cases, and at best hope that their opponents do not find countervailing evidence in the historical legal record. They cherry-pick evidence in order to win their cases. That is their job. Ethical and responsible historians, by contrast, must take countervailing evidence into account, even if it undermines whatever hypothesis or hypotheses they might have.
Other would-be historians, such as some journalists, do the same thing, perhaps for other reasons. In these ways history is often confused with and conflated with myth, fable, and outright falsehood to advance political and cultural agendas.
All sorts of popular cultural forms--cinema, fiction, television, nonfiction books, essays, and other forms of education and entertainment abound in historical subjects of themes. It seems that many creators of these products and many amateurs think that history is relatively easy to do reliably. But it isn't. Consumers of these forms often think that they "learn" history from these sources. But they don't; they "learn" myth and falsehood, disguised as history.
2
There's a lot that's glossed over in the potted history Justice Thomas leans on; he obscures a great deal of the history of the politics of reproductive health to make his argument. For example, how does Emma Goldman figure into this narrative? Goldman, and other free love / reproductive rights activists of the late 19th and early 20th century, had a very different view of agency, state power, and gender than Sanger. I'm not saying that these activists were paragons of contemporary political sensibilities, but they don't fit into the tendentious argument Thomas asks us to believe. If we are going to dive into history to find guideposts, then we owe it to ourselves to be honest about what we find. The past, like the present, is far more complex than Thomas allows.
When I heard of and then read the opinion I was stunned. Certainly, in aggregate, the adjacent yet independent actions of women (of whatever ethnicity) can end up looking as if there is a selection process at work, but the fact of the matter is that these are all individual decisions. For Justice Thomas to assert that in the aggregate these individual decisions amount to eugenics is ridiculous. What you have are women coming to similar decisions based on what may be common circumstances (poverty, age, marital status etc). If those conditions hold to a greater degree for one ethnic group or another, that is not a racial bias or an indicator of eugenics. That simply means that common circumstances lead to a common outcome. Blame the circumstances for the seeming racial bias, not a cultural drive for eugenics.
5
I can hear all the liberals getting triggered by this column. It’s not about the abortion issue per se: the subtext is that the moral ”liberal religion” has complex outcomes that are impossible to understand as consistently clear moral good. And the complexity and morally ambiguous outcomes are too much for many folks to deal with.
I applaud Douthat for being able to map out some of these confusing and fascinating threads. As for abortion, my two cents worth is this: as long as you have a diverse, technologically advanced, “post industrial” society it’s simply impossible to not have women have control over their bodies. At some point technology will provide a form of contraception so embedded (and free) that the whole abortion debate will become moot. Till then the moralists on both sides will rage, but it’s the hot air rising from the technological locomotive speeding through history.
1
When I was in grad school, Planned Parenthood offered me inexpensive contraceptives and excellent health counseling.
Now in my 60s, I’ve set up a recurring monthly donation to them. I think they’re about to get an extra, large check.
7
The statistic concerning more poor and/or ethnic women having abortions today is an artifact of the difficulties obtaining and paying for healthcare.....only exacerbated by the anti abortion forces.
The best way to lower abortion rates (a choice no woman makes lightly) is to make birth control readily available and affordable.
If truly pro-life, the same advocates against abortion would be in the FOREFRONT of the push for available, affordable, universal health care: prenatal, postnatal and support for children and families dealing with handicapped family members, young and old.
(This is NOT what we see!)
2
It's interesting how Conservative Christians rail against government interference in their lives, but not as loudly as they insist that government force people to follow their version of beliefs.
4
Uber Catholic Ross continues to deliver on the church's long tradition of do this, do that comminiques to the flock frequently accompanied by highly insightful 'moral" analysis that is pure bunk.
I will suggest barely functional and frequently downright bizarre Clarence Thomas as a starting point of reference isn't too persuasive.
Douthat's ease at applying the conservative, liberal and progressive labels to an issue that transcends each, illustrates a personal bias that pays lip service only to the fundamental issue of a woman's right to choose and women's healthcare rights.
4
It must never be for anyone else to decide what a family wants to do with their choices for having kids. Severe disabilities are something they and the kid would shoulder almost exclusively.
Freedom isn’t optional as soon as you dislike the decision someone else makes.
5
The essence of Thomas' statement on eugenics is built on the same rhetoric Republicans use to fall back on the fact the 50+ years ago Democrats were the party of segregationists and supporters of Jim Crow. They conveniently forget the exodus of those people to the Republican party after the Civil Rights Act. While eugenics was a very real movement with very real consequences - sterilizing mental patients at one point. It is a long dead and discredited concept. It has not more to do with the pro-choice movement than Ross does with intellectual honesty.
5
Ross decries black abortion rates and wants to delink it from a poverty question/solution. But, he is quiet on the SNAP cuts being inflicted (with new work requirements), child care needs, or increasing the minimum wages, even as the Trump farmers reap another 18 billion of free (taxpayer) money on top of the previous 12 billion in welfare/tariff transfer payments.
It seems the rural white farmers are now full Trumpist's and are quite happy to de-link farm subsidies from food for the poor (urban?) areas. Their reps in Congress are now firmly in the yoyo camp as far as food legislation.
For one who strives to promote a consistent grand unifying theory on everything from legislation to medical care to personal morality, he is strangely quiet on something living people actually need: food. Simply put, thoughts and prayers, or (embittered) Supreme Court Justices will not fill the bellies of the children, (or protect them from gun violence or educate them). I guess the founders didn't care, or they would have written it in the constitution.
1
It is ironic (not) that a great number of abortion-at-any-stage foes, are quite willing (on principle) to abandon their devotion to the care of severely deformed infants at the point of birth, and are also opposed, (on principle) to taxation to provide such care.
6
There are many reasons we should have family planning education so that women can make rational decisions. We need to address the whole problem, not just abortion.
Planned parenthood is a family planning institution. When I was a volunteer we did very few abortions, but provided huge amounts of education, birth control and options.
There is no doubt that there is too much consumption in our world. One of the reasons is overpopulation. If there had been no birth control in the past 50 years, what would our world look like now?
I was a young nurse in the early 60s and saw so many women hospitalized and dying due to pelvic infections and what we now call sepsis from dirty abortions. Clean abortions were illegal, but middle class and rich women and women who were able made arrangements with their physicians to have a quickie abortion. That may still happen, I hope so.
Middle class women who are married and in stable relationships may need to have abortions because one more child will tip the family or the individual woman over the edge.
So let’s help women to have fewer abortions by providing as many birth control options as possible and educating men and women, and let them make their own decisions when needed.
12
“None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal. That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life, the requirements of female equality.”
“Unborn life” is not life, by its very definition. If people want to keep pretending that there’s some moral obligation due to each and every embryo to successfully be fertilized, then we should probably start paying attention to what happens once those children are actually born.
9
Forget Malthus. The immediate ugly fact is that unwanted unloved and uncared-for children are more likely to grow up badly. We need fewer such, not more. Therefore birth control, including abortion on demand, is a good thing.
8
I haven’t read Thomas’s opinion but it sounds like he may be confusing eugenics and genetic screening. No expert here but eugenics suppresses births of undesired races through sterilization and abortion. Not happening in this century and would be widely condemned if it did. Genetic screening could be used to abort fetuses without the desired trait. Thomas and Douthart should focus their arguments on that issue and leave the right to chose an abortion to the woman. Trait selection is something to worry about but Thomas and douthart miss that point by broadly condemning abortion.
2
Surely we have to ask whether, in an age of increasingly public expressions of white supremacy, much anti-abortion activity is intended to keep white women from having abortions. Maintaining and increasing the white population also long has been linked to efforts to prevent "miscegenation" and condemn homosexuality. White supremacists want white women to play their proper role in white dominance by marrying white men and popping out lots of white babies.
3
Clarence Thomas’s idea is dangerous only in the hands of someone like Douthat who wants to sow division and heap suspicion on progressives.
Almost as an aside Douthat points to the real issue here: “None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal.” If that’s the case why bring it up at all except to cast aspersions on pro-life motivation?
Thomas’s suggestion of eugenics is a sideshow distraction, and Douthat knows it. But the Douthat editorial creed is simple: never fail to waste an entire column’s worth of words if it gives you the opportunity to attack progressives – particularly about something like abortion, which we know the Catholic Douthat has intractable, theological views on. And if you can’t convince people with theology, why not try eugenics?
10
In the interest of educating readers to the history of eugenics, Ross Douthat shows an appalling lack of understanding, oversimplifying matters, ignoring what drew Sanger to eugenics, and thereby tarring progressives--as if the eugenics movement was easily divisible in the way he asserts (it wasn't); and as if progressives were focused on population control. This is manipulating the historical record for his conservative ends.
First, the idea of continuous progressive movement from the early 20th century on is nonsense--and Douthat should know this or be ashamed for his lack of diligence. For example, many in the run-up and during WWI advocated eugenics as part of a pacificist movement. Margaret Sanger was among them, a lifelong pacifist. Douthat would have you think that her eugenics was an effort at population control of the poor--and Ginsburg, too. Both wanted the poor to be able to control their own lives. That was Sanger's focus in starting Planned Parenthood. Frankly, it's in keeping with many conservative values, to allow individuals to have control over their own lives rather than allow government to do so.
In sum, Douthat has done a disservice here to serve a political interest. It's a dishonorable bit of work. I shouldn't have to write this, but as a former professor of American Studies who specialized in the time period he writes about. I would have told him to get it right. He does not.
10
The real problem we have is the amount of sex that is occurring in our hyper-sexual society. We have ignored woman's bodies and sex completely.
My emphasis is not on the woman's body since I am a male, but .......
There is nothing simple about this issue.
Having a baby is a real strain on parents and if one is missing you have a mother without much help and pinned down with a child (often multiple children). With the inability to have an abortion you have increased poverty rates, and lower educated citizens (of any color).
The single mother with a child or children is often called out by the right as a welfare queen. This single mother who had the child is the target of almost every Republican reasoning to cut welfare. To force a woman on welfare with a child to work is cruel. First she would have to find daycare, then she'd have to have the skills.
If anything we should be teaching birth control and not playing around the edges. I don't care what the Catholic Church thinks about it or if it makes anyone uneasy.
It's time to talk about sex and the hormones that cause its desire.
Sex is part of the human condition.
It is time to really talk about contraceptives.
6
From the typewriter of Tom Shadyac or Mel Brooks, this column would serve as a foundation for a cinematic satire on how academics can expend copious amounts of hot air and end up saying nothing. You can do much better than this "one hand this, the other that," Mr. Douthat--or at least confront the issues in your very compelling headline.
5
So much intricate bobbing and weaving by Douthat to reach his desired anti-choice conclusion.
This whole debate is pointless as in a free society we all have the ultimate say over our bodies. You can't force me to donate a kidney, or bone marrow, or to give blood, to save another life. Likewise you cannot force me to carry an embryo or fetus; Whether that embryo or fetus is a living human or not is moot.
5
The hubris and self-importance of the Douthats and Thomases stands out like noxious weeds in my lawn. These are men, men who have never and will never know what a woman deals with when a man -- notice that it takes two, one of each gender -- gets her pregnant. These guys worship their own autonomy as men who can ignore the results of their trysts if they so, yes, *choose*, but work overtime to load the responsibility of a life-long commitment to allow a mass of cells to occupy and dominate the female body and eventually demand 24/7, 365, ~25-yr sustenance and support, both physical and emotional (not to mention the intellectual wherewithal required to teach and explain the entire world from baby through adult.
So for this piece, Douthat can comfortably pontificate from his armchair about the issue knowing it has nothing to do with himself...pretty much the same approach he takes with every other issue. Sophistry as a tactic for producing words in print is a fairly rare skill if you want to be seen as worthy of attention in the NYT, admittedly, and he has achieved that.
But if Douthat or Thomas could get pregnant themselves, removal of that nascent mass of cells, when it is uninvited by rape or incest or when it threatens the host body or when the host feels it unacceptable in the context of their life, would assume the status of a religious ceremony.
And then slanderous projection of "theoretical self-conception"!? If that were disqualifying, he wouldn't have a job.
6
Nicely done, Douthat! A discussion of the history (recent) of abortion without the usual polemics about murdering babies and inflicting unbearable mental anguish on those who think abortion should be criminalized. Thank you!
1
Well, Ross, you introduce your three-stage history by saying it's useful to do that. If it has any use, I missed it. It's a mere typology. I've seen thousands of them and, generally speaking, they do not mean very much. This is no exception.
As for people who believe something like, "Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood. Therefore, Planned Parenthood is a eugenicist front", well, they don't need another typology. They need a course in elementary logic, or maybe better mental equipment.
5
The concept of "solv(ing) poverty by cutting birthrates" isn't a "bias." It's simply mathematical reality. If someone is making barely enough to get by themselves, popping out a kid is only going to make the financial situation of the mother worse. Same is true if both parents are in the picture. Taking an amount of money that only had to cover the needs of one person or two people, and adding extra mouths to clothe, feed, and house spreads resources even thinner.
Having a child also takes up a tremendous amount of time and energy, which otherwise could be put towards working additional hours, education, or other forms of self-improvement that could lead to increased income.
One of the biggest hypocrises in the right's belief system is that they talk out of one side of their mouth of the importance of taking responsibility for one's self, but then when people do and decide that they can't afford to reproduce, those on the right call them selfish or, as this article illustrates, worse.
6
Another example of Right Wing hypocrisy—more concerned about the "rights" of a minority fetus then they are about the rights of minority people to vote, get an education, live without fear of burning crosses. They abandon the child when he or she is most vulnerable.
All the tortured anti-abortion rhetoric ALWAYS ignores the obvious remedy— BIRTH CONTROL—if there's no pregnancy, there is no need for abortion. Birth control should be taught and made readily available.
If it runs counter to your religious beliefs, fine, don't use it, its a personal choice. But if you are indeed a religious person, and genuinely horrified at the suffering of the unborn, then you should see handing out condoms as greatly preferable to "dead babies." More hypocracy.
Of course, none of this is about babies, or condoms, or even abortions. It's about political power, using an emotional issue as to keep your base fired up while keeping your opponent on the defensive. So much for governing.
7
I'm pretty sure this editorial fails spectactularly at histroical research and actually lends credence to the right's wild conspiracies about Sanger and eugenicists.
4
I have essentially no stake in the abortion battles. There are scientific and medical reasons to say that a fertilized egg is not a “person”and therefore has no rights as such. The other side believes anything after conception is a “person.” What is that opinion based on? If you can only answer with “that’s how I feel”or bring in the Bible or any religion, you haven’t offered a compelling case. Do we force atheists to believe in heaven and hell? Why should anyone, with their own religious beliefs, have the right to impose that belief on anyone else?
If you believe that life starts at conception, good for you. But accept that some people, some very good people, just don’t agree with you or your religion. Stop calling the women and their doctors murderers. This debases other people and does nothing to advance the discussion. The most “conservative”position should be that the government should be mute on this subject. There should be no opinion about it. It is government stepping into your private life.
9
I believe rates of infant mortality are also much higher in the black community than in the white community. Perhaps Mr. Douthat would like to expand on his aspersions against white liberals who support legalized abortion by suggesting we’re in favor of *those* rates, too.
3
Yes, this is about who is in control. Are we to understand that the answer to forced abortion is forced birth? Both fall disproportionately on the poor and people of color. Good education, other than marginal employment and health care access are structurally denied these populations and conservatives actively trash worker rights and social safety nets. Personal agency, bodily integrity and self determination are the only remedy. And giving agency to these women is something the right cannot tolerate.
4
I would hope Ross Douthat would offer a formal apology to Planned Parenthood for his slanderous remark of them being in the ‘abortion business’. Planned Parenthood was a lifeline for me as a young college student on financial aid and food stamps. They provided me with routine exams along with birth control. Has Ross ever bothered to go to a Planned Parenthood clinic and seen the range of services offered for women’s health and men’s? And yes they do provide abortion services thank goodness, in a clean and safe environment. Those days seem to be winding down as women are losing the battle to control their bodies and the decisions that come with being female.
12
Most people are trying to earn a living, stay ahead of our creditors, and keep body and soul together. For some women that occasionally means having to rid themselves of an unwanted pregnancy. It's not bigger than that.
Ross should keep his semiotics and very public love of obscure 20th century thought movements to himself. It's invasive.
9
Justice Clarence has the courage to speak out for the unborn. We need more men and women on the Supreme Court who are not afraid of public opinion. I hope President Trump is given the opportunity to appoint another Justice such as Justice Thomas who is not afraid to follow his head and heart.
1
@KMW
What courage does it take to say that someone *else* should do the hard work of bearing and raising a child she doesn't want?
What courage does it take to say that someone *else* should ruin her life and body to raise a child she doesn't want?
What courage does it take to give away someone *else's* bodily autonomy?
What courage does it take to say someone *else* should endure a misery you will never have to endure?
3
Mr. Douthat suggests a broader social and historical perspective, but still stays pretty narrow in his approach. As some of the other letter writers note, it is the GOP's apparent lack of concern about those kids after they are out of the womb that's part of the problem. As pithily noted by Barney Frank, Republicans 'believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth...'. Absent that broader perspective, they won't and shouldn't be taken seriously on this issue, Thomas included.
1
Well, you could say that after 20 or so years, Thomas has an idea---a very bad one, but it is an idea---
3
I await the day when no man has a say in whether abortion is legal or any individual abortion should or should not be had. (Yes, I know the day will never come.)
4
You can write thousands of pages about this, use examples from a hundred years ago and stretch mightily to put a racist slant on reproductive rights, but the only thing that matters is the individual's decision whether to continue a pregnancy. It is none of your business what I do with my body. In the USA, women are not chattel.
9
The right hand of the court now has two false mantras. Robert's word salad of "gobbledygook", the locution a bright legal mind uses when he does not understand a field outside of the law, and Thomas' egregious and sophomoric tantrums based on false premise and bad historical interpretation. To reprise, brilliant legal minds (dummies) that make stuff up.
2
This disingenuous attempt to paint abortion as evil ignores the simple truth: abortion rights are about allowing individuals to control their own bodies and lives without government interference. Nothing more.
Unable to address this in good faith, conservatives trot out a long line of anti-choice arguments designed to deflect from motives of liberty and self-determination. They lie about a fetal heartbeat at 6 weeks. There is no fetal heart at that stage. They lie about fetal pain at 20 weeks. This is physically impossible—there is no connection of the nerves to the cortex until 24 weeks. They lie about Planned Parenthood. They lie about TRAP laws. They lied that abortion was a scheme to reduce minority birth rates.
They even lie about their own religion—the Bible says nothing about abortion. In fact, Christian tradition was rooted in the concept of “quickening” for centuries before Christians knew conception existed.
Now Douthat employs innuendo to suggest that pro-choice motives are somehow “structurally” based on eugenics. It’s another lie.
If anyone has a eugenics agenda, it’s the conservatives who rant about the declining birth rate among whites and the dilution of white blood by brown. Perhaps it’s not surprising that anti-choice voices keep returning to this topic. It’s top of mind for them.
10
First and foremost, sending warm thoughts to Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg this day in spring, hoping this finds her in comfort.
'Eugenics': 'The production of fine (esp. human) offspring by control of inherited qualities'. Not all of us have been to Oxford, Mr. Douthat, after all.
The Year of 1917, when Margaret Sanger was in Chicago, Rasputin had been murdered by a group of nobles, and America was entering into WWI.
Some women were college graduates, but did not have the right to vote. Some women were scientists and physicians, and came North.
In 2019, 'We The Peasants' in America, as some authoritarian countries would have it, do not condone abortion and encourage Planned Parenthood.
Morality is not going to help feed the lives of accidental children, let alone those born in poverty, and has led men to commit acts of violence against the fairer sex.
Singular, but earlier my thoughts were with Dr. Ford and Dr. Hill, women of courage with no need to be taught what is within their rights, the former a child psychologist, the latter an eminent lawyer.
Meanwhile, Ross Douthat and Clarence Thomas, who will never bear children, are addressing 'The Rights of Women', and it would be of far more interest to some of this readership, to hear the voice of Stacey Abrams.
4
American (white) women deserve to lose freedoms because they have always voted Republican. Most women don't care about politics, certainly not as much as they should if they 'really' care about these issues and not just pay lip service. But I argue that American women do not care - why else do you send your cannon fodder to wars? It is far too easy to just vote Republican - ask the majority of white women.
2
Isn't this Douthat/Thomas argument really about poverty and its correlation with race? Since the poor in the US are disproportionately non-caucasians, the "negative" impacts of any policy will disproportionately impact minority communities. So if one is going to effectively call abortion a form of eugenics (racism), then you must also call our Heath Care system racist, our Education system racist, our Real Estate system racist, heck...one could say Capitalism is racist!!! Of course, some on the more left side of politics do make those arguments, so it is odd to see it used by Douthat/Thomas?!?!
Perhaps we can all agree that more wealth allows people to have more freedom, more opportunity, more choices, etc. - and that communities with historically limited (restricted) access to earn/gain wealth tend to suffer the negative consequences of whatever policies our society has in place. Thus for those concerned about racism (as Douthat/Thomas seem to be focused on here) we should turn this concern towards a focus on policies that make wealth more equally shared by more people - (in a way that still encourages entrepreneurship and growth). Sadly the GOP focus on tax cuts does not do that because it clearly benefits far far more those who already have wealth, who are disproportionately caucasian. (I guess Douthat/Thomas could now make the case that tax cuts are racist too!!)
1
Racism and misogyny are Republican issues that satisfy a non-religious fan base: white men.But the backbone of the pro-fetus movement is rooted in male supremacy. Do Catholics believe that women are equal? Do Evangelicals? Are religious zealots threatened by female equity? Do women in Church or Mosque or Synagogue have the same rights as men? Are the teachings of male supremacist faiths “cherry picked” by men?
Our founders want any religion to be the faith of America? Did they want Congress to anoint their favorite faith or legislate in ways that favor certain persons, genders, or medical procedures. Clearly the, First Amendment, mandates a non-religious, secular government that protects every American from the endless religious wars of Europe and the world. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” leaves no room for Catholic Dogma or Evangelical authority to force their beliefs on all of us. Catholics and Evangelicals are free to prohibit birth control, sex education, and ending pregnancy in their teaching and beliefs. Catholics and Evangelicals have no authority to govern, make laws and punish non believers in America, nor do they have authority to over science or medicine. All women are victims of male supremacist beliefs. Clarence Thomas’s decisions are white male supremacist. His beliefs justified slavery, racism now, and male supremacy now. Psychiatric dissection would inform his decisions.
1
"Criticizing his fellow justices’ decision to block part of an Indiana law that banned abortion based on sex, race or disability ..."
Three negatives? That was easy to read ... not!
No wonder Thomas has been so quiet on the court all these years; with a divided court he didn’t want us to know just how extreme he is.
8
It's quite a feat of mental gymnastics for Douthat and Thomas to link support for a woman's right to chose with support for forced sterilization on the grounds that people who support forced sterilization support legal abortion in order to make their case that they are protecting people from something sinister and that freedom of choice is not the central issue. The operative word isn't eugenics, as Douthat disingenuously implies, it's force, which he and Thomas clearly have no objection to using to achieve their goals which have nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with imposing their views of morality on others.
4
Is it possible abortion rates in African-American communities because of both poorer access to contraception and higher rates of poverty?
4
Ross Douthat is a master of the disingenuous argument, but this really tops his previous efforts. This article is as intellectually honest as banning Native Americans from hunting and fishing on their reservations in order to protect the environment. Conservatives are not just "not paladins of racial justice", but in fact have no standing to comment on the issue at all.
4
Eugenics and abortion are different issues, clearly. But abortion in part is stopping the birth of unwanted children, which I think is a good thing, right?
Do we have to call wallowing in some truths from history "progress". Isn't better to move on into the future without having to pay homage to a past that conservatives wish to bring forward to hamper progress. The conservative idol of individualism in all things human which they use to stymy appeals to everything social in human activities exposes a hypocrisy larger than any hypocrisy that confuses their brains from reading a fundamentalist bible.
1
Eugenics in this case is an involuntary termination. It is imposed by an outsider.
Abortion is voluntary, chosen by the mother.
It's her decision, not yours or mine.
You're grasping at a thin, weak straw this time, Ross. You usually are much better reasoned, even when we disagree.
You also don't usually resort to slandering, as you did with Planned Parenthood in this piece. Or the false alliance of RBG with eugenecists.
6
Throw it on the wall and see if it sticks. That seems to be the theme of Mr. Douthat’s latest piece. In this case, couple a reviled philosophy, eugenics, (most closely associated with the Nazis) and tie it to the pro-choice movement. Add some highly questionable historical references, and even more highly questionable historical “analysis”, and voila: the pro-choice movement is now a nefarious scheme to genetically engineer the our society.
These types of arguments should not be taken seriously. Their appeal, if any, lies with those people, overwhelmingly male, who because of religious or political conviction, or because of sheer arrogance, seek to impose their views upon all.
2
Clarence Thomas has it exactly backwards. Abortion is being outlawed mostly in southern states because poor black women's progeny used to be property. The subconscious motivation among the men in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia is inherited from their Grandfathers who tried to prevent slaves from using contraception while slave women knew secret ways to prevent bearing children who would be sentenced to a slave's life of hopelessness and cruelty. Why no exceptions for rape in the South? Because a child born of rape was worth as much as one born of marriage ... if marriage was even allowed. Women were just breeders. Of course these are not conscious motives among modern descendants of slaveowners, but 300 years of considering black women as less than human, and as having no right to deprive an owner of potential property, let alone the right to freedom to determine her own fate, didn't die. There is no echo of eugenics in choice; but there most surely is an echo of slavery in anti-choice. Poor black women living in poverty and chaos in Alabama want, need, and deserve abortions to minimize family misery, as the former pro-life minister learned in an Alabama prison. But although Alabama society men no longer benefit from more poor black babies their attitudes toward women have not changed; the strictest, most heartless anti-abortion law, laws entirely limiting women's freedom to control her life and the well-being of her family, are being spawned in the South.
3
Clarence Thomas has many dangerous ideas as a water carrier for Libertarian Neo-Feudalism. That is the root of everything he does. He has used race disingenuously to forward the libertarian agenda. Notoriously in his confirmation hearing. And here in applying the notions of state over-riding the bodily autonomy of black and other people (mostly women) in the name of eugenics to then have the state over-ride the bodily autonomy of women in the name of forced childbearing. He is logically and morally incoherent.
1
The Earth doesn't need any more human beings. We have overpopulated the planet and our only hope for redemption will be how we reduce our numbers so the Nature can survive.
Obviously making population decisions based on race is abhorrent but breeders are breeders, whether they are South or Central Americans, Asians, Africans or Europeans. If we are precluded from discussing population control we are stuck in the same competition between population groups to out-breed each other that created our ecological problems to begin with.
It may seem simplistic but the basic shift from patriarchal (father to son lineage) to the more natural matriarchal (mother to daughter lineage) would stabilize and reduce human population levels without the often imagined horrors of Nazi ideologies or "Eugenics".
There is a solution to the human / Earth problem. Let the women decide.
1
Let's get our history straight. The argument that providing low-cost or free abortions for low-income people (many of whom happen to be African-Americans) is racist is an argument originally from the Far Left (whatever they called themselves in the 1990s). The irony of Clarence Thomas taking up this trope is almost unbearable.
The word "eugenics" should be nowhere near this discussion. No one is talking about forced abortion, or forced sterilization. And there were several historical and geographical iterations of what we now call "eugenics," as different in objectives as "patriotism."
Hey, Ivanka Trump! Are you on food stamps? Why not? Oh, because you make too much money. And food stamps are for people who need an economic boost. Guess we all have to put groceries on the table, huh? It's just more costly for some than for others.
Well, sometimes it's a woman's choice to terminate a pregnancy. And she needs an economic boost. This is no more racist than food stamps.
Oh, and poor white people get food stamps too.
2
There is nothing inherently wrong with eugenics. It just happens to have been practiced in scientifically unsound, coercive ways.
The paradigm for a good eugenic program would be: a very wealthy person endows a fund to persuade people to voluntarily get tested for disease-mutations such as CF or sickle-cell hemoglobin, maybe by paying people money to get tested. And also, the fund would persuade people who tested positive to voluntarily take measures to avoid passing the bad mutation on to future generations, either by not breeding at all, or, by using artificial reproductive technologies such as IVF with selective implantation of confirmed-normal embryos/blastocycsts. (Or, soon, CRISPR.) Again, the fund could offer to pay people for taking these measures.
This would be eugenics, but also scientifically sound, non-coercive, and beneficial to humanity. Future generations would be less likely to suffer from genetic diseases, some of which are horrible. Cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, many others. Including, RRM2B-related MDDS, which is what little Charlie Gard had.
1
Thomas' attempt to connect eugenics with abortion was rejected by the scholar whose work on which it was ostensibly based. Yes, Thomas' idea is dangerous, but more because it is tells a false tale, not because it points out some sort of moral flaw in "progressive" (whatever that means these days) views on a woman's right to choose. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/clarence-thomas-used-my-book-argue-against-abortion/590455/
1
By "killing nascent human life" one might think Ross is referring to the fact that infant mortality rate in the United States ranks in the 20's, behind countries like Costa Rica.
But don't forget, the comfortable, older, white, Republican male (in this case Catholic), is - as usual - concerned only with the collection of cells called a zygote. Once it's a "baby" he relishes culling healthcare, food stamps, workfare, educational assistance - nearly anything shown to help it live.
I guess such selfish duplicity is easy when you can't get raped or pregnant.
4
Clarence Thomas is about as qualified to sit on the Supreme Court as Donald Trump is to sit in the oval office.
It is dangerous when a nation of 335 million is ruled by ignoramuses.
6
There is a direct line between the eugenics movement and Auschwitz, just as there is a direct line between the Jim Crow laws and the Nuremberg Laws.
But there is no such connection between a woman's right to choose and eugenics or racism.
Indeed, bans on contraception and abortion, like the Jim Crow laws and the Nuremberg Laws, were designed in order to keep one type of person in their place.
End of discussion.
3
This "blurrier" post does not justify denying women's rights.
Tough situation and most rational people would take the abortion path, I suspect, under these difficult circumstances. I would.
The U.S. does not provide adequate support to help the working poor to deal with extra disabled kids or not disabled kids for that matter.
George Carlin had some ironic and bitterly funny routines about the right wing sympathy for the fetus, and lack of concern for the poor kid once out of the womb. I think that is still terribly true and not likely to change anytime soon.
I never understood the phrase suffer the little children.... but it seems to apply here.
1
Government and especially SCJ Clarence Thomas stay out of our lives and our bedrooms.
5
Sunday morning mental gymnastics...
Eugenics was about state controlled pro-creation.
Ross/Thomas et al advocate for Religious mandated pro-creation.
Roe-Wade in the US and similar the Morgentaler legal decision in Canada recognize pro-creation as a personal choice.
Oh and Ross... planned parenthood is a public heath organization, nice try though.
1
Mister Thomas is to reasoning as Mister tRump is to economics.
4
Wow. Reading Mr Douthat describe the progressive agenda is like listening to a blind men describe an elephant, touching one aspect, misinterpreting, but sure that he understand the whole.
As a progressive I would never believe that describing nazi eugenics is an accurate representation of conservative views on birth control. Sadly Mr Douthat had no such hesitation.
Often wrong, but never uncertain
6
"And in any other area of policy Thomas’s point about how legal abortion appears, in the aggregate, to act in racist and eugenic ways would be taken as an indicator that something more than just emancipation is at work."
Perhaps it should underline the limitations in relating correlation and causality in any simplistic or straightforward way, in this and any other instance--which is not to suggest they aren't often related, but it qualifies the conclusions one properly ought to draw in any particular context. Thomas paradoxically is trying to use ways of arguing common on the left to make an argument from the right, but what is missing is a measured critique of this way of arguing either from left or right that points out its limitations.
So, I looked up some quick statistics about shooting deaths by race in the U.S. It appears that the rate of death of black individuals is higher than that for white individuals in every state in the Union.
The Second Amendment was written into law by men who held black people in slavery.
And yet I don't hear Clarence Thomas or other other conservatives calling the right to bear arms a tool of racism. Weird, huh?
2
I think Mr. Thomas is one of the worst judges we've ever seen. I find every one of his decisions devoid of logic, reason, compassion, wisdom, and, most importantly, they are consistently at odds with the most fundamental tenets of our Constitution. He is the worst kind of activist judge, and frankly, a complete and total boor.
3
For eugenics purposes, the relevant issue is the overall fertility rate, not the prevalence of any particular method of birth control. The fertility rate among blacks is higher than among whites, so eugenics arguments fall flat.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rates-by-race-and-ethnicity/
I'd like to know if the garbled edit of the sentence, "That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life, the requirements of female equality." was meant to be connected with an "and" or a "not."
Interesting--an issue that has aroused conservative concerns for the welfare of African-Americans. Abortion is evil and look!--it's mostly black people who are bearing the brunt of this terrible scourge. And you know we really do care about black people. We don't want them to vote, but--we care!
Funny isn't it--the aftermath to Katrina, or the half-hearted response to the devastation in Puerto Rico...think about the preponderance of black neighborhoods in close proximity to toxic sites. Are we really expected to believe that conservatives give any thought to the well-being of black and brown Americans?
But Russ and friends are willing to make this one important exception--coming to the aid of African-American women by forbidding them access to abortion and birth control.
Praise the Lord!
3
Douthat repeatedly assumes and implies that Margaret Sanger supported eugenics. Although the pro-life myth machine has been assiduously promoting this for years, it is hotly contested and has been widely debunked by professional historians.
This is an great example of the deeply dishonest technique that Douthat (who I often enjoy reading and occasionally agree with) so often employs: using false premises to have a phantom argument that ducks the actual facts of reality.
Margaret Sanger devoted her life to the right of individual woman to access and use birth control; she lived through an era where eugenics was part of the intellectual debate of the times and was careful not to damage her own cause by either vocal opposition or championship of it. She was not a eugenicist, but she was not above appealing to those who were to gather allies for her own feminist cause. (She was also happy to work with and make common cause with many who did vocally oppose eugenics). Most of the “case” is based on a few carefully worded statements to court potential powerful supporters who were eugenics minded and the fact that a periodical journal of ideas she helped edit once published a pro-eugenics in one issue when she was on the masthead.
To tag Sanger as a eugenicist is like tagging every gun rights supporter as a white nationalist, every critic of ICE’s tactics as an advocate for open borders, or everyone who supports Social Security as a Sanders-style Democratic Socialist.
3
I am quite sick of hearing Clarence Thomas, the Pope, and Ross Douthat use various degrees of manipulated or false historical fact to defend what is fundamentally faith based dogma. It is the 21st century and clearly some men and religions still want to retain their societal powers by keeping women ignorant, barefoot, and pregnant. To equate eugenics theories of 100 years ago (or Naziism) with a woman’s demand for control over her own health, body, and life is intellectually corrupt and serves only the male power base that spouts this rhetoric. The nurse, Margaret Sanger was a saint because she dared, a century ago, to educate women about a subject forbidden to them: basic elements of birth control. Not the pill, not the IUD, not abortion, just understanding of fertility and birth control. Since Roe v Wade, the religious right has used dishonest and publicly disproven methods such as inserting Sangers face on to a Klan photo, quoting her writings out of context, and conflating eugenics with a woman’s right to make her own life choices. If apt parallels can be drawn, I’d sooner compare those who are pushing to have the government ban the universal right to available birth control and safe, medical, legal abortion with those who thought it was the government’s role to sterilize the poor, the unwell and the incompetent.
4
If Douthat wants to opine about how racial attitudes have shaped current politics maybe he should start how the racists like Helms and Thurmond left the democrat party after the civil rights bill and slid into the Republican party where Buchanan and Nixon were happy to give them a home. There, they have morphed from a part of a coalition to the dominant voice of the party of Trump. I am a lot more worried about how crypto nazis are now an accepted part of the republican coalition and gaining influence and power every day than I am worried about Malthusian influences in Planned Parenthood
1
Clarence Thomas has become well known for his silence while on the Supreme Court.
We now see what happens when he opens his mouth.
3
Clarence Thomas cited a book on eugenics in his dissent.
The author of that book has responded, and says Thomas is way off-base:
3
The old eugenics card, beloved by desperate anti-abortion zealots. As spurious as any of their arguments and as hollow. Collective biosocial engineering? Give me a break.
Short explanation of the anti-abortion zealots' position: It's not about the "babies!" It's about punishing women for their sexuality. And once the children are born, concern for their welfare ends. They're on their own to face school shootings, families decimated by drugs, poverty, inadequate health care, etc., etc.
For Thomas and Douthat to contend that access to abortion leads inexorably to Auschwitz is as fatuous as it is deplorable.
2
If a woman does not have control of her own body she becomes the property of others. If abortion is outlawed, it is the government who will be practicing a form of eugenics by forcing women to continue pregnancies they don't want. It will be the government practicing eugenics if poor women or rural women or minority women can't control their fertility while rich, white urban women can. It will be the government practicing eugenics if it forces families to give birth to gravely disabled children. And it will be the government commiting manslaughter if women who need emergency abortions lie bleeding in the hospital because no doctor will treat them.
5
Thick slices of uber Catholic baloney on toasted white male bread, heavy on the traditional oily reductionist blather with a dash of peppery mysigony.
4
This is not a matter for Thomas or Ross or anti-abortionists to debate. This whole endeavor to steal a woman’s personhood, her identity and individuality is amoral and wrong. Period. I am sick and tired of reading day after day about sanctimonious misogynists and fanatical, frustrated, so-called Christians whose lives are so devoid of purpose that they find it necessary to exert power over others whom they deem of little worth. No one, I repeat no one, can take me away from me. Take care of your own souls and leave mine alone.
5
Anthony M. Ludovici, in a book titled "The Night-Hoers," argued that it was silly to try to practice eugenics through abortion. After all, when you abort you don't really know what you're killing. Far more sensible to let the child be born and examined by a committee of eugenic experts, who would make the live-or-die decision.
So, let me get this straight. The politicians who want to kill the ACA, want to kill public education, want to have more guns in the streets, want to kill Medicaid, want to kill SNAP, want armed teachers, want more money for foreign military adventures, want war with Iran, want to stop legitimate asylum seekers, and want to send dreamers home, are worried about the eugenic consequences of abortion.
Got it.
8
Eugenics and population control. huh?
It is confounding to the extreme to hear these bizarre arguments from the "pro-life" brigade. They'll twist themselves into pretzels in order to point out the most dastardly scenarios when it comes to the unborn....but once that baby leaves the womb? A complete lack of compassion.
I'm frankly sick of these hypocrites who go on about how every life is sacred, and do *absolutely nothing* regarding our country's shameful poverty rates among children. Or the thousands of migrant children - truly among the most vulnerable populations on earth - who have been ripped from their families by the US government, and are housed in child prisons in the desert. These people don't care about children, they don't care about the powerless and the vulnerable. It's sick, rank hypocrisy of the highest order.
2
My goodness Mr. Doubthat, you are really bending over backwards to make this argument.
If you would please clarify, what does "theoretical self-conception" mean?
1
It's just not that complicated, Ross, when you are a woman who needs to not have a baby when a man gets you pregnant. I can assure you I had no thought towards eugenics, Darwinism, race, politics, etc. when I had to have a very painful and terrible abortion. It was just that I was too poor and unprepared to bring a child into the world. I really think men like you should never write about these things. Because biologically, you can never truly experience this and your rumination on the topic is insulting.
5
I really wonder how white people who are anti-abortion would feel if, suddenly and magically, it were ONLY black and Latina women getting abortions... .
2
I would not read anything this man wrote if my life depended on it. I have thought for years he was off his rocker.
3
I notice that, while acknowledging the Nazi use of eugenics as the cause of its decline in popularity, Douthat still goes on to Blane progressives for all eugenic efforts, and for authoritarian efforts in Africa. History shows very clearly that those have very strong ties to racist, patriarchal right wing white men trying to impose their views on women and minorities. Not unlike today!
1
“In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business — and the disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates is shaped by that reality and others, not just by free choice.”
You’re wrong about the “disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates.” The abortion rate may be higher for black women, but so is their pregnancy rate. Black birthrates in the U.S. are higher than white birthrates: Non-Hispanic black women bear on average 1.82 children during their lifetimes, versus 1.67 for non-Hispanic white women. Birthrates for Hispanic women are even higher, at 2.01 children per woman. So much for abortion causing race-based eugenics.
Fertility statistics for 2017 from the CDC:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_01-508.pdf
Many other readers have replied about your specious comment that “Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business.” I will add two comments:
1) Planned Parenthood does offer information on and provide referrals for adoption: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/pregnancy/considering-adoption
2) You have lost any respect I had for you and your writing with this calumny against the only nationwide organization fighting to provide affordable contraceptives to all women who want them, so that they might avoid an unwanted pregnancy and thus an abortion.
2
"But in practice, liberal technocracy still has a “solve poverty by cutting birthrates” bias inherited from a population-panic age"
And ignoring that population panic age got us here to possible extinction in short order in the vastness of time. RD makes it sound like it was all just a mirage. RD and CT are peas in a pod on abortion and its relation to women's rights, driven by fairy tales of life after death and pure misogyny.
1
Once again we have to thank a male for such an insightful analysis of the "your own choice/you don't have a choice" debate.
2
Without examples to the contrary this is merely mischief making>
"However: In any other area, the left would look at a history like this and ask whether those formal convictions are the only thing that matters, or whether the eugenic past still exerts a structural influence on the present."
This>
"their theoretical self-conception" is insulting. Reading the informative-disguised paragraphs leading up to these words I had to wait for it, and it came.
Liberal Technocracy
Once again I suggest the New York Times relieve readers of this trouble-making double talk. The New York Times is no place for this kind of trickery and ill mindedness.
"In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business"
Too numerous falsehoods in this piece attempting to support Ross' arguments. This is one of the bigger canards. Planned Parenthood is in the health care and reproductive health business, not abortion business. Adoption is in the social work lane and not health care. Abortion or termination of pregnancy is a medical procedure. The far right likes to conflate Sanger's work in family planning with the eugentics movement. They are not related. Sanger understood that too many children too close together leads to bad health outcomes for women. She provided education to the women who needed it. Just like the modern day Planned Parenthood but we now have more tools in our reproductive health tool box to support women's decision-making. It's a sick argument to say that today's efforts in women's health have a eugenics basis.
6
The main problem with Thomas' theory (that abortion is eugenics with another name) is that the people getting the abortions are well-off, educated white women. White supremacists complain that brown, catholic women are breeding the white race out of existence.
1
Really Ross. You're ruminating over something Clarence Thomas had to say? Get life!
2
On boy, gobbly goop Douthat counting the fetuses on the head of a pin scholasticism!
Outrageous that in 2019 Ross worries about wombs when he should be worried about climate change, the illiterate in the White House and a military in service to the white god.
While I appreciate Mr. Douthat’s instincts (life) it’s difficult to take him seriously when he chooses to be so dour and popely.
Have a good day.
Anti-abortion ideology is a formula for abject poverty for millions in America. The destructive Republican agenda is a disgrace
to our once decent nation.
2
Clarence Thomas is one of the stupidest SCOTUS justices ever, so I wouldn't put much credence in what he says (especially now that he doesn't have Scalia to tell him what to say and think).
5
While the Roman Catholic church consigned unbaptized infants to its creation of limbo, aborted uteri will be more graciously consigned to an afterlife, if there is one. The Christian god is a God of love, and "amor vincit omnia."
Humans can't definitively and universally determine when life begins. Not human wisdom, but divine. An aborted fetus is in good hands. "He's got the whole world in his hands, no?"
When the Catholic crusader, Almeric, during the Albigensians
massacre, when Catholics and Albigensians were holed up in the same church, gave the order to slaughter all. When asked how to distinguish Cathars from Catholics, responded, "Kill them all! God will know his own."
I think the Christian God will save any aborted human, and give a go card to got straight to heaven.
Honestly, Mr. Douthat, did you expect anything better from Clarence Thomas?
4
Once again, Douthat flails, using fine words to concoct a tissue-thin argument based on the merest hypothesis.
He fails utterly to show any coercion. He doesn’t attempt to show any structural bias guiding poor women to abortion, nor any plausible evidence Planned Parenthood (or other provider) prefers particular kinds of women to have abortions. Like Silent Clarence, he merely notes the history and suggests a relationship, and tacks on a Trumpian Who Knows?
Maybe it was the Russians. Or the Chinese. Or a 400 pound guy in his bedroom. Who knows?
News flash, Ross: historical figures are products of their time. Lincoln freed the slaves, but suggested shipping them to Liberia (whence the name). FDR imprisoned Japanese Americans and turned away Jews seeking asylum from Nazi Germany. Pobody’s nerfect.
Douthat is particularly elliptical citing the crux of the abortion debate, “That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life, the requirements of female equality.” What does that mean?
Does Douthat dispute female equality? Is female equality to be balanced against the putative moral status of unborn life? If, why? We don’t require any one else, for any reason, to devote bodily resources in support of another, even cases of life and death. Why is abortion different?
How about this, Ross: abortion covered by universal healthcare, free to anyone at point of service, the procedure determined by medical need, as with everything else. Perfectly fair, and no dilemma.
1
Red Herringfest 2019.
What a show, directed here by Ross, starring Clarence reprising his classic role 'idiot savant'.
Equating birth control and family planning with explicitly elitist/Darwinist/pragmatist eugenics a daunting stretch.
Though they seem to address the same substantive issue, they're only distantly related, like umbrellas and submarines.
Eugenics is, first, an elitist movement that fits comfortably in today's conservative milieu.
A crowd of self-satisfied, egotistical people of quality decide who is worthy to live and who, basically, costs too much.
They would implement population-wide programs to achieve their vision.
Some, like Hitler, choose (under cover of faux intellectualism) to do away with those he didn't like. Others scientifically select people who don't deserve to live and disappear them.
Many sympathetic to those views just couldn't find the nerve to go directly where they wanted and settled for half-measures like sterilization or confinement.
In its American iteration, eugenics was considered an extension of scientific cattle breeding.
Abortion rights are concerned with individual women. No-one forces anyone to do anything. In fact the movement is a response to conservative's insistence they have the right to control women's behavior, force compliance.
The population-wide approach of eugenics is the antithesis of pro-choice politics, focused exclusively on an individual's right of self determination.
4
No 1 on either side of the issue sees abortion as a virtue. Just like many think of gambling, prostitution, or consumption of alcohol & mood altering drugs. The track record for legislating morality is abysmal. There r multiple reason’s why Christ said to separate religion from civics. The law has to make compromises that religious ethics cannot make.
& there are reasons for that:
Morality/Values/Ethics r middle class characteristics; the rich don’t need them, the poor can’t afford them.
Take your anti-abortion preaching to a cocktail party in the Hamptons & nobody will listen to you even as they right you a check. Take it to any congregation in middle class suburbs & you’ll get a lot of nodding heads & affirmations. Take it down into the ghetto & no one will even show up.
An Econ Policy Institute study (at: bit.ly/EPI-study) shows that from 1945 to 1972 GNP grew 100% and the median (meaning everybody’s) wage in lock step with it. Since 1972 GNP has grown another 150% but the median wage has been flat. Since some workers wages have gone up (health/tech) it means tens of millions have endured 47+ years of declining expectations. In 2014 the middle class fell below 50% for the 1st time in decades.
The GOP’s prime directive is the every greatr concentration of wealth&powr on behalf of the wealthy&powrful. Since 72 they’ve used Roe to get workr votes.
You want to affect abortion advocate for catholic social teaching to expand the middle class & you might get some traction
I usually avoid bandying about terms like mansplaining, but in this case, the ironies are just too rich.
Conservative Catholic males pontificating about women's rights? Naw. Tuck your bloviated tails between your legs, boys - your rank display of power, privilege, and prevarication reeks to high heaven.
1
The most dangerous part of Clarence Thomas is that he sits on the Supreme Court.
5
I'll tell you what Ross, let's just leave all the decisions about abortion up to pregnant women, and that will get you and Clarence and all the male worriers about today's excessive feminism off-the-hook.
8
It's amazing how Mr. Douthat is able to fit so many square pegs into one round hole, how he takes only what he wants from history, and is only effective at making an incoherent, relatively unreadable argument that will convince no one of anything.
And for this he gets paid, I assume.
1
"Eugenics efforts" has virtually nothing to do with abortions, Ross. Hitler tried to wipe out Jews. Roe-Wade has us wiping out ourselves for our own failure to use contraception.
That leaves the host of responsible women in charge of contraception, and whether or not a new human life will be born or aborted. The only humane decision is human life. Just like the life we got.
Women today have become either the Lady High Executioner or the Lady High Savior of our own kind. Saviors know that the child in their womb is NOT their body. It's a unique, new human body that was meant to be borne and born.
As a humane people, we must find more resources to help our pregnant mothers remain the Saviors of our own kind.
Concerning the high abortion rate in black America.
To balance the alarm raised by the statistics on abortion rates, it is worth noting that among non-Hispanics, blacks have a higher fertility rate than whites - and Hispanics outpace them both. So if abortion advocacy is some white master-race plan to suppress black reproduction, it doesn’t seem to be working out very well.
1
I don't see this issue as an extension of the efforts of the eugenics movement as much as one of survival for a woman and her children. Mr. Douthat unfortunately does not address the systemic issues that undermine a person from a disadvantaged background's (read minority, poor, disabled) ability to provide adequately for a child. A mother knows how difficult her choices are and most want the best for their children. As a mother you are responsible for your children's welfare everyday, even more so if you are a single mother. The lack of essential support for human welfare in this country puts women in a no-win situation and facing judgement from all sides. So, can we stop with the implicit assumption that women with unplanned pregnancies are terminating them on a whim? And, by the way, for those who say a woman should carry the pregnancy and adopt out the baby...that's as difficult a decision as terminating and we offer no support for that either.
2
For the connection between pro-life evangelicals and the historical basis of racism see https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133?o=0#superComments I's quite shocking.
1
Thomas is a dangerous man who would overturn Griswald if he could.
3
Seems like a big reach to connect the dots from voluntarily having an abortion to the forced sterilization programs of the past. But I guess you use the tool closest at hand.
So social conservatives are now balling their eyes out about the abortion of all those black babies. Are they adopting them? Are they offering social support services to the mothers of them? Where is the legislation to actually support motherhood and the born after the unborn stage is over? I’m all ears.
1
Tellingly, this columnist discloses his own biases only indirectly, but oh so clearly, in this sentence: "None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal."
A bit of research shows the author is a convert to Catholicism ... which adequately explains why this supposedly objective assessment of an issue of paramount importance to women's lives, of forcing a woman against her will to continue a pregnancy and undergo childbirth as if it is just like a walk in a park without possible life-long consequences, to a third person's "should."
Here, then, it is the perfect sentence encapsulating patriarchy, whether the "should" is the arrogation of entitlement by a man or a woman. Understand that this imposition is a sign of slavery, an exercise of raw power imposed only on women's lives and bodies.
I expect more intellectual rigor and more honesty from a New York Times columnist.
2
Conservative voices are much needed in our current political conflicts; it should truly surprise how relevant and yet how unheard these voices are. So why so hidden? Essentially conservatives have lost the right to speak, because they have not owned their part in making Trump possible, and unless and until they do, we should look with caution at what they claim. Where were the conservative voices, like John McCain as one example, when propagandists like Rush Limbaugh were spewing falsehoods about Obama? Was what they were saying okay despite being anti-conservative, because they brought votes to the Republicans? When did expediency replace character and truth, as conservative values? RD and crew will never speak effectively for the conservative voice, until they admit that the base did not get on board because of conservative principles, but because they saw things only from their personal gain; and coming solely from that is the opposite of conservative values. There is a conservative voice that can speak pro-choice as well as so-called pro-life. Should not the value of the individual, a surely conservative principle, be invested in the mother, as who should decide on continuing a pregnancy? Yes. We should consult elite educated opinion when making decisions; another conservative opinion. But experts should not be who decides, any more than we should have experts doing the job of a jury of your peers. Take heart Ross! Feminism is closer to your beliefs, than you know.
I'm just really glad my own mother "chose" life when she found out she was pregnant with me. I'm sure the rest of you would say the same about your own mothers. It would be interesting to hear the views of others whose mothers "chose" differently, but alas, they don't seem to be commenting here today.
2
So every male has an opinion on what we woman can and cannot do with our bodies.I consider this conversation private and resent any male voicing their ill formed opinions on it.EXCEPT Bill Weld,who eloquently stated on Bill Maher last night that women were being treated and talked about as tho they are "brood mares or chattel".This is a republican that I really like.I bet he would agree with me that if birth control is made harder to get,Viagra should no longer be available to men.
FYI...millions of women depend upon Planned Parenthood for birth control[and mammograms, pap smears etc. etc.]you probably didn't know that didya bros.??
5
Abortions of sickle cell or Tay-Sachs babies actually make those conditions more likely in descendants - that is arguably are disgenics rather than eugenics. If you don’t have to care for sick babies that are homozygous for dangerous recessive traits, you can have more babies, resulting in more babies with the recessive trait than is “natural”. If you believe the recessive gene is bad - which is disputed in both of these cases, that is the opposite of eugenics.
How about the fact that black and disabled people don't receive appropriate governmental support, due to bigotry and more, and that's probably the reason abortion rates are high there?
1
It's the three generations of imbeciles are enough argument perpetuated by other means. Eugenicists favored progress, as they saw it, and if the lower orders were prevented from reproducing this would make for a better, healthier society. If the effect of liberalized abortion (a different way of regulating reproduction) should be such that the poor, ignorant, and unfit took advantage of the new rules disproportionately then this is the Eugenicists dream carried forward under the banner of women's rights.
1
Decent attempt to refine nuances, but let's not forget that abortion is a grim necessity for millions of women circa mundi. If the MAP were available gratis everywhere, abortion would plunge toward zero, except to purge zygotal, embryonic & foetal defects.
I wouldn't want Clarence Thomas or Ruth Bader Ginsburg managing my personal, intimate affairs!
1
Prolifers should educate themselves on how birth control reduced abortion in Colorado. Thanks to a grant from billionaire Warren Buffett’s family, Colorado spent $28 million from 2009 to 2016 supplying IUDs to 75 public health clinics including several based inside high schools. The result: Colorado’s teen birth rate fell 54% and teen abortions fell 64%. Not only that, the state avoided paying nearly $70 million for labor and delivery, well-baby check-ups, food stamps and child-care assistance to teen moms.
https://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/30/colorado-teen-pregnancy-abortion-rates-drop-free-low-cost-iud/
3
If you want to talk about eugenics, just think about what happens if the laws in Alabama, Georgia, etc. are upheld. Rich women, mostly white, will still have access to contraception and abortion when they feel it is necessary. Poor women, disproportionately minorities, will have illegal abortions, become infertile, die or be jailed. Their children will die earlier and their lives will be nasty, brutish and short. I can't think of a better way to perpetuate the traditions of state-sponsored eugenics and Tuskegee.
1
What was the point of this column, other than to draw attention to what Clarence Thomas said?
2
I am a Planned Parenthood patient although it was way back in 1978 when I, at 17, found myself pregnant. It was Planned Parenthood who provided my pregnancy test. It was Planned Parenthood who outlined my options without ever advocating for or against any of those options. It was Planned Parenthood who gave me valuable information and never once tried to persuade me regarding whichever decisions I wanted to make.
The eugenics argument falls flat when I recall my life and my son's life. He was disabled from birth. His father didn't support him until he was six years old and then at $25.00 a month. Between male dominated courts and the hypocrisy that it was my fault for getting pregnant his "father" skated on any and all responsibility for this child for basically his entire life. His biggest contribution was hiring lawyers to get him out of paying any child support.
You have no idea of the reality of having an unplanned pregnancy, what it can do to your life or the dismal support systems in this country for the disabled. Your sanctimonious columns are an insult.
Clarence Thomas, the constitutionalist, would never have been allowed on any court had we not progressed beyond what the literal interpretation of the constitution states.
While the Constitution does not address abortion, I would refer you to the decision of the Kansas Supreme Court.
703
@Catherine
Great post. RD's Catholicism drips from every word. He tries to sound oh-so-reasonable but still comes down in favour of Thomas's misogyny.
Why must women shoulder a moral burden no man has ever had to bear? The whole argument is crooked.
151
@Nullius, "Great post. RD's Catholicism ...."
"Religion does three things quite effectively: deludes people, controls people, divides people." ~ Carlespie Mary Alice Mckinney
80
@Catherine
There should be national health care
free for all.
Special support for disabled persons.
Free Pre/Post Natal Care
Free Child Care
Free Pre-School.
Your child's husband should have been forced
to help you raise your child,
if only by sufficient child care payments.
23
I consider myself pro-life. If all anti-abortionists were as passionate, vocal and active about pre-natal care, women's health and children as they are about restricting abortion, than I would believe their pro-life stance. But most "pro-lifers" give little, if any, energy to these issues. Their "pro-life" scope is narrowly focused on the one issue that takes the heaviest toll on women - abortion. So what is actually fueling their fires? A genuine advocacy for life, or some sort of desire to control/punish women? If you are a pro-lifer who objects to this characterization, may I ask if you are working as hard for pre-natal care, women and children as you are for restricting abortion?
If pro-lifers want to get more people on their side, they need to speak and work as passionately for women and children as they do for restricting abortion. Til then, it's hard not to wonder what their real agenda is...
3
Has Douthat ever written a column stating that sex in marriage is only for procreation? A position as a rightwing Catholic he must surely embrace? Inquiring minds wish to know.
3
Sneaky sophistry but not even particularly skillful sneaky sophistry
by Mr Douthat.
Indeed Clarence is the gift that keeps on giving. We can agree on that (not)
2
The reality of the past 3.8 billion years or so is that nature, yes Mother Nature, has been practicing eugenics. That's what evolution is.
Humans can do better than brute nature, and sensible parents rightly want the best for their children, that's how evolution has programmed them. Naturally, they strive to give their offspring as many gifts as possible, from higher intelligence, to a better college, to a healthier childhood diet and so on. But provided this is done at the individual level, that it's all the predictable consequences of billions of years of evolution in nature is not enough to make it eugenics of the repugnant state ideology type.
3
I support abortion on religious grounds.
I believe all God's gifts are miracles.
I believe abortion is God's miracle gift to unready mothers.
Who are we to question God's miracles?
3
The only reason forced eugenics was wrong is the forced part, not the eugenics part. There is nothing wrong with voluntary eugenics; in fact, everyone does it—people are engaging in eugenics when they pursue partners who are kinder, more attractive, smarter, etc. over ones who are less so.
2
It's astonishing that consertives are only interested in the fetus. Where are they when the babies are born? No child care, inadequate schools, and no after school care.
3
@rainbow
The explanation is actually quite simple.
An unwanted fetus is only harming one person-- a woman. Conservatives don't care about woman.
Unwanted pregnancy punishes women for having sex. Always a bonus for conservatives.
Fetuses are easy to like-- they don't talk back, they don't have opinions of their own. Fetuses don't challenge conservatives, they're not liberal. They are clean slates for the projection of all that is good. They've never really done anything "wrong" (except see above, hurting women) and conservatives can only empathize with a limited range of people-- including those who have never done anything wrong or other conservative, straight, rich, cis-het white god-fearing men. As soon as you've made a mistake-- like having sex or taking out a student loan or needing medical care that is not provided directly by a woman's body, it's your fault and you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Forcing women to bear children doesn't cost conservatives anything. The woman does all the hard work and suffers all the negative impacts. Actually providing for them.. phew. That's a lot of work.. or at least, taxes.
1
Don't you just love this sort of bad-faith rhetorical exercise on the part of anti-abortion spokespersons, intended to distract attention from their own disgraceful misogyny by accusing good, innocent people of bearing a grave moral burden that is not theirs at all?
3
Ross' opening premise here is that all pregnancies are to be desired, cherished and fostered. By force if necessary. Alabama has even torn the cover off the rape/incest exceptions.
In the real world, this isn't how it works. Many pregnancies are unwanted - and often occur despite the use of birth control methods. Child outcomes for forcible unwanted pregnancy are not very good - but even that isn't the point.
It is neither Ross's place to say "you must," nor my choice to say "you mustn't" to a pregnant woman. It is hers, and hers alone.
Eugenics is social engineering achieved by forcible external manipulation of pregnancies in a population. When one woman says "I don't/can't have this baby," that isn't eugenics. It is her choice. Her reasons are beside the point - they are a non-issue.
Side note - "Planned Parenthood is in the abortion business" - Equally true as "the Catholic Church is in the pedophile enabler business." That statement was beneath you, Ross. As was your nifty way of trying to put RBG in with eugenecists.
Shame. Shame. Shame.
3
When conservatives argue, "Planned Parenthood was started by a eugenicist long ago, so it must have eugenicist aims today and thus can never do anything good!" I find myself wanting to ask them, "Wasn't America founded by slaveholders?"
5
The bottom line is that Republicans of a certain background think that women should not have sex unless they want a child.
Justice Thomas, a lucky man indeed who by a stroke of luck in a sense was able to go to Yale and is conflicted by this most, what should be a Happy event, has a resentment that he didn't get in on just pure merit. This man was a replacement for Thurgood Marshall, no wonder he has an inferiority complex.
1
What Sanger wanted or did not want is subject to debate.
I would like to know how Ross can make a statement that the "high abortion rate in Black America". Where does he get his proof that the rate of abortion is higher in Black America rather than White, Asian, Hispanic, rich, poor? Show me the proof.
More to the point, it is choice that is the issue, not abortion. You take away anyone's freedom of choice, you are going down the slippery slope of what next freedom of choice will Americans lose.
If the Conservatives in our society had their way, maybe it will be a Woman's right to vote. After all they still operate on the theory that women do not have the brain power, nor do Blacks, nor do Hispanics, etc. They are a throwback to the Stone age.
The Right to Choose should not even be legislated nor should any abortion law. This is a very personal issue, not a religious or Government issue.
We are free to practice our own Religious beliefs or not, as guaranteed by the Separation of Church and State. And others have no right to shove their our throats. The Government has no right to legislate a very personal choice.
Give us real facts, Ross, not your beliefs.
2
"In any other area, the left would look at a history like this ..."
*That's* Ross' argument, imaging what the left would say? This is weak tea even by his, very low, standards.
Let me offer my three part understanding of this issue.
1. Red States decline to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, thus depriving poor women access to essential heath services.
2. Then they pass laws outlawing and criminalizing abortion while shutting down Planned Parenthood facilities on the feeblest of excuses.
3. And finally they solemnly declare they are doing so to reverse the tacit eugenist agenda that undergirds the Left’s position.
Where I come from that’s called chutzpah
6
What about the "moral status" of fully born adult human women? Is it only fetuses who are "moral"?
Is it because they are considered "innocent" in your religion, and full-grown women sinful?
1
Eugenics has come to mean some sort of State control over reproduction. As in the State sterilizing the "unfit" so as to assure a "healthy" population which did happen up until the 60's in some States. That African American women chose, on their own, to terminate a pregnancy is not at all eugenics. So Clarence Thomas turns eugenics on its head; Now the State will require that the pregnancy come to term.
3
Please note that each year Planned Parenthood performs hundreds of thousands of abortions on black women, which has reduced the black population by many millions over a period of 20 years (and millions more over a longer period). Given these huge numbers, some black people—and others—view this population reduction as genocide, a conscious effort to shrink the black population.
Indeed, as the article notes, even Ruth Bader Ginsberg described this issue “as a desire to subsidize abortions for ‘populations that we don’t want to have too many of’”).
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck—it is eugenics.
I am pretty sure most white folks wouldn’t want eugenics applied to them, especially since the projected in-migration and birth rates of mostly-brown US sub-populations will make whites a minority in the not too distant future.
"the disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates"
Is due to systemic racism leaving blacks in the south in poverty with little access to birth control and little access to sex education.
There is nothing more pro-life than sex. So why don't pro-life people support greater access to safe sex? Sex is the life force.
Instead, they say no one should have sex unless they are prepared to parent a baby. That is a very life-negative position.
I guess it's the same reason they are opposed to gay marriage which is crazy since gay couples never have abortions. It seems that their entire position is sex is only ok if it produces a baby. In the 21st century that is just weird.
3
The major problem with eugenicists boils down to the fact that they took away people's choices regarding reproduction. They forcibly sterilized people (or forced abortions) because they knew better than the people in question what was good for society.
The response to that cannot be taking away choice in the opposite fashion, forcing people to bear children who do not wish to do so.
The liberal abortion rights argument is all about choice. It's a simplistic but effective argument to ask, are the black women who have abortions racist against their own race?
Too many pro-life people seem to think Planned Parenthood tricks women into having abortions like a witch with a candy house. "Get a free toaster with every abortion." This is the twisted logic behind locking up abortion doctors for 99 years, but having no punishment for the women who hire those doctors. (It also helps that punishing women is massively unpopular. Thus, the pro-life arguers generally eschew logic on this point.)
And the idea that the eugenicist motivation of reducing poverty is confined to the liberal side is absurd. Gather a room full of conservatives and ask them if they think people who cannot afford to care for children should be having babies, and I'm betting you'll hear a lot of "no"s.
2
This opinion piece is in need of serious editing. I’m the founder of one of the most successful communications grad schools in the US and I can’t follow its points.
I’ve found that those who have relied on uncommon words, many of 4-5 syllables, are very insecure individuals. They need to prove that they really are intelligent. Often, they’re found on college campuses like Virginia Commonwealth University. A University that I was a member of for approximately 11 years. The best and brightest don’t have a need to construct head-scratching sentences that often obscure their points.
Though I’m educated and intelligent as well as a daily reader/subscriber of the NYTimes, this piece doesn’t stand up to your publications wonderful work. It doesn’t belong on your Front Page or on any inner pages, either.
2
"I’ve found that those who have relied on uncommon words, many of 4-5 syllables, are very insecure individuals."
So, from your limited personal experience, you conclude that Douthat is a "very insecure individual"?
"They need to prove that they really are intelligent."
And you are mind-reading or posing as a psychiatrist.
"The best and brightest don’t have a need to construct head-scratching sentences that often obscure their points."
Yet you don't cite even one of those "head-scratching sentences".
"Though I’m educated and intelligent ..."
Your whole post is basically a personal attack on Douthat.
@cooktench
I agree completely. I'm a lawyer with a degree from a fancy law school and I clerked for a federal judge. I write for a living. Despite common tropes about legalese being impossible to understand, good legal writing is concise and clear. The reader should be left understanding precisely what the writer wants the reader to understand and there should be no ambiguity in the writing.
I have found that smart people who are trained writers (as opposed to, say, a brilliant pharmacist or mathematician) write poorly in a few circumstances: 1) when they do not understand a topic; 2) when they are trying to lie or obfuscate the truth; and 3) when they are attempting to reach a conclusion that is not supported by logic or the facts.
Douthat's writing is frequently remarkably difficult to follow and understand. It's not just a question of vocabulary. That is one of the reasons I find him to be a weak thinker; or, he knows he has to bend over backwards and tie his writing in knots to reach his desired conclusion.
1
This seems pretty irrelevant to the current debate.
1
And yet, Trump’s supporters, who are happy to have him stack the Supreme Court with anti-choice judges, also applaud his racism and laughed as he mocked a disabled reporter.
3
The second to last paragraph of Mr. Douthat's Op-Ed begins: "None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal."
So why does he write almost an entire piece that seems to give credence to Clarence Thomas's new offensive version of his whining "high tech lynching"? Thomas used that phrase to intimidate the pathetic male white Senators who were about to vote on his SCOTUS nomination, and to avoid the believable accusations Anita Hill made against him.
Now Thomas, with Douthat's assistance, posits Eugenics as a valid link to a woman's right to abort a pregnancy as legally allowed by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision?
When it comes down to making decisions about the right of a woman to govern profound, intimate impacts on her own health and body, men should just shut up.
Roe v. Wade was a decision that was a compromise. Women already gave up control over their health and bodies to the U.S. Government, but at least it offered women a somewhat reasonable window within which to decide what is best for their own present health and future health.
It is a compromise decision that has survived the test of time, and that the vast majority of women have learned to live with.
Men, especially the kind of man Clarence Thomas represents, should be thrown into the dustbin of history.
4
In 1900 there were 1.6 billion living humans.
Now there are 7.6.
How many does God want in order to have full destructive dominion, in his name, over the Earth, Ross?
2
Both Ross Douhat and Clarence Thomas are morally wrong to even consider the idea of legislating a woman's very personal choice as to wether to carry a pregnancy or not. We own our own bodies and our own lives! It is appalling, disgusting, and absolutely immoral that these force-birthers are out to control women these days, by promoting the fantasy that a fetus has more 'rights' than the woman.
6
That we're even having this discussion is disgusting.
How far back in the past must we go before we realize it wasn't the place we aggrandize today?
My grandmother died because of a back-alley abortion. She was told her pregnancy would kill her. She had no choice. Neither did the state.
My mother - her daughter - was only one year old. She barely knew her. I never knew her.
Jerks and narrow-minded zealots caused that. They're offspring are alive and well today.
Can't we please grow up, allow women to control their own bodies, live in the 21st Century, and move on past the small percentage of people with power whose thinking continues to be evolved from political or religious "principles"?
10
Today I look white, live and work abroad, and have successfully joined the upper middle class. I pass, and don't have to feel the chill breath of poverty on my neck.
And it would be easy chameleon-like to adopt a "white" distance from the poor, be they black, hispanic, or scruffy, invisible, rural whites. Because wealth, class, and "Whiteness" is fundamentally about distance not color. But I won't.
I don't forget for a moment that I am the end product and inheritor of five generations of dirt poor Irish immigrants who fled starvation and a virulent version of racism under the heel of British imperialists and their convenient cultural myths.
And when my teen aged grandfather x 4 reached Ellis island in 1852, he confronted yet another harsh and unforgiving racist wall in which a freckle-faced Irish lad was in category 5, non-white and undesirable, a population given to too much drink, too much violence, and above all too much sex that made too many snotty-nosed degenerate brats.
No, I don't forget. I know how easily the White Line can be crossed in the wrong direction. I know that Whiteness is a state of mind and not a color. I hear Mr. Douthat's historical argument, and one-up him to go all in to support the web of effective social supports that enable ANY population like those of present day Ireland to lift itself out of grinding poverty and the stink of Otherness.
Put your money where your mouth is, Mr. Douthat. Abortion is a dubious savior, but not the devil itself.
3
Ross, I hate to be the one to tell you this but, you don't get to tell people of other races, genders and religions what is best for their souls when you don't seem to care about the bodies they're wrapped in. Scream it from the Supreme Court, wrap it in racial terms, speak in tongues if you have to, but there is no way the two are linked. Unless you want to take advantage of someone's poverty, don't start by turning it against them.
4
It’s shocking to have a member of the lunatic fringe sitting on the Supreme Court, but that’s unchecked conservatism for you. Thank you for calling Thomas on it.
I quibble, however, with your 12th paragraph ("But in practice….”) over questionable assumptions.
1. "liberal technocracy” does NOT have "a 'solve poverty by cutting birthrates’ bias"—as if liberals, unchecked, would duplicate communist China’s one child policy. Such has NEVER been considered by any serious policy maker in the U.S. That’s but a cultic, fear-mongering meme about liberals and 'social engineering’ (e.g., civil rights, affirmative action, public schools, etc.); it's as discredited as Reagan’s demonization of government, tax cuts lift all boats, and religion is the requisite weave for maintaining the fabric of society.
2. Contempt for a “population-panic age” (Paul Ehrlich in the 60s?), you make it sound like overpopulation has never been an issue. Panic we should. Experts in all relevant scientific fields warn that we aren’t just facing extreme weather thanks to climate change, but a mass extinction that threatens our very existence.
3. "Planned Parenthood clinics are not "in the abortion…business.” Abortions account for 3.4% of PP's health services. PP only exist because the U.S. has the most expensive, most dysfunctional health care system among OECD countries (Why? Because we don’t treat health care as a right, but as a predatory opportunity to profit off people’s biological misfortunes).
3
Thomas and the author of this piece tie themselves in knots trying to equate the pro-choice movement with the eugenics movement. Ultimately it is the individual woman who has to decide whether or not she wants to have a pregnancy and a lifelong commitment to raise a child black or white disabled or not. There is no authoritarian efforts to force women to have abortion. Thomas and his fellow conservatives should be more concerned about the children who are already here than the unborn.
4
What does this mean? "That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life, the requirements of female equality." You can believe a fetus has equal status to any adult person, and still think that abortion must be legal, not because of "female equality," but simply because no person can be forced to carry anything in her body no matter the status. Conservatives would expel a sick uninsured one year old from their hospitals to die in the street, and yet think a women must be forced to risk her own body and health for a fetus.
2
Abortion is not healthcare. Abortion is the killing of the unborn and usually a healthy baby. It is most often done for convenience.
Performing cancer surgeries to save one's life is healthcare. Performing heart surgeries so someone can live is healthcare.
Abortion takes an innocent life. This fact can never be denied.
1
Yeah, and many are lacking access to these healthcare as well. So, tell me why should we ban the woman's choice, while doing nothing for ease the access to healthcare?
1
There are contradictions and even hypocrisy by those who claim to oppose abortion.
.
Those who oppose killing children when they are inside their mothers frequently will to make an exception for rape and incest. Why is that? If those against-abortion believe it is wrong to kill thsee children, how they are conceived is irrelevant. No one questions the humanity of a person who was conceived through rape or incest. The only logic for the exception is political. It's just a way to reduce opposition by those who favor the abortion procedure.
.
Those who favor giving permission to kill children when they are inside their mothers will frequently support
It would be interesting to know what this conservative pundit’s opinion is on the spate of extremist anti-abortion legislation sweeping through various statehouses. Does he approve of no exceptions to abortion, even in instances of incest or rape? Should the procedure be banned at such an early date that women will not even realize that they are pregnant? How about the criminalization of participating doctors who would be subject to more jail time than the very perpetrators of a rape? What say you???
2
Respect you which is why I read this.
Now, here's what you got wrong.
High rates of abortion among black populations has more to do with male dominance/sexism and poor peoples' lack of knowledge and access to both control. Neither of which conservatives know about nor want to do anything about. You either don't know about these factors or you ignore them at your peril. Keep it up, though, you are one of the few from the right who thinks. By the way, abortion will Never end nor be totally illegal. Mainly poor women suffer when abortion is illegal or difficult to obtain.
1
Poorer populations get more abortions, b/c poorer populations have more unintended pregnancy. And b/c racism is still a strong force in this country, a lot of the poorer populations are non-white. No one is culling anyone. Accidentally pregnant women are making individual abortion decisions.
2
"That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life". No Ross, it turns on woman's choice.
5
It is facile to label the point of decision to have an abortion as racist or part of eugenics. We live in a society where Republicans have unraveled the safety net, and blocked wealth building capabilities for families of color through ridiculously low pay, lack of healthcare, and predatory lending practices, to such an extent that, by the timing of an abortion, the decision is nothing other than the desire to help family members survive who are already here.
4
Douthat writes, “In theory the high abortion rate in black America is just the result of countless individual decisions.”
The construction beginning with “In theory” suggests, of course, that there is a different reality.
A reality Douthat later suggests is connected to Planned Parenthood.
As if black women are somehow coerced into abortions by that organization.
Might there be an alternative reality, that black women are disproportionately poor and this get worse medical care overal and also simply can’t afford another mouth to feed?
Douthat doesn’t seem to want to address that. Doesn’t fit his narrative, I suppose.
6
Why would any of Clarence Thomas's ideas, dangerous or not be of any interest? He has zero credibility.
3
A couple talking points to consider:
1. Any alliance Margaret Sanger formed with eugenicists likely occurred because without male help, Margaret Sanger could not have kept her family planning clinics open. She'd been arrested.
2. The Roman Catholic Church opposed women's suffrage, which did not pass until 1920.
3. One of the sidebar stories about women's suffrage is that the Prohibition movement needed women's votes to get their amendment passed. "Temperance" and women's suffrage traveled together.
4. The book "Imbecilies" by Adam Cohen describes the life and times of Carrie Buck, an victim of the movement to keep the "feeble minded" from reproducing. Reproducing in poverty and outside of marriage, even from rape, was enough to get a woman labeled feeble minded.
5. During the Baby Scoop Era following WWII, many young unmarried and overwhelmingly "white" mothers were forced or encouraged to "surrender" their children to the commercial adoption industry. Mothers who balked at this were often labeled feeble minded, neurotic, selfish, immoral or all four. Social and political movements like shotgun marriages make for strange bedfellows and extended families.
2
To the degree it can be adduced Clarence Thomas believes the Constitution should be strictly interpreted in accordance with the original intent of the framers! In that over 50% of the framers were slave owners had their original intent been dispositive in the area of Constitutional analysis— as it relates to Clarence Thomas’ status in America— it is reasonable to adduce that there would have been better than a 50% chance of Clarence Thomas being a slave today!
Ergo the weight given to Thomas’ critical analysis of any subject should be adjusted accordingly!
1
"In practice the medical system strongly encourages abortion in response to disability, with predictable results. "
That is a lazy and sweeping generalization put forth with nothing to back it up. Examples, please.
"In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business — and the disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates is shaped by that reality and others, not just by free choice." Abortion is one option provided by Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood also offers contraception, STD screening and treatment and cancer screening. It is often the only option for low-income and uninsured patients (who are also often from minority groups) to obtain these services. STD and unplanned pregnancy rates rise when Planned Parenthood is forced to close clinics and no substitute services are offered. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/17/planned-parenthood-congress-wisconsin-texas
I doubt if Ross Douthat and Clarence Thomas have any first-hand experience in working with or attempting to help the clientele that Planned Parenthood serves. It's very irritating that they feel so qualified to opine from their lofty and theoretical perches.
3
Your article is appalling. I have had 2 abortions, one at 14 weeks and one at 18 weeks, for severe fetal anomalies. I ultimately went on to adopt a typically developing child and gave birth to a son who has autism and intellectual disability. I passionately love my son and haven't struggled over or regretted either my abortions or his birth for an instant. I am too busy dealing with the appalling level of services for people like him. Until men actually contribute equal resources to their children (personal labor and money) and everyone supports the precious lives of people with disabilities after they're born, don't you dare talk to me about eugenics.
6
I think that Thomas' arguments are sound in some ways... abortion for the sake of bringing children into the world under the best of circumstances is an argument--- and to the point that only people who prove to be worthy of bringing children into the world under the best of circumstances is not very sound; nor, however, is the idea that children should have to suffer the most wretched of circumstances, if, for example, they are born to, say, a 14-yr old who's been raped and impregnated by a family member. There are ludicrous arguments, and anti-social ones, too, launched by both sides of Roe v...
Any time one political or ideological group finds itself on the wrong side of history, there often are all sorts of historical distortions offered to justify a position which is currently rejected by the overwhelming majority.
The strained attacks by the Christian right on Margaret Sanger and other pioneers of the right of women to make decisions about their bodies is an example of knee-jerk conservatives attempting to hide their misogyny.
We would not be having this controversy over abortion. if the anti-abortion forces were not imposing their religious beliefs on others in violation of The First Amendment of the Constitution.
Justice Clarence Thomas, ironically hearkening a woman’s Tea Party fundamentalism – his wife’s – should be ashamed of himself for accusing pro-choice activists of a racist-inspired taste for eugenics.
Justice Thomas should be man enough not to resort to fake history to explain his animus towards women facing a difficult choice.
1
The activist Right in the USA doesn't care about "the unborn". Rather, they understand that abortion can be used as a wedge issue, as the symbol-rich tip of the larger instrument they use to distract and divide the population (I would like to write "the electorate" here, but that is now too small a subset of the population, due to the various forms of disenfranchisement which they have engineered). Justice Thomas's dissent presents fresh, thought-provoking material which functions to add polish and ornamentation to the tip of that wedge. Nothing more. He is adept at this. Remember "high-tech lynching"?
2
Placing the rights of the fetus over its mother's (and father's, if present) rights, and even its own rights once it is born, is twisted.
Children need families, health care, and families with living wages.
Right to lifers should be more concerned about genocide (supporting MBS with arms, for example) and trigger happy racists. Not to mention family separation at the border, including newborns. Those aren't real people? Really?
The dismissal of women's rights over their own bodies is appalling.
Please respect all life, not just recently fertilized eggs.
2
So all those white men rushing to pass draconian anti-choice/ forced birth edicts in their state legislatures are not doing it just to maintain control over women’s sexual and reproductive lives, but to prevent abortion providers from eugenically “culling” minorities from the population!? Who knew?
And yet in those same states the funding to provide pre-natal and post-natal services for poor and vulnerable women and ongoing family support which would foster favorable outcomes for those children is sorely lacking. I’m confused.
1
Of course, reduced worldwide population should be a human goal, for everyone.
Except certain Times columnists, where the maximum should be zero growth.
Daily life and it’s events concern most people most of the time. Pondering the underlying meaning of personal decisions seems to be the purvue of a justice who was clearly an abuser, tho unconvicted. As the man who seldom speaks since his appointment, perhaps he should hesitate before re writing history incorrectly. We do not need more “alternative” facts.
Were Thomas not a Supreme Court justice, this eugenics argument would scarcely be given air time, given its wild reach into history and yet another pro-life pretzel twist.
Freedom to make a decision about her own body and her own rights, including her right to privacy, should drive the abortion discussion (though discussion is a misnomer by now). And when white men speak the loudest about the religious evils of abortion -- we should know that whatever history says about the evolution of eugenics, we're again going to endure a long period of women being subordinated, suppressed and manipulated
Clarence Thomas may know the law, but he obviously knows little about American history, especially about the progressive era (1880--1917). Then many progressives like William Graham Sumner distorted ideas from Darwin and Huxley, and believed that higher breeding rates among the poor and minorities were lowering the average intelligence and wellness of human kind. This led them to endorse eugenics programs to improve the race. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a progressive and one of our greatest jurists ruled in the case of Buck v. Bell (1927) that "three generations of imbeciles are enough" in ruling that it was all right to sterilize a woman. That was probably his worst decision.
Today, the motive for abortion comes from economics and ideology. Women believe that they need to obtain education and jobs to support themselves and their families. They can't afford to remain stay-at-home moms. They are also just as intelligent as men, and have become lawyers, doctors, journalists, and army officers. One was even nominated by a major party to be its candidate for president of the United States.
Consequently, they need to control their reproductive lives to fit in with their work ambitions and plans. They don't want to remain "barefoot and pregnant".
These women and men are progressives in that they are in favor of education and equal pay for equal work. But they are different from the progressives of the progressive era. Justice Thomas doesn't see the difference.
It was clear during his confirmation hearings (with Anita Hill). The man is off.
2
Ross Douthat, we human beings do not know the moral status of unborn life. For Justice Clarence Thomas (an unmitigated misogynist who never should have been confirmed to the Supreme Court and who has not acquitted himself well in his 27+ year's tenure on the Bench) to aver that abortion equals the triumph of eugenics isn't worth a fig. Emancipation of females is as important as emancipation of slaves was back in the day of Slavery (whether in America or Egypt in the millennia of B.C.).
2
Eugenics embodies the idea that authorities should tell women what children they are allowed to have and what children they are not allowed to have. The so-called pro-life position also says that authorities can tell women the children that they must have. Outlawing all abortion has a lot in common with eugenics.
2
Clarence Thomas was always dishonest - from his manipulative dishonest testimony at his confirmation hearing, to his manipulative dishonest argument in this issue. He was a tragedy in the 90's and he is a tragedy today.
5
Women have all different reasons for having an abortion. There are statistically more abortions with minority ladies, particularly black ladies, not because of eugenics but actually because of birth control failure ( estrogen birth control pills failing with higher bmi).
I also see with dismay that several of the states want to prosecute medical doctors for performing an abortion. Did you know that Psychiatrists can refer you to a Doctor who will perform an abortion because the Psychiatrist prescribes C ad D class medication. Lithium is d class because can kill a fetus. Valproate is c class. Lisinopril hctz that I take can kill a fetus. There is legally no waiting period if a Psychiatrist prescribes you an abortion.
I became pregnant with a man who was incredibly smart and handsome, but I lost the baby and almost bled to death because he was taking Valproate for a mild case of bipolar disorder. We were a middle aged couple. Although we are different, we do not mind blending in with our neighbors. No one told me that Valproate causes a developing fetus to develop with no heart valves. I adored that man, and I had to slink into my Psychiatrist's office. He made a gesture like he tossed pixie dust in my eyes.
I hope that my candid disclosure opens people's eyes about who has to undergo abortions. I hear a lot of autistic people, notably autistic men who think that all black ladies and vivacious bipolar ladies like me should be taught a lesson.
1
Sanger had the scientific misconception that environment changes genes, and therefore dire poverty damages genes. If that were true, Sanger's position on eugenics might have some justification. But it's not true, so a reasonable person would simply discard that part of Sanger's legacy as irrelevant. Unfortunately, Thomas isn't that reasonable.
It is mind-boggling that within just a few hours of yet another mass shooting of actual living people, we are seeing another right-wing opinion piece railing against the slaughter of...potential people.
1
We seem to give little consideration to the simplistic but true idea that the best way to prevent abortion is to prevent conception. Prevention of conception is as much a man's responsibility as a woman's. Perhaps that's why so many men kick this idea to the curb. If you're an anti-abortion man, it's easier to harass women than to harass other men about what they can do to prevent a pregnancy.
5
Maryland recently passed a law that if a pregnant women is murdered, the criminal penalty increases. Other states have similar statutes. If the unborn has no right to life, why would that be relevant?
Of course people still link the availability of abortion to racism: it's a commonplace where I grew up in Pennsyltucky that having legalised abortion in 1973, one would soon witness an uptick in certain demographics' availing themselves of this procedure. Ironically many of those people who darkly anticipated the newly opened clinics' activities would witness their own lily-white females opting to have an abortion. It was also a commonplace that legislators would never seriously move to abridge womens' recourse to abortion because the racial supremacists that supported them would not hear of this...
1
So. Abortion and birth control should be illegal because somewhere in the past there were racist and eugenicist leanings among birth control activists.
Douthat has taken a Catholic and Evangelical talking point about Sanger and others being racists and is trying to twist it into a guilt-inducing preventive for pro-choice progressives.
Ridiculous. That's like saying that the first anti-slavery people really were just trying to prevent so many undesirable Africans from being brought to our pristine shores, and so to stop the trade in humans was actually quite racist. Ergo, those progressives were the real racists in trying to keep blacks out of our country.
I resent his implication (if not outright accusation) that I'm a closet eugenicist because I think women should be able to be in charge of their own reproduction systems.
Douthat is impressively smart and well read and a teeeeeeensy bit anti-Trump. But he can't hide his true right-leaning proclivities. His too-cute parenthetical "Nor does any of this imply that social conservatives are paladins of racial justice" statement does not provide enough cover for his real feelings about birth control, abortion, and women's place in society.
2
Isn't the major point that past eugenic or population control efforts were dictated by the state?
An abortion is a decision by the woman concerning her own body.
2
First of all all parties should agree that education to reduce the number of abortions is a very good thing. Our partisan politicians cannot even support that collectively. They are bad people who are more interested in holding power rather than doing what is best for the people of our country.
Next, the number of abortions per 1,000 women has declined from 29.3 in 1981 to 14.6 in 2014. We should agree that through education and birth control that it is best to continue to drive these levels down. Surgical procedures are best avoided and in this case can be.
Lastly women need to stand up and get rid of politicians like the 25 white guys in Alabama that are telling women what is best for them. All very sad.
3
A major cause of abortion: women and girls coerced to have unprotected sex.
The solution - go after the cause - could well come from anti-abortion men, be they named Douthat or Thomas. But they never, never discuss this cause. They just take turns figuring out new ways to blame the victims.
1
@Douthat,
Thomas rules from his heart and not his mind.
People like Thomas are complicating the abortion issue.
To me, it is simple:
a) Parents must have the right to decide on abortion. Remember Bill Cosby? He was right, “I brought you in this world, and I can take you out!”
b) Roe v. Wade must be overturned. This is against our federalist constitution. Leave it to the states to decide. If I did not agree with Cosby, I will move from TX to AL. But that would be my decision, not the government.
"....liberal technocracy still has a “solve poverty by cutting birthrates” bias inherited from a population-panic age, and abortion-rights rhetoric still has a way of sliding into Malthusian fears about too many poor kids in foster care."
I am not sure what is wrong with the liberal mindset above with regard to "too many poor kids in foster care" and also "solve poverty by cutting birthrates." They made sense 50 years back and still makes sense today.
Cutting birth rates is even more valid now considering the massive problem of climate change.
1
Not "the moral status of unborn life," Ross, but the moral status of undeveloped life. Big difference, and one that honest anti-abortionists need to respect.
When I see the forced-birth zealots address the reasons that women might feel that abortion is their best option (like with actual money to subsidize all the costs of bearing and rearing children, and interrupting education and career, I will begin to take this argument seriously. Until then, I regard it as just more cheap talk from people with no skin in the game.
In my view, Thomas comes to his thinking via his altered views controlled by his intellectual ineptitude. Rather than consider all parts of reasonable inference in any situation, Thomas fails to "get the point" and frustrated, then seeks out some avenue unexplored by others, to try to make his point. He's always been a waste of time.
2
Obviously of your time. So why are you wasting it?
The Christian Bible and its purported inspiration/author, the Christian god are of no help when the "right to life" enforcers are in high dudgeon. Their god, time and time again, ordered the annihilation of innocents, to the point of have women's bellies sliced open to slay their unborn babes. All because their tribes failed to follow one or another of god's endless and often silly "laws." So, of course, the only suitable, godly, recourse was genocide. Well, I guess that, technically, if the fetus was removed via a gaping slash across the abdomen rather than vaginally, and the woman left lifeless as well, it's not abortion.
An earlier commenter began his comment saying flatly that abortion is murder. Not sure what he labels the above-described prevention of birth, since god ordered it. And if god told a woman to have an abortion (as opposed to the gorier separation of a woman from her, presumably wanted, unborn), from where does our critic derive the justification and the power to force her into disobeying her god? If your god tells you to do one thing and my god tells me to do the opposite...is one right and the other wrong? And which, pray tell, is which?
Abortion, like it or not, was not a religious issue until it became expedient for the subjugation of women in the effort and the need to keep the power of religion in the hands of men.
1
Thomas's argument shows a profound lack of history. The eugenics came out of the early Christian missionary and anthropology studies first conducted by white men who were appalled by what they saw as savage living standards. These early missionaries/ministers were racist, sexist and patriarchal. By the early 20th century science denounced this but the some sects of the Christian right did not.
The anti abortion movement is very patriarchal. It is all about men's control over women's sexuality. If conservative republicans really cared about families and life why do they support many policies that make it difficult for families to strive.
Furthermore if the state is going to force women to bear a child with significant birth defects then the state should pay for the medical and educational burden that comes with having a handicapped child. I don't see many conservatives supporting this. Once a child is born their attitude is you are on your own. This is a way to punish women for being sexually independent.
2
If a woman is forced to carry a fetus to term, what is the father’s fate? A forced vasectomy seems reasonable. The father’s culpability is never discussed. Seems odd.
2
It may not have started out that way but the case against pro-Choice is now just a religious argument; not economic, not social, not racial, certainly not scientific. The anti-choice sides have already conceded that the fight will not be won on purely religious appeal: more-and-more of the less-and-less church-going voters are now pro-Choice. They are desperate and are now using the "strategy of fake" to make confusing and inaccurate arguments based on race (eugenics by this judge) and science ("fetal heartbeat" in Georgia and Ohio). Public beware!
There is an extremely racist history to the first laws banning abortions and to the movement trying to ban them again. Why would they get a pass?
The truth is, racism is so deeply rooted in US history that there is hardly any idea of movement that does not bear its taint, if you look close enough.
2
It is funny how conservatives love autonomy until it is a question of autonomy for someone not like them. The virtue of decision making ability, even full humanity, is seen as a property of an aristocracy of a certain class of the white and male. Women and children benefit when women have control over how many children they have. Who benefits when they don't? What eugenics and the anti choice industry have in common is far more significant than the proposition of Justice Thomas: the control of others to satisfy their prejudice.
1
I wish Ross would get out of his bubble and actually go out and talk to women of color at a Planned Parenthood facility. I'm sure that could school him on "theoretical self-conception."
1
This is classic "signal versus noise " analysis. Douthat takes some statistics and then invent's a narrative which does not exist to fit his philosophical bent. Naturally other facts, like Planned Parenthoods other 66% of their activities, other than abortion, are not mentioned because it does not fit the narrative. The whole story would be nice in the future Russ.
What a convoluted arguments to discredit pro-choice. Conflating eugenics and pro-choice is of the same order as conflating eugenics and genetic research or birth control. Anything can perverted for morally dubious purposes but if that is to be the reason such things should not exist we might as well stop inventing anything. Ban the internet, television, the printed press, medical drugs, etc.
Planned parenthood’s main business is not abortion! It is women’s health. When I was poor and unemployed I had a free exam there and got a diaphragm for birth control. Birth control is essential to women’s health and the best way to reduce abortion rates.
Eugenics is not part of the pro choice movement now, regardless of what it might have been in the past. Families that choose to abort disabled fetuses should not be pilloried. Having seen the despair of families with disabled children I cannot blame them.
Until we deal with inequality in our society and racism (not an easy goal) we must not ban abortion.
392
@Reva Potter WOMEN who choose to abort embryos or fetuses for any reason should not be pilloried.
31
@Reva Potter
Sanctimonious Republicans like Douthat love to say that "Planned Parenthood is in the abortion business" or that the doctors and nurses at the clinics are "abortionists". I have not dealt with Planned Parenthood as a client for decades, but that sure wasn't the case then. Later, in the 1980's, as a Red Cross instructor, I noted that the organization's most distributed pamphlet (by far) was "It's OK to say NO WAY", designed to help teenage girls resist pressure to have sex. This was at a time when various Republicans were lying that Planned Parenthood encouraged promiscuity. The next several most distributed pamphlets, into the early 21st Century, were all aimed at reducing the spread of AIDS.
Planned Parenthood is in the healthcare business. Douthat should stop being sanctimonious and become interested in facts.
85
@Reva Potter
Yet Planned Parenthood carries out abortion
after abortion...not all for medical reasons
but for the sake of convenience.
Does Planned Parenthood counsel young
mothers to be about Adoption rather than Abortion ?
Eugenics is part of the Pro-Choice movement
it is applied eugenics against those in the womb
of their mothers.
Your last sentence seems to indicate that those
who suffer from racism should be aborting their
children, after all who wants to raise a child in
a racist society ?
You mean well Reva Potter but you are blind
to the implications of your views for they lead
to the murder of the young and the old and
the disabled.
2
The “abortion rate” in a population is only meaningful if we know the pregnancy rate, specifically the unintended pregnancy rate. If certain populations are having more abortions because they do not have convenient, affordable and reliable access to contraception then the problem is not the abortion rate.
3
I would like to make very clear to those and there are many on this comment board that the majority of pro life people do not scream, shout, harass or spout ugly names to those entering abortion facilities. The people in Manhattan behave in a courteous and dignified manner.
We are there to offer another choice and these women can take it or leave it. It is there choice. Sometimes they do ask us for help and we are very happy to oblige.
Many of these women are given housing facilities that are far superior to anything they have ever known. They are clean, comfortable and the people running them give them the love that has often been missing in their own lives.
The people in the pro life movement are good people. This is why I decided to take part in the first place. They have shown a wonderful example to those women in need and they have responded. They have had no regrets in keeping their babies.
1
@KMW
You are free to fill yourself with goodness and thump your chest with moral zeal as long as you do not try to get the Government to enact laws that impose your morality on the rest of us. You don't know when a fetus is imbued with a soul or when "personhood " begins. These are religious views. And the Constitution has something called the First Amendment which prohibits the Government from establishing the views of one religion as the policy of the land. Keep your religion and your morality off my body.
2
Really, Ross, how noble that you cite Clarence Thomas's concern that the contemporary polemics on abortion conceal an historical agenda of racism and eugenics. But one wonders where Thomas's acute sense of historical racism went when he signed onto Shelby County v. Holder, the ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act, with an opinion claiming the pre-1965 history of (voting) discrimination is no longer relevant(!) And never mind the fact the Thomas's court voting record on affirmative action, voting rights and desegregation have done nothing but to weaken civil rights and propagate racism, much like his eventual vote to overturn Roe will be seen as an attempt to strip women of their reproductive rights.
Skepticism about progressivism? Truly, Ross, who are you kidding when you employ cynical arguments and cherry-picked history like this?
4
The author obfuscates the issues.
Mr. Douthat’s lumping of forced sterilization of specific populations with individual decisions of abortion under the umbrella of ‘reproductive policy’ to make his point is disingenuous. Tainting abortion by viewing it as an exercise in eugenics is misleading. Abortion is an individual’s decision and eugenics by definition requires action en masse.
The only institution still supporting eugenics is the Supreme Court. In Buck v Bell, 1927, the Court 8-1 in favor of a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state".
3
Why is contraception unavailable to begin with? And why are men not mentioned as having 100% responsibility for the financial support of all born children. If the latter was seriously considered, one wonders if any of the pro-choice arguments -theological/ ideological- would be structured as is in this column or by Justice Thomas?
2
The column conveniently ignores the one blatant historical example of a racist, eugenic campaign about abortion in America—probably because it was an anti-abortion campaign.
In the late 19th century anti-abortion activists sought to make abortion illegal by arguing that it was in effect “race suicide” being committed by white Northern European, Protestant women in the face of an onslaught of white, Southern European, Catholic immigrants.
Anti-abortion politics is and has always been a campaign to maintain control over women’s lives by men, by social structures, by religious assumptions, and by law.
5
Douthat's argument -- if you can call it that -- is a mess. You cannot simply say that the question of abortion has taken three separate historical trajectories, and then coolly say that while attitudes changed "substantially ... older impulses [lingered] in each new dispensation." He hasn't shown that this happened; he merely asseverates it with unjustified confidence.
Take eugenics as being the first stage. The first stage of what? The abortion debate? Eugenics came to the fore with the rise of scientific medicine, and the idea that we could improve things by controlling the birth less desirable human beings. 'Three generations of imbeciles' is enough, and that sort of thing -- as if the issue of abortion were not always an issue of woman's freedom. Eugenics was never central to woman's right to control her reproductivity, however racists got involved, and only came late on the scene.
The key to Douthat's attempt to map out historical periods is a ruse, which is evident in his closing words. The question of abortion, he tells us, "still turns on the moral status of unborn life." Now, there is Douthat's real argument, and he should have acknowledged his special interests at the start. The mind of Douthat the Catholic is already settled. The issue is the moral status of the foetus (or, more generally, unborn life), not women's rights (or eugenics). But unborn life cannot be legitimately protected by abridging women's freedom, and that's the real moral issue here.
2
Had Justice Thomas been just a bit brighter than he is, and had he been just a bit more attentive to how people really live in America he might have noted that while today’s abortion rates are indeed highest among populations — racial minorities and the disabled — that the older eugenicists hoped to cull, there is no causal relation between one fact and the other. Rather, abortion rates tend to be high in populations that are at the margins of the economy, have noticeably less access to education than other Americans, and have just as noticeably less access to health care than other Americans. Moreover, in a very rich country with a not very sound safety net, those populations get rather little aid from the society at large. It is an unhappy reality that Justice Thomas is not bright enough to figure any of this out on his own.
Our loss.
3
A "bio-political" eugenics is a "progressive" cause of improving society's overall well-being, deciding on life, death, health, and reproduction on that basis. Eugenics is a matter of positive government action, while the legality of abortion compels no action.
Modern states are too involved in deciding how people should live. (Consider the overreach of the managerial mental health industry, or Belgium's authorizing doctors to assist the despairing in suiciding). And we should resist the cheapening of life for the poor.
Interestingly, the concept of human rights (of which the claimed right to life of fetuses is an appropriation) may not be what is needed to counter these trends. Rights tend to correlate with needs and through them with providable services. Marx's slogan "to each according to his needs" was realized by the 20th century welfare states, which exchange the need-provisions of commodities and services for labor ("from each according to his abilities"). Benevolent paternalist governments give people what they need, in exchange for duties and payments, and respect their rights, which in the end are mostly animal rights: food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and freedom from physical harm.
Abortion decisions are about a way of life (if and when to have a child), routinely theorized as attaching to a biological potentiality (as "right" meets "science"). A eugenics model with state as actor rather resembles -- compulsory childbirth.
1
The pro life crowd work hard to make contraception expensive and difficult for women-especially poor women-to get, by making contraceptive coverage not part of basic health care plans. Then,denied easy access to contraceptives, these women have a higher rate of undesired pregnancy. Thus, they have a higher rate of abortion. Eugenics? Not really. Instead, yet another example of a failed health care insurance system, and the ramifications of the imposition of the religious right’s opposition to contraception being included as available to all women, regardless of employer. Imagine if the coverage of Viagra for men were attacked in the same way, as encouraging lewd and lascivious behavior, and employers were allowed to not cover this drug because it violated their religious beliefs.
The hypocrisy of being so-called pro-life and at the same time being pro death penalty, locking kids in cages at the border and separating them from their parents is just amazing.
5
Dear Mr. Douthat,
I have previously suggested to you that we men should just shut up about abortion, since it is very largely the bodies and lives of women that are at stake. Unfortunately, you can't let it go, forcing me to repeat myself, this time with the right-on quote, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Amen.
4
Where is the link to what THE CONSTITUTION says about this difficult issue? With all the "blah blah blahs" I really don't care about linking or not linking eugenics and so on into the firestorm. What the bottom line SHOULD BE is "does The Constitution provide a right to abortion yes or no". Personal OPINIONS are irrelevant in discussing issues involving the Supreme Court and only serve to inflame people's EMOTIONS which should never be part of sound legal reasoning. Humans are emotional and it's the duty of all parts of the justice system to separate emotion from legal reasoning. Make sense, ladies and gentlemen?
Here are the statistics for abortions in 2014:
• White patients accounted for 39% of abortion procedures in 2014, blacks for 28%, Hispanics for 25% and patients of other races and ethnicities for 9%.6
• Some 75% of abortion patients in 2014 were poor or low-income. Twenty-six percent of patients had incomes of 100–199% of the federal poverty level, and 49% had incomes of less than 100% of the federal poverty level ($15,730 for a family of two).*6
Hmm, no eugenics here and it is quite simply a case of not having the money to support a child.
4
If one makes this argument about reproductive rights -- arguing against them because racists used to support them -- then one needs also to apply that logic to gun rights acknowledging the second amendment's origins in concern for policing runaway slaves. If abortion rights are to be curtailed because racists once argued for them, so too should gun ownership rights.
3
Any influence of past policies would be visible if we look for it. At what point is there some sort of 'organized' push toward a policy of encouraging abortion among the poor, or a particular race, or any other type of eugenic application?
Lacking that, Douthat's argument is simply sophistry, a smokescreen providing an additional thin veneer of fantasized cover for anti-abortion advocates.
2
That so many people so shamelessly support eugenics proves that our society is gravely ill. Ultimately it comes down to the question "do all members of the human family have human rights?" If no human being has human rights until he's born, then human rights don't exist at all: there are only rights granted by the State. Such people have thrown themselves in with the worst philosophies of the 20th Century.
1
Thank you, Ross, for allowing that there is something of an unease with race and disability that may be playing a role in today's fervid support of abortion by liberals (they're not progressive to me).
1
Imagine two couples living at/near the poverty line - doesn't matter what country. One has access to contraception and can limit the number of children their coitus produces to 2-4 instead of the 8-12 the other couple's coitus lacking contraception produces. All else equal, which family enjoys a higher standard of living? The children of which family have a better chance of obtaining higher education and better health, economic prospects down the road? The answer is obvious. Ross is, per usual, obfuscating the clear facts on the ground. What I find laughable is that many so-called "pro-lifers" who rail against contraception and abortion themselves have 2-3 children. Are their own skills at timing coitus to avoid conception so much more advanced? Or are they availing themselves of the same contraceptive methods they would deny others? I think I can guess the answer....
1
Ross, you have taken a fever ridden conservative construction and have done your best to provide an intellectual basis. Like 'fetal persons'and life at heartbeats, this is another grasp at straws.
Ross and Thomas are ultimately arguing for a kind of 'reverse-eugenics' where the poor and disabled are forced to have children and carry them to term.
For Thomas and the conservative 'original intent' crowd it would be good to note that abortion was neither a moral or religious issue until the late 1800's. Up until then even the Catholic church did not consider abortion an issue.
Abortion became an issue mainly because medical doctors wanted to squeeze midwives out of their business. It was then backed by politicians who wanted more 'white babies' .
Eugenics is a problem only when it is mandated by the state. A woman has a total right not to bring a severely deformed child into the world. To force a woman to give birth to a deformed child is neither morally or intellectual justified outside of religious extremists and conservative 'thinkers'.
2
We have both an onrushing climate crisis and a crashing wave of the extinction crisis. If you think we're not in the population panic age, you're clearly not paying attention.
This is thoughtful, in that it made me think in ways I previously had not. Thank you.
This article is outrageous. We shouldn’t let women choose, because we might not like the choices they make. We, in our infinite wisdom, must make those choices for them. Why don’t we get rid of democracy too while we’re at it.
3
As usual, Douthat combines facts without logic to support his religious beliefs.
A disproportionate percentage of abortions may be in African -American populations. This is because a disproportionate percentage of African-Americans are poor; the result of brutal, systemic racism in the the U.S.
Planned Parenthood is not in the abortion business, they are in the planned parenthood business and they also provide general health care to millions of people every year. Abortions are a tiny part of there business.
1
The highest total fertility rates in this country are to be found in red states, where the opposition to abortion is strong. The lowest fertility rates are to be found in deep blue states (e.g.,, New England) where there. is strong support for abortion. The future belongs to those who show up, meaning that in the long run the demographic outlook does not look good for the Democrats.
No mention of sex education, or the role of fundamentalist morality.
Nor mention of the appalling impact of raw capitalism on families.
The description of planned parenthood as focused on abortion is bizarre; perhaps a column by Douthat on the history of that organization might be in order.
2
The apparently finesse in mixing up, as in a bad cocktail, theories and practices, ending with a covered rehabilitation of the retrograde thinking of a right wing judge, is easy to identify like a rhetorical remedy to sustain anti-abortion arguments.
You write the "medical system strongly encourages abortion in response to disability" which is not true. The medical community is professional and does not push women into aborting. But I am sure if your family was faced with news 13 weeks into a pregnancy that the fetus had it's heart outside of it's chest cavity, or no brain, or no kidneys, perhaps you would see the very personal choice that women need to be able to make. Not everyone is equiped to continue such a pregnancy, though some are and do. The medical community supports choice.
1
This line of reasoning is puzzling. Why would you look at historical arguments to support your position on abortion when you can consider actual data on women of reproductive age (age 15-44) and abortion rates?
In the United States in 2016, 20.5% of women ages 15-44 were Hispanic, 56.7% were white, 14.6% were black, 0.9% were American Indian/Alaska Native and 7.3% were Asian/Pacific Islander. https://www.marchofdimes.org/peristats/ViewSubtopic.aspx?reg=99&top=14&stop=127&lev=1&slev=1&obj=3
In the United States in 2015, white women accounted for 49% of abortions, black women 40% and other races 11%.
https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/abortions-by-race/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
The CDC Abortion Surveillance Program for 2015 states:
'Among the 30 areas that reported cross-classified race/ethnicity data for 2015, non-Hispanic white women and non-Hispanic black women accounted for the largest percentages of all abortions (36.9% and 36.0%, respectively), and Hispanic women and non-Hispanic women in the other race category accounted for smaller percentages (18.5% and 8.7%, respectively) (Table 12)."
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/ss/ss6713a1.htm#results
These are readily available data.
Look at the data and draw your own conclusions about race and abortion. You will be better informed than the author of this piece.
2
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.": if we are forced to have children against our will, birth control is getting harder to find, and social services dedicated to helping those people are cut, it is against the constitution and the bill of rights. It is against the very idea of citizenship.
Second, under current medical law, if you decide to "save" someone's life, it has to be consented to. That's why no one can take your bone marrow, and that's why you're not required to give your kidneys to anyone, whether or not it would save their life. Moot point.
It is our body. It is our choice. This piece was dangerous in that it ignored some of the most basic facts of this debate, and in Kansas they recently upheld abortion rights based on their state constitution. Engaging in false equivalencies, then remaining ambiguous is dangerous, and has nothing to do with eugenicists. It isn't about them any more: it is about us as citizens making the best choices for our futures, and our desire to not bleed out in the streets because of it. By engaging in this, you ignore the fact that we are citizens. Plus men get all kinds of medical coverage for viagra and other blatantly unnecessary medical treatments. If y'all can get constant hard ons, I don't see why I should be required to carry a child I don't want to. Plus it's not your place: you're a man. When have you ever had to worry about being pregnant, the cost on your body and your career, aka the ability to provide? Never.
1
None of this is about ethnicity; it is about economic disparity. If you don't have money you don't count. That is the American way.
1
Mr. Douthat's argument and analysis are offensive, an attempt to cloak paternalism in an intellectual argument. Which is exactly what Clarence Thomas has done by adopting this theory from the antiabortion movement.
The very simple idea Mr. Douthat pitches is that if some individuals who began important social or political movements in the past held views on any issue that we now find offensive, you can use those views to taint them and any important movements that have developed from those trends. This is foolish.
I could use the same theory to argue that Thomas Jefferson's ideas about democracy should be ignored because he was a slaveholder. Or that Christianity should be ignored because the Catholic Church supported the persecution of Jews during the Roman Empire.
Today's pro choice movement is grounded in personal freedom, the right of each woman to make a choice that is personal to her. Using a pseudo-intellectual argument to claim this is about eugenics is truly absurd. It's about control.
1
As always Republicans don't care about the living. I know parents who raised handicapped children. Sometimes it destroyed their marriages . Sometimes their lives. Not everybody can handle it. I have no right to decide for them. You have to know, if you can deal with it in a decent way. But that's a foregone concept for Republicans nowadays.
Douthat imbues the embryo with such a high moral status that he is oblivious to the ghoulishness of the Government requiring a full grown woman or teenager or child (yes, ten year olds) being forced to give birth. Since Douthat mentioned the word 'justice' perhaps he should flesh out his moral framework to tell us what justice would require of the father. What can the Government require of the father that is of exactly the same moral worth as months of exhausting pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, and the risk to a woman's life? And, then, let's not forget the sleepless nights with a newborn, the diaper changes, the childcare burdens in time, effort, and money, and the sacrifice of a woman's own life and aspirations. All this forced upon a woman -- but not a man -- because those embryos must be saved. Force, command, and control over women are, it seems, the birthright of all ultra-conservatives (men and women) and done in the name of saving "babies." And, one more point: since Douthat traces the moral lineage of today's choice movement, we may ask why there is such overlap between restrictive abortion laws and the former slave states !! Perhaps habits of force, command and control over human bodies persist through generations. After all, that was the cause of the antebellum split in the Baptist Church whose southern descendants now march with righteous zeal to control women.
5
The contortions observed in this article to paint progressives as eugenicists are breathtaking. Somehow Mr. Douthat fails to discuss the more obvious conservative racial eugenics, namely cuts in food stamps, medicaid, housing and other aid to the disproportionately minority poor. A slow death is still death and Republicans such as the author are its biggest supporters. Add to that his and others' opposition to solutions to global warming, and their "pro-life" position is seen for the obvious farce that it is.
1
He should advance this argument in the context of prenatal testing and not abortion.
“...In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business...”.
No Ross, Planned Parenthood are in the business of women’s healthcare, with abortion a minor part of the narrative. This pro life trope misrepresents the role of Planned Parenthood in the lives of thousands of women, providing basic ob/gyn care and misguidedly focuses the pro life movement on defunding Planned Parenthood to the detriment of women’s care.
The odd thing about the feminist argument for abortion is that it largely ignores the damage that abortion has done to females around the world. In China, for instance, female infanticide was practiced for centuries, and that practice has effectively been replaced by gender-selective abortion. Today in China, 115 boys are born for every 100 girls. A decade ago, the figure was even worse, with 121 boys for every 100 girls.
So there is simply no question that abortion is used to further eugenic policies, and there is no question that the victims are females. So it is strange that American feminists never seem to mention this uncomfortable issue in campaigns against the victimization of women across the globe. I guess it just doesn't fit the narrative of the overwhelmingly privileged and mostly white sisterhood of US feminism.
Of course, there is a compelling argument to be made for the idea that women should have total control over their bodies, in exclusion of any rights of an unborn child. But at least there should be some recognition of the heavy toll that argument has taken on women across the world.
If Thomas thinks the primary reason women get abortions, he is so far off base. They do if for a host of reasons, very few of which have to do with designing a child. Time for him to retire.
1
In the Sanger era the eugenics argument was used to outlaw abortion because too many white women were using it to control their fertility and immigrant women were not, causing the white race to be in jeopardy.
In the 1950s Protestants were fearful that JFK's Catholicism would have him adhere to the Vatican rulings and he would seek to outlaw abortion and even contraception.
In the 1950s, with the Cold War in full swing, foreign aid was a major tool in our arsenal to keep nations within the US sphere of influence.
That cost tax dollars. If foreign populations could be controlled, meaning made smaller, by exporting contraceptive devices and money for abortion clinics, it would reduce the tax dollars needed for foreign aid.
Women who are impoverished, unable to afford the more reliable forms of birth control, such as monthly pills, are much more likely to experience an unplanned pregnancy.
The most impoverished women in the US are women of color.
There is a cause and effect explanation if higher numbers of women of color need an abortion. The need of impoverished women to end a pregnancy is exponentially greater than the need of middle class women to end a pregnancy. Impoverished women do not have the means to care for an unplanned child.
The pervasive poverty of women of color is not a eugenics program. It's an economic inequality problem.
No matter if eugenics has anything to do with the abortion issue or not, it's still comes down to one group of people trying to dominate or have control over another mostly based on religious dogma.
No pastor, priest, pope or politician should have the power to tell others how to live their lives or reproduce.
1
Dear Mr. Douthat,
I got knocked up at 17. It was 1973 and it was my choice to make. She's a 6th grade science teacher and has two daughters of her own. I made what you would consider the right, or moral, choice. But it was my choice to make, and I was able to make it because I knew that I had a support system in place that would allow me to successfully raise a child. It didn't matter that abortion was legal or illegal. What mattered was that I had a dependable support system that did not end when she was born, or even when she was out of diapers, and included things like a Pell Grant to help with community college. If all y'all anti abortion pontificators and such would quit worrying about the court system and create a legitimate support system - including birth control and sex education - then the abortion rate would drop even further.
627
@TrueLove--It is not only "the strongest of women" who give up their infants. It is also the coerced, the threatened and the defenseless. Do you have any idea how many young girls went through pregnancy and gave birth, just to have their babies taken from them, because their parents made them? How many minor girls are threatened by families into giving up their newborns? Don't assume that your children came to you because strong women gave you a gift. Many adopted children were taken from weak, unwilling and defenseless girls who had no choice. I know, because my sister was one of them and it ruined her life. She never recovered from her grief and trauma. Not all adoptions are rosy stories of self sacrifice.
103
@TrueLove
I'm reading that she opted to keep her child because support systems were available to her that allowed her to raise her child, not give it up for adoption.
Without that confidence, would she have made the same choice? That's a decision every woman is entitled to decide for herself, and 'bravery' has nothing to do with it.
77
@Vanessa Hall - Great post! If Douthat and his fellow self-satisfied moralists spent 1/10th the effort advocating for the sort of social support that you had, abortion could become, as the slogan goes, safe, legal, and rare. Instead, US maternal death rates prove childbirth is unsafe for women without the support to which everyone should be entitled.
38
Why do republicans never ask, "Why do women get abortions?"
Find the answers to that question, and work on ameliorating the conditions that cause women to seek abortions. You will end up with fewer abortions by preserving the freedom and dignity of women than by forcing them to gestate an unwanted fetus.
2
Is privacy no longer an issue?
1
Mr. Douthat does not know or understand the history of eugenics. Alongside the desire to limit the poor and non-white population, there was a sincere attempt to eliminate the terrible genetic diseases that still plague Third World countries today. Eugenics was espoused not just by right-wing racists but by left-wingers such as H. G. Wells. The Nazis embraced “negative eugenics” (elimination of the unfit) and made it into a tool of phantasmagoric racial ideology that literally did not see Jews as human beings (Hitler famously said “The Jews are a race but they are not human”). To compare this with the parents’ natural desire to have healthy offspring or with a woman’s disinclination to bear a child doomed to pain and suffering is disingenuous. When I was pregnant with my second son, I was reading Daniel Kelves’ excellent book “In the Name of Eugenics” that outlines its complicated history. I also had ultrasound and other tests. Has the fetus been diagnosed with Down’s syndrome, I would have had abortion and done it with the full awareness of the history of eugenics. A fetus is not a human person and preventing the birth of a sick child is an act or mercy, not of murder.
3
If Judge Thomas wasn't black and incredibly fortunate to have a Republican in the White House when Thurgood Marshall died, he would have been a local traffic court judge in a small town.
8
Recycling an old discredited and sickening argument This isn't intellectual this is claptrap.
4
I don't know where to begin. I'll try. This columnist's sophistry in attempting to link (in his own inimical "I'll have it both ways"style) past eugenics proponents to today's pro-choice advocates is as much a canard as attempting to link The National Socialist German Workers' Party to democratic socialism as implemented by ,say, Canada or Norway.
Mr. Douthat is really just another Sean Hannity dressed up in fancier adjectives.
False equivalency is the coin of the realm for these holier than thou types, even if it has an Ivy League vocabulary.
4
Thomas' argument just shows the deterioration of the conservative mind. It's the same kind of reasoning you hear on Fox that says all democrats are pro-slavery which assumes they are unchanged from those of the 19C or the racists in the Jim Crow south.
2
Two of the last people in America who should offer an opinion on womens’ human and sexual rights are Clarence Thomas and Donald Trump.
9
Mr Douthat the fact of the matter is Margaret Sanger partnered with Nazi sympathizers and Klansman to promote eugenics and abortion particularly among the so called "inferior" races. She gave Black women special attention and was able to worm her way in with a number of Black pastors at the time who allowed Sanger to promote and proselytize on the virtues of abortion for Black women and families from their respective pulpits. This history is part of the philosophical foundation that inspired the creation of Planned Parenthood. It is scary and it is shameful and it is real. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Justice Thomas pointing this history out.
As a lawyer practicing special education law I have represented quite a few minority parents of children from NYC who relayed that hospitals in NYC pressured them to abort their children. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the “progressive” agenda is racist and rooted in eugenics.
One of these parents relayed how the hospital were pressuring her, she discussed this with her sister who worked as a nurse in the hospital who said, “Don’t listen to them. They try to convince every black mother to abort.”
Yet another pro-abortion (not choice) article where the most basic questions - Is it right to kill babies? When are they babies? - are ignored.
If Ds are the party of science, why are there so many who insist that even a 9 mo. old fetus isn't a baby? Is there something magical that makes them babies once removed from the womb when they are exactly the same being? Why do I hear so many people say, well, I would never do it, but it should be legal? Why would you never do it - perhaps b/c it's a baby?
Why do you call people dangerous who desire to preserve life? Even if your party is right about everything else, why at least not have respect for those who feel the lives of the voiceless are important? Wouldn't you think sympathy and preserving life is more in line with your call for the same for minorities, the poor, the physically challenged? Or is it only those who can protest?
We so often hear - well it's legal (I used to parrot that as a young man), as if that answered all questions about morality. Yet we know Hitler relied on the facade of legality. We know that slavery and raping ones own wife were once "legal." What has legal to do with it?
I know how painful the topic of abortion is and that many people will be shocked to read the above in a "safe place." I used to, when young, make all the same pro-choice arguments until, to my great discomfort, I realized how illogical they were.
More and more I realize how heroic and selfless Justice Thomas has been.
Another off-base argument presented by Ross Douthat.
The real problem is electing GOP politicians, notably GOP presidents who promote bad Supreme Court justices,starting with George HW Bush and the continuing bad choices of Bush, Jr. and the current psychopath who is the illegitimate resident in the WH.
"Disparate impact" doesn't count when black babies are killed at a higher rate than white babies? (Jesse Jackson used to call this "genocide.")
Pain doesn't count when it's felt by unborn babies?
Pro-choice doesn't count as unborn babies choose to struggle when pierced by needles?
Science can be denied when it says unborn babies are human lives?
Care for the poorest and most helpless among us doesn't apply to unborn babies?
(Care for born babies can be shown in ways not limited to what government bureaucracy makes taxpayers pay for. Ask pro-life centers or churches for help. Since "Dan Quayle was right," repent of fornication and practice monogamy; my wife had four babies by a boy'friend' when she finally got married--to me--10+ years ago :)
Liberals who do not apply standards to themselves are not applying standards; they're merely advertising. (If they want to impeach president Trump they'd better lock up the justice-obstructor who withheld emails, destroyed hard drives, and threw attorney-client privilege over her conspiracy with a Brit to buy Russian gossip; president Trump did none of those. It'd give them a lot more leverage--and might give a desperate candidate some name recognition. Justin Amash for President?) Standards outrank us and make claims on us. ("Blessed is the man...his delight is in the law of the LORD.") But if I don't like what's advertised, I won't buy it.
I think that the price of tea in China is related to tee times at blue state country clubs. Tea, and tee - see? You don't see? Good. Nor should you see any sense in this bizarro column by Douthat.
5
Ross misses the irony that "Pro-life" advocates are allied with the same people who would support eugenics.
No neo-Nazis in the Democratic Party.
2
@Daniel F. Solomon hmmm, me thinks you misseth his point. Yes, there may not be Nazis in the democratic party, but there is a long list of dogmatists who, so convinced of their rightness, are blind to their own moral failings.
Or Perhaps rather then missed his point, you've rather proved his point....
I support abortion, and agree there may not be Nazis in the democratic party, but there are certainly communists, and the historic outcomes of communistic policies have proved every bit as homicidal as the nazis - Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot.... So lets stop pretending that being a democrat/liberal/progressive means we are free of moral stain.
Here's the bottom line for men like Douthat: in prior times, babies that would have died at birth or shortly after can now be "saved", like those born just around the 20 week mark. They suffer bleeding in their heads and other critical ailments that can condemn them to a life no one would want for them.
By the same token, in earlier, less safe times, unwanted babies either malformed or not were left out in the forest to die.
Social Darwinism has been alive and well in all eras of humankind. These draconian laws and the (mostly) rich male pundits who promulgate them are condemning women to, once again, determine their decisions by drastic means.
Mr. Douthat fails to start in the right era with respect to abortion. It was legal and practiced in the British colonies, and the first laws banning abortion didn’t come along until the mid-1800’s. It’s not some new idea hatched by Social Darwinists. It’s an ancient practice that was common.
2
“None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal.” A beg-the-question formulation. The question is whether government should make abortion illegal for all, where a moral prohibition of a generality the “should be” this formulation assumes has its source and rationale in religious doctrine and belief that some may accept for themselves but in no way need be accepted by all and that in a free society with no religious establishment should never be imposed on all.
1
@David Laurence: An atheist can think that religious people have as much right to have their moral views heard, and considered as a potential motivation for law, as he does.
The author took his shoe and rubbed out the bright chalk line Thomas drew between "eugenics" and "abortion." He did nothing to address the fact that Thomas drew that vile line. Thomas did no one any service. It is just one more example of his empty, blinkered thinking that has characterized his tenure as a Supreme Court justice
3
Perhaps you should read this Ross: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/clarence-thomas-used-my-book-argue-against-abortion/590455/
The author Adam Cohen from whose book Thomas cribbed for his eugenics rant, disputes Thomas's conclusions.
On another note: Clarence and his wife are poster children for serious ethics reform on the Supreme Court.
4
If you are so worried about human life, get rid of the guns!!!!
6
Clarence the Clown is known for going long periods of time without being heard from. He should try to maintain that part of his reputation.
Have a hairy Coke and a smile, Clarence, then go back to impersonating a mime Justice. We prefer things that way at this point.
5
So black mothers are racists? The Nazi eugenics program based on the "purity" of a blood line is similar to a woman's right to choose? Or, not similar, just coincidental but still requiring overturning Roe V Wade? RD nothing that you write surprises me but I must admit I was taken in for a moment with your use of the word "dangerous" in relation to CT (thought you were being critical of, not praising CT). Don't get me wrong, CT is a dangerous individual as is his promotion of Natural Law replacing our Constitutional Way of Life since it will bring the end of democracy as we know it.
2
The main conclusion of this argument is that we should all be worried about Thomas in the USSC. Thanks Ross for pointing out how far ahead of hear time Sanger was and how stupid Thomas is; someone should send him a VCR tape explaining the difference between individual choice and government issued eugenics.
1
We need Douthat's reasoning to support the "up-is-down, "wrong-is-right" approach of the current Russian/Repug approach to governing.
Nothing becomes anything and tortured semantics proves black is white.
Lofty pseudo-intellectualism, I guess, deserves exposure so the rest of us can be tested for mental insufficiency.
3
The danger in the Roe v Wade decision is that it based on misreadings of the Ninth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Ninth Amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” But the Ninth Amendment does not make unenumerated rights constitutional rights or empower the Supreme Count to determine what those unenumerated rights are. If Supreme Court justices can add new rights to the Bill of Rights as they see fit, what is the amendment process for?
The Due Process Clause says that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Roe v Wade decision located a “right to privacy” in the term “liberty” and asserted that the right to privacy gives women a right to an abortion until the third trimester. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment obviously meant that states cannot incarcerate person without due process, but this doesn’t matter. A person arrested, charged and convicted for violating a state anti-abortion law has received due process.
The argument that abortion advocates support culling minority populations makes about as much sense to me that an argument that gun rights advocates support the same thing because deaths from gun violence are higher in minority populations.
3
Let me get this straight. Douthat notes the "genetic fallacy" that the source of an idea or position does not imply the truth or the falsity of the idea. He goes on to make clear that he is not claiming that pro-choice advocates are motivated today by such eugenic considerations. And then he pivots by claiming that the "Left" is hypocritical because they are not committing this genetic fallacy in regard to the issue of abortion while they do in regard to certain unnamed issues. I am not sure who the Left is that Douthat is indicting, probably the spector of the campus Left as ascendent "cultural Marxists" is the people he has in mind. It's easy to label your enemies as hypocrites when you don't name them. I would wonder whether he read the opinion piece from a former member of Operation Rescue who decried his pro-life postions of the past on the basis that persons such as Douthat who advocate imprisoning women for the exercise of their rights to bodily integrity never seem to get around to the social policies that might make the lives of the children of the poor more than exercises in futility. He might also start by noting that the president from his party advocated a family leave policy while campaigning for the presidency. For Trump this is one of many cases of "Promises Made, Promises Broken" for Douthat "Promises Made, Promises Ignored'
2
Does anything link the eugenics of the past to abortion today? Yes! Absolutely! To anyone who thinks otherwise, I suggest reading the biography of Dr. Karl Brandt, the doctor who led the euthanasia program in Nazi Germany.
This is my third attempt in several hours to get the NYT mediator/censor to allow my comment to be published. I don’t know why, given the tenor and vigor of other comments, why mine is not acceptable, particularly since it is based on easily verifiable facts and quotes the author.
Please note that each year Planned Parenthood performs hundreds of thousands of abortions on black women, which has reduced the black population by many millions over a period of 20 years (and millions more over a longer period). Given these huge numbers, some black people—and others—view this population reduction as genocide, a conscious effort to shrink the black population.
Indeed, as the article notes, even Ruth Bader Ginsberg said this issue can be seen “as a desire to subsidize abortions for ‘populations that we don’t want to have too many of’”).
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck—it is eugenics.
I am pretty sure most white folks wouldn’t want eugenics applied to them, especially since the projected in-migration and birth rates of non-white US sub-groups will make whites a minority in the not too distant future.
of course, it is not eugenics, because the black women who chose abortion freely, do not do it because they want to bring the black population down. They do it because of their health issues, or to avoid crushing poverty. If black women choose more often then white to have abortions, the question becomes why? And should not Thomas Clarence and other supporters of his idea address the reasons that force black women to have abortion rather than to ban abortion condemning the black women to crushing poverty, bad health and possible death?
1
Blah, blah, blah. This essay, and so many like it, would have been so much better if the writer had just said, "A woman's body is her own private property." And then shut up. Especially someone like Douthat, who probably cares about property rights.
5
Mr. Douthat blows off the issue of population control. We are nearing 7.5 billion and are on track to reach 8 billion by 2024.
There have been reasoned estimates that a population of over 11 billion would be unsustainable, and that the optimum human population would be 2-3 billion.
Clearly this last has long been in the rearview mirror, but the issue of overpopulation is huge.
With global warming, areas are becoming marginal to uninhabitable, we have about 65 million refugees worldwide, and we have governments that are trending toward putting up "no vacancy" signs to refugees.
The forces resulting from overpopulation will result in increasing conflict. Violence is a major factor in the refugee crisis.
Population control is a legitimate governmental interest. This fact shouldn't be ignored either in the abortion policy debate or as a vital concern.
1
I strongly suspect that for many politicians (most obviously trump himself), abortion is much less of a moral matter and far more a convenient political tool for persuading people to vote against their own best interests while feeling "moral". Should they succeed in actually "winning" this fight, they will lose a potent weapon in their battle to retain power while serving their oligarchic masters. The giveaway, of course, is that despite the "sanctity of life" that sanctity ends abruptly as soon as the baby takes its first breath --- it has somehow morphed into a 'taker" and must learn to use its non-existent bootstraps to acquire (unless it is fortunate enough to have the right kind and color parents) health, an education, a livelihood, indeed any kind of worthy life, on is own. That's the American Way.
7
No Planned Parenthood is not engaged in the adoption business, but neither is the anti-abortion movement. If those opposed to all or some abortion will start an enormous fund-raising effort and establish a wealthy foundation to support an adoption agency for all women who choose abortion because they cannot care one more child that might reduce some abortions for some women.
That still does not get into the difficult debate about personhood and whatnot is and when it happens.
1
I am revisiting the theme of the wonderful book Cider House Rules. The rules are ignored in this story because they are written in a language the people can not read. The owners are always upset because the rules are not followed. Life is difficult and people need the freedom to make decisions on their own with as little interference as possible.
I would really, truly wish that the states that are prohibiting abortion would spend more money on educating the children who live there. They are not pro life because they do not support the life of living children. They are just pro birth and once a child is born, they are on their own.
4
Sanger was a racist. Look at the photos of her posing with the KKK.
The first PP was opened in Harlem. What a coincidence that she chose a place where many black women lived.
Black women make up about 13% of the American population. But they also have 40% of the abortions. So don’t tell me abortion isn’t about “culling” the black population.
2
Ross, I’m a grandmother, been around since Roe was a case in the SCOTUS. At NO time in my life I have ever heard of any group PROMOTING abortions!
God gave us all, free will. God didn’t want puppets. Women have the RIGHT to choose what happens to their bodies, and their futures! YOU don’t have to have an abortion, BUT do not shove your beliefs on others!
Clarence Thomas has a right to his opinion however ridiculous it is! He has NO right to shove his be.iefs down the throats of women who do not share his beliefs! This goes for his wife too!
By the way, IF you want to FORCE woman to give birth, then YOU should FORCE the sperm donor to support the child until age 18!
9
Ross is overthinking. When my friend In high school got pregnant, she realized that she was not prepared for parenthood, and boy was she really not prepared for parenthood. I drove her to the clinic, she was out and about in a matter of hours. She is now the parent of 3 lovely daughters and 4 lovely grandchildren. We are really overthinking this process.
If you want more welfare, then, by all means, eliminate choice. If you want to handcuff young women, then, by all means, eliminate choice. And if you want to continue to obliterate the male as at least 50% of the issue, sometimes more in the instance of coercion, then y’all can go to hell.
12
If I were interested in adopting a child, I would not go the office of a healthcare provider. I would go to an adoption agency, a place that is, in fact, in the "adoption business." It is a red herring to accuse Planned Parenthood of not being something it has never claimed to be; it would be like accusing any ObGyn of not running an adoption agency. That said, when I relied upon Planned Parenthood for healthcare as a younger woman, a variety of information was always made available to patients, including referrals to adoption agencies. The goal of Planned Parenthood is to provide its patients with factual information and quality healthcare, not to make health decisions for them.
11
Mr Douthat complicates a simple question... Should a woman be able to control her own body?
Insuating that pro choice women are looking back on the history of eugenics and population control is laughable. I am 66 how and have no memory of Sanger. As far as overpopulation in the US, we know birthrates have dropped drastically. Young adult are choosing not to have children because they are pessimistic about the future where climate change will destabilize numerous habitats.
I am thankful for the right to choose when I found myself pregant, and was an immature, sheltered young woman, just starting to find my way in the word as an adult. I was unprepared emotionally and financially to bring a child into the world. I knew I would never be able to put my would be child up for adoption.
The answer is a woman needs to make her own personal decision based on her own situation. No man is qualified to voice his opinion on unwanted pregnancy, because he will never be in this difficult and wrenching situation.
12
"… pointing toward a more skeptical view of progressivism’s progress, and away from the all-good-things-are-liberal-things take that many of Clarence Thomas’s critics instinctively believe."
On the other hand, skeptics might wonder about the all-good-things-are-conservative-things take that seems to shape nearly all of Thomas' views. Especially lurking just under the surface: the never-ending consternation over feminine equality and the patrimonial authority lost in 60's/70's. And ironically, his inability in a purportedly strict originalist framework to answer the simple question: why is this any of your business?
8
A few years back, when I was working, the chat among my co-workers, around the mythical water cooler, often included abortion. I would offer the opinion, "Abortion, I'll never have one." Notice the use of the word I'll instead of I'd. They would listen and after a few seconds of stunned silence would quickly blurt out another opinion about the pros and cons of abortion rights or lack of them. I guess I've never considered the eugenics side of the debate because I never thought it was relevant, and still don't.
3
Apart from the obvious and historically accurate assertion that women will have abortions no matter the law, and those will money will travel to have it done safely, and those without money will go to wherever they must, there is another dimension to this crusade.
The question always goes begging about why do so many "pro-life" officials stand with crocodile tears when mass shootings take the lives of the born and still living, when they could do something about gun control? It is not the 2nd Amendment, s we are also supposed to be assured of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Unless someone wants to take it with weapons which are mass destructive?
4
Good grief. Such intellectual gyrations.
1. Birth control (contraception) and abortion rights have nothing to do with eugenics. Certainly not today.
2. Nobody is arguing for eugenics (social engineering), with the exception of individual right to die (end of life) decisions.
3. World population: As predicted by expert demographers since the 1970s, total world population is scheduled to level off at roughly 11 billion. Yes, quite high, but manageable.
4. Poor vs. wealthy, one race vs. another? It's the same situation for all people, on all continents -- see points #1 and #2.
5. Women's rights vs. the rights of the unborn: This is the real issue. If having an abortion were a crime, about a third of American women alive today would have been fined or jailed (Guttmacher Institute estimate of percentage of American women who have had an abortion one way or the other in their lifetimes since 1970). And, to state the obvious, what about the men involved in each situation? [And, please don't target legal abortion providers. This is not a supply-induced demand problem, but real demand by real women and men.]
12
Thank you. I’ve had one “illegal” abortion (the back alley Mexico kind), one “legal” abortion (in a hospital, not PP clinic) and one child that would not be in this world today if I had, died, been jailed or forced to give birth back in the 1970s.
2
Whether we are talking about eugenics or the pro-life movement, these have one thing in common: a concerted effort to take the power to decide when and whether to have children away from individuals. In other words, all these movements have one dangerous goal: to control the means of reproduction at a governmental or state level. It is an all too short road from there to controlling and shaping whole populations, not just through racist immigration policies or worse, but by coercing women to have or not have children. Scary indeed.
Katherine, Ithaca NY
7
As long as anti-abortionists refuse to invest, and invest heavily, in health care, day care, a living minimum wage, and education for the poor and middle classes, their arguments hold no moral high ground whatsoever. None.
So drop it, Ross.
20
Yes, there are moral questions about abortion which fundamentally boils down to at what point does the woman’s agency trump that over the fetus/unborn, and vice versa.
But, Clarence Thomas’ argument is just a back door way of trying push his pro-life agenda. I’m sure the are 500 other barstool arguments that he could provide us to support this views.
The questions raised here are legitimate, but let’s not kid ourselves. Justice Thomas, and the state of Indiana are engaged in a strategy to ultimately make abortion illegal. Whatever they can make stick in terms of restrictions they will.
I’d like to imagine a world where the right to abortion was agreed upon and made available but certain moral issues would be acknowledged and possibly have policy remedies.
3
@Jonathan Sanders
Furthermore, it rarely makes sense to consider Judge Thomas's arguments on their intellectual merit.
6
It is inarguable that the best abortion preventative is contraception. Full stop. Anyone who argues that contraception is wrong is criminally insane.
That said, why shouldn't the abstinence alternative be actively encouraged in schools, even by religiously motivated activists? What possible harm could there be? It obviously can't be the only alternative. But no one can argue against its benefits. It is the only 100 percent effective birth and disease preventative. Who knows how effective and widespread it might become if given a chance?
Every possible pregnancy preventing or delaying alternative must be explored and encouraged. The Earth is beyond its carrying capacity. The Four Horseman are champing at the bit while we dither.
1
"In any other area, the left would look at a history like this and ask whether .... the eugenic past still exerts a structural influence on the present."
Yes. A fine question to ask.
"Yes, in their theoretical self-conception, pro-choice institutions are neutral custodians of the right to choose."
No. There is nothing remotely "neutral" about the pro-choice argument. It is openly, unapologetically about women's rights.
"In theory the genetic-screening industry exists only to provide information. In theory the high abortion rate in black America is just the result of countless individual decisions."
No, of course not. It's the result of the far higher rate of poverty in black America. This is blatantly obvious. You're basing your argument not on amorphous "neutral" things, but on social (structural) conditions - right?
"None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal. That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life, the requirements of female equality."
It turns on which of those two one deems morally predominant. You tip your hand by putting "the moral status of unborn life" first. Abortion rights proponents don't pretend to be neutral - but you pretend that it's "neutral" to care more about the rights of the unborn than the rights of women.
We could argue all day about whether fetuses are people. Antiabortion zealots aren't actually certain whether WOMEN are people.
7
Mr. Douthat's history of abortion in the United States is incomplete.
At the time of the adoption of the US Constitution abortion was not illegal. The earliest anti-abortion law was enacted in the United States in Connecticut in 1821. It has been estimated that 20-25% of pregnancies in America in the mid-1800's ended in abortion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#Rise_of_anti-abortion_legislation
The other missing piece of history is that "no man has ever needed or had an abortion." Why should men have the right to make laws to restrict a woman's choices?
10
@JMT
Douthat clearly should not attempt to make abortion-related arguments on any grounds related to "neutrality." It's laughable, and he must know it. It's simply incoherent.
1
Any bill to restrict abortion rights should establish the right of the mother to obtain genetic testing to prove paternity and establish the obligation of the biological father to support the child. The disproportionate male support of abortion would evaporate... all those male legislators would think twice about the mistresses and their own behavior..and votes
12
@John Lee
It'll never happen in reality, but I'm sure you're right - it would put an absolute end to the basic anti-abortion male mindset of "Abortion is so wrong and so immoral and I'm a holy person who 'values life'… but when my girlfriend/daughter/mistress needs an abortion, that's different."
What you're talking about used to be called a shotgun wedding.
Of course, after the wedding, the bride often lived in misery with an abusive, sometimes murderous husband.
And the many kids the happy couple had suffered the consequences too.
Birth control and abortion -- the great levelers.
@B.Not enough - we need to have the male prove
Thomas gets zero credit for introducing eugenics into the abortion debate because it is irrelevant to the present.
Decisions by parents to test for Downs and other lifelong conditions are not driven by the medical industry (in cabal with a eugenics secret society) but by parents themselves. It is patronizing to suggest otherwise.
As for the broader idea that abortion is eugenics in disguise, that has no more legitimacy than the general idea of eugenics has in biology and anthropology today. It’s interesting for an intellectual historian but irrelevant today.
Reproductive freedom is about just that – reproductive freedom.
12
This ode to history, theoretical arguments and Clarence Thomas ignore one crucial point. Current debate is really an economic one. Women of means, even moderate means with a credit card, can get reproductive care or an abortion. It might be inconvenient and/or expensive, but until US laws prevent women to travel women will pay to get what they need. If they have enough money. So the reproductive care or abortion debate is really about making services locally available to women without money to travel. This is why the organization Planned Parenthood comes to the forefront of this debate. While their excellent services are available to all women, they are a crucial resource for poor women, including teenagers and students. Of course this is a fundamental argument about individual rights. Let's not further mislead the discussion of individual rights with the societal issue of eugenics. Also, since women of means will always find a way, does Clarence Thomas believe in some kind of reverse eugenics where the poor must be fruitful and multiply?
9
There a few angels dancing on a head of a pin here as Mr. Douthat attempts to make sense of Thomas' purported thinking on abortions.
There's little difference among the victims of conservative thought, whether it's children forced to have babies doctors in jail, or those who lose health care and access to food and education. Thomas' philosophy is all about control, not life affirming at all. Looking at the larger picture, until republican policies about the less advantaged change, no republican has the right to speak of what's pro life and what isn't.
13
Perhaps it would be equally enlightening to divide Conservative reproductive policy into three historical phases:
Phase 1: Men get what they want.
Phase 2: Men get what they want.
Phase 3: Men get what they want.
22
At one point your author writes, "None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal." There are many theories and beliefs about the benefits or drawbacks of allowing free access to abortion. But whether the government should legalize it is something else.
The main point I would think is whether we consider an embryo a human being, and if so at what stage of development does the embryo become a child. Christian doctrine asserts that life begins at conception; not all people will agree with this and not all religions accept this idea. If a large majority do not consider life to start at conception and do not consider abortion to be an act of murder---should we give in to the minority that insists that abortion from conception is the same as killing a grown human? How early in its development would we call it a human? Should we wait until birth or viability outside the womb for giving it the status of a human?
3
"Christian doctrine asserts that life begins at conception" -- Actually, only *some* versions of Christian doctrine assert this. There are plenty of Christian denominations that don't.
4
Today's efforts to protect access to abortion has to do with one issue: The right of women to control their own bodies and their medical care.
The woman who chooses to end a pregnancy is not influenced by political, societal or racial pressures. Hers is a unique personal choice and therefore should be hers alone.
The idea that women and in particular, women of color are or can be swayed by political statements is an insult.
Excepting of course those female members of certain religious and political groups who seem totally willing to accede to the demands of their male leaders.
Those who have such clear visions of why women should be forced to endure an unwanted pregnancy should follow the old adage "Walk a mile in my shoes." People, especially men, who opine from a comfortable seat in a comfortable home with a full refrigerator, money in the bank and health insurance know not of what they speak.
23
"In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business — and the disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates is shaped by that reality and others, not just by free choice."
In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the healthcare business - providing women with reproductive health care, including birth control. The disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates is most likely shaped by lack of access to healthcare. I have yet to meet a woman who gets pregnant in order to have an abortion.
If you and Clarence Thomas are really interested in reducing the number of abortions, you might want to start by advocating for the Roman Catholic Church to change its stance on birth control.
40
I am tired of columnists continually following Donald Trump, Republicans in general, and far right conservatives et al constantly explaining to the masses what they "really mean" and how conservatives are so misunderstood these days.
Perhaps, Mr. Douthat, they are able to express their own beliefs and there is no reason for you to rush recast their "true" meanings into something more palatable to the "masses".
20
Leave it to a Republican conservative writer to make up the outrageous claim that liberal technocracy still has a “solve poverty by cutting birthrates” bias without producing one scintilla of evidence or research.
But why should that be a surprise? After all Republican conservatives actually believe and continue to claim that tax cuts pay for themselves.
28
What is tragic in this essay is that the same men who are anti abortion also refuse to give women adequate healthcare. Death rates among women who give birth are higher in the US than in any western country. Planned Parenthood provides the healthcare that the system denies women. It is the ultimate brutality to force a woman to have an unwanted child. The male dominated legislatures continue their oppression. Clarence Thomas is not a man to respect in this argument - even the Pope recognizes the need for abortion.
26
Human beings are proficient at finding facts that fit their biases and discounting all others. I have known numerous women who have had abortions and the decision was difficult for each. The overarching principle in each case was “am I in a position to raise a child, or will I be in the near future?” With very little in the way of a social safety net in the US, it is difficult to argue with their conclusions. Eugenics did not come within screaming distance of the decision making process of these women. I am aware that anecdotal evidence is not particularly strong. This however has been my experience and the experience of those I know.
20
By all means travel down any historical path you please. Skeptically muse on the darker aspects of birth control. However, the issue here today is Roe v Wade. Roe is based on a woman’s right to privacy in choosing whether she carries a fetus to term, gives birth and assumes the responsibility of raising the child. That’s the real historical reference. Overturning Roe overturns women’s autonomy and hands our fates back to a male dominated society. No thanks.
32
Mr Ross is struggling again to logically square the moral circle of his convictions. In the process, he recalls into play old and long defunct specters of eugenics and social engineering while using justice Thomas' off-the-wall arguments as an "I'm not that extreme" counterpoint.
On substance: the right of women to choose how they deal with their bodies is a RIGHT, not an option. As such, it cannot be circumscribed or mitigated by what perceived general consequences it might bring when exercised. If black women are more likely to have an abortion than white women (if this is actually the case), why would this be an argument against their right to do so? Should we now start factoring in the increased birthrate of black women to make a quantitative determination of whether indeed access to abortion would end up reducing black population, and therefore restrict reproductive rights to "protect" us from second-hand eugenics? This becomes quickly absurd!
Please focus on the constitutional and ethical merits of the issue and leave justice Thomas' deliberately contrarian and provocative arguments to their deserved oblivion.
25
There is a lot of theoretical discussion here - that's fine, but let's stick with one clear fact for a moment. Women have had abortions since women have had pregnancies. If we outlaw abortion, abortions will still be done - but they will be dangerous. As a nurse of a certain age, I have been at the bedsides of women dying from septic abortions. I never want to see that again!
1027
@B Lundgren
The argument is silly. If we outlaw guns, people will still get guns. Does that mean anyone should be able to buy a gun? There is such a thing as justice. To allow abortion up until the moment of delivery is horrifying to most of us, but I guess not all of us.
3
@B Lundgren
The anti abortion crowd don't care a bit about that. I'm sure they feel the punishment of death fits the crime of abortion.
But let's take it one necessary step further. It's pretty simple to avoid abortion with adequate and inexpensive contraception. It's not 100% foolproof but it goes a long way. There is contraception implants that last 5 years.
So, why do anti abortion people fight against contraception too?
They go for abstinence. Absurd.
It didn't work for Adam and Eve so why should it work for anyone else?
Wealthy will still get abortions so that sounds like it's a class issue not a racial issue.
It's not eugenics. It's anti sex. No more no less.
Control of OTHER people.
84
@B Lundgren - Yes, B, we've also had murders since Cain beat Abel to death. We outlaw murderers, don't we?
There's a cure for "septic abortions." Don't have one. Choose life.
4
Why is it that pro choice people get so angry when there are good people who show those who are contemplating abortions that they do have an alternative choice to aborting their unborn babies. Yesterday when a large group of us stood quietly in prayer vigil outside planned parenthood there were two separate incidents of individuals furious that we were out giving pregnant women a choice to have their babies.
One young man shouted expletives and was wild we would even think of helping desperate pregnant women to choose keeping their babies. Another women walked up and down the sidewalk carrying a coat hanger. I have often wondered why these people get so angry when we want to help these mothers and not hurt them.
Planned parenthood has been very good in getting out the message that abortions are safe and legal. They have blindly convinced these women that they have their best interests at heart. False. This is where they make the bulk of their money. They rarely offer women an alternative to abortion because it is their cash cow. They perform more abortions than any other organization in the country. Over 300,000 to be exact are done each year to many frightened and confused women. I would not say this is in any way a rare number of aborted babies. After they have the abortion, they are on their own and must fend for themselves.
Why are pro life people criticized for displaying compassion and concern. We do not coerce we help women. Abortion kills.
5
Many groups like yours do not stand quietly, they shout at women entering Planned Parenthood, call them names, accuse them of murder, display graphic signs and various other intimidation tactics. Many of those women may be there for reasons other than abortion, but that doesn’t matter to those screaming hateful things. This is an issue of the right to make medical decisions and privacy, women have the right to medical privacy and making their own decisions about medical issues. You do not have the right to make those decisions for another person. You should not be able to mislead women and give false or incomplete information either, as many of the so-called clinics that anti-choice groups sponsor, staffing them with people who have absolutely no medical knowledge or credentials. No one is forcing you to choose to have an abortion, but leave that decision to each individual.
30
@KMW
I would agree with you, if this was completely true. Unfortunately there are many sides to every coin. Every coin! There are well-meaning folks in pro-life such as you and equally uninformed as those willing to kill healthcare workers in the name of pro-life! Isn't that ironic?
Given the pros and cons on both sides of the argument, this rests on privacy and personal freedom, appropriately (as well argued in one of the comments) curtailed in Roe vs. Wade.
Why is it your business what I do with my body? Hospitals are required by law to tell all options and let the individual and her doctor choose what they want to do. Nobody does this blindly in a vacuum. And if they do, banning abortion is arguably the worst thing you can do for the kid, if delivered.
6
@KMW You may be well-intentioned, but the law of the land, Roe v. Wade, was established to protect the privacy of women making a tough decision. Putting yourself in the face of women entering an abortion clinic is violating that privacy. I have no quarrel with you advancing your anti-abortion opinion, but please do it in a less intrusive way.
Should government dictate that any person must donate an organ of their body (while in their body) for use by an undeveloped, thus-far-nonviable mass of tissue that might develop into an independent being, which the "host body" will then have lifelong obligations to?
Should Big Government dictate to a fully formed, conscious, functioning person that their inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is now null and void? And is so due to government's "taking" of their body to service a minute, undeveloped, foreign mass of tissue that might grow if it could occupy their body?
Whatever Margaret Sanger did or did not think is of zero consequence to me in this matter. No one, male or female, rich or poor, should have their human dignity and inalienable right to their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness stripped from them at anyone else's whim.
I'm no more pro-abortion than I am pro-tonsillectomy. Nor less so. If based on one's own values, circumstances, and considerations for their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, someone needs a tonsillectomy, or a root canal, or to terminate an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy, government should never, ever be involved in that decision.
900
@Betsy
Very well said Betsy-
I am a practicing Catholic, I would like Christians and other faith practices to offer help to women facing this decision
BUT
Its not my body and it is not right to force people to bend to my will.
I will worry about the beam in my own eye for now.
40
@Betsy
No, but governments, and Liberal Socialist governments usually, dictate you MUST have an abortion.
The tendency of left wing governments is to think it can organize societies and do so by killing people. Humanae Vitae foretold we'd end up right where we're at.
Liberals say it's okay to kill the most helpless, unborn babies and the aged, but it's not okay to execute a serial murderer, because that would mean we're inhumane.
Orwell is right now saying, "I told you so."
1
@Betsy Exactly. We would never have a law mandating that a mother give up a kidney to her child, even if the child needed it to survive.
29
I have known couples who have aborted fetuses upon learning through testing that the resulting baby would have had Down’s syndrome. I happen to be white, as were these married couples. Is this kind of decision, made possible by testing not available to poorer pregnant women, an unintended way for more affluent women/couples to ensure that their racial and economic group has a stronger genetic future?
3
@Franco51 No, it is a reason to extend health care, including such testing, to everyone.
5
@Edmub
Your response, regardless of whether one agrees with it, as I do, has almost nothing to do with my question.
How about this? Perhaps the couple didn’t believe they had the ability, aside from their white privilege, to raise a child with life long needs for care.
1
Roe does not turn on the moral status of the unborn, nor can it, nor will it. It turns on privacy. That abortion is no one’s business but a woman and her doctor. A case could be made that the sperm donor has some kind of right to know, but since the entire burden of pregnancy and birth are upon the woman, that would not stand.
And no, it is not an extension of eugenic arguments. Because eugenics was forced, abortion is chosen.
Now, there can and should be arguments made that forced pregnancy is a form of slavery. If Thomas agrees with the recent laws made in Alabama or Georgia, he would be the first black legal scholar advocating slavery that I know of. And so we should start talking about legal slavery, something that is explicitly unconstitutional. At present, no law can force a woman to remain pregnant and give birth. That’s slavery.
The eugenics arguments are not even logical, but they do attract people who like to advance conservative domination. And make no mistake, conservative domination is the game right now-which should have every freedom loving American up in arms!
The question you should be asking in the Age of Trump is whether or not you are more free today than you were four years ago. Economics can change on a dime, but when you give up freedom, you won’t get it back. And I’m not just talking about the wall to keep you in.
502
@Jude
I agree with much of what you say, though you are incorrect on the question of whether existing laws force women to carry a fetus. In the United States, they do, and this was not changed by Roe or its subsequent revision in Casey. While true that Roe was based on right to privacy considerations (as well as a woman’s health/life), this right was not determined to be absolute, being superseded in the last trimester by other considerations.
6
@Jude Thank you for clarifying this as I was wanting to say the same thing about the basis of the decision resting upon privacy.
I do not understand why people on all sides must refer to the Roe v. Wade decision as flawed. Yes, there may have been a stronger Constitutional hook if the decision was based upon the XIII or XIV Amendments, but the beauty of the decision in a pluralistic society with conflicting values and judgments is sublime.
Essentially no restrictions during the first term, some during the second and stricter restrictions during the third. It is a sliding scale where the balance of rights gradually shifts from the woman to the state's concern to protect the developing life over time. It is a grand compromise that pleases no one completely but preserves women's absolute dominion over their bodies early on and raises the bar as the pregnancy proceeds.
As far as the author's suggestion that to “solve poverty by cutting birthrates” is racist, I am at a loss. That is what smart families do regardless of race. Don't have children that one cannot afford. Don't sentence a child to poverty and struggle. The parents may have been irresponsible in creating the pregnancy (if that was the cause), but it would be the child that would pay the highest price for their actions and to force people to remain poor by forcing them to have children is the racist act. I agree with the comment that forcing someone to carry a fetus to term is tantamount to slavery.
81
@Skeptical Observer
Existing laws regulating third trimester abortions do not force a woman to carry a viable fetus. After viability, pregnancies are routinely ended early by inducing labor and by scheduled c-section.
5
I am married with 2 children and work part-time to ensure that our children can attend at least medium quality public schools. I spend my evenings helping with homework and doing chores, and average 6 1/2 hours of sleep a night. We have never been to Disney World, and likely will never be able to afford such a vacation. Once a year, our family takes a 1 week vacation to visit relatives who live 5 hours away. My husband works at a job which he likes but which provides only a modest health plan. I recently found out that my birth control (previously very reliable) has failed, and I am pregnant. The ultrasound and testing show the baby to have significant abnormalities which are likely fatal, but if not, they will result in lifelong catastrophic disabilities. If I continue the pregnancy, I will have to quit my job to care for this child full-time, and we will likely have to move to an area with lesser schools. Our modest savings for our children’s higher education will vanish, as will any hope of our own retirement. No one will help with the crippling expenses sure to be incurred to care for this child. Nor will we have resources for respite care or the specialized child care required any time my husband and I leave the house at the same time. I feel that continuing this pregnancy will come at the expense of our current children, my health, our economic future and (I understand from the statistics) possibly our marriage. Why should I be FORCED to continue this pregnancy?
1552
My parents explained to me that I am an only child because they didn’t have the means to care properly for more children. I learned this as a moral precept. Birth control is the preferable alternative, but if abortion is necessary, it is a moral choice. Don’t have a child that you can’t raise properly.
222
@Real Mom
My heart goes out to you, and as a mother I support your decision to do what is best for your family. I know that millions of other women support you, too. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
311
@Real Mom I am so sorry for the circumstances that you face, and their resulting choices. Your story reflects the far-ranging real-world implications of these policy debates.
162
Why do republicans, who support smaller government, want to invest their laws and energies in the uterii of women, the bedrooms of lovers, and the rights of a mass of cells inside a woman, (the fetus)? Their concern for people might best be expressed by programs to help the disabled, the poor (mother and child, included) and strengthen our educational system, so that we have a literate populace, independent and educated enough to make good choices. With an educated populace comes the need for open and available birth control policies for all. Our literacy rate is below many Western nations, and our tendency toward becoming a theocracy, as well as already being an oligarchy, is frightening. Let's worry less about what an individual does with his/her body, and what two consenting adults do, and more on making our country a better place.
437
@Gloria Utopia
Republicans do not support smaller government. They support different government. They want the parts they don’t like to be smaller. But, being control freaks, they want the parts they do like to be larger - much larger. It takes a lot of bureaucrats to run a police state.
31
@Gloria Utopia
Exactly. Thank you.
12
@Gloria Utopia
“Why do republicans”... simple, clearly the republicans have no moral or ethical or legal scruples, they simply want the “winning”, Roe is a perfect divide and conquer crowbar for them. You think they care about literacy or consent, just take a look at the way Mitch and his pals shield our misogynist president.
13
"In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business — and the disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates is shaped by that reality and others, not just by free choice." Planned Parenthood is in the healthcare business. Abortion is one of the services it provides, and accounts for about one third of those services. To state that Planned Parenthood is "in the abortion business, not the adoption business "is purposely meant to mislead, and meant to exclude the other abundant healthcare services it provides.
You go on to state: "In practice the medical system strongly encourages abortion in response to disability...." There is compassion in recommending a pregnancy termination when a baby will be born with a congenital disorder that will doom him or her to a life of suffering and pain.
In a 2018 Gallup poll, the percentage of those who consider themselves "pro-life" are males, and they dominate state legislatures, especially in Red States. Surprise! Women don't get to make the state laws governing their right to autonomy over their own bodies.
Abortion is not a moral issue. It is a rights issue, and whose rights outweigh those of another, the mother's or the fetus's. That is how the argument should be couched. Would you want your rights usurped Mr. Ross? Would you like no right to self-determination when it comes to medical decisions?
Roe vs Wade gave women the right to choose. Now they are unjustly being told to give up that right.
979
@Diana
Oh my.
"...That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life." Mr. Douthat
"Abortion is not a moral issue. " Commentator Diana disagrees.
Please forgive me my abstractions.
The word "is" in the determination of just how discourse should proceed gets a bit tricky.
Poor Bill Clinton took a lot of flack for asking questions about the meaning of the word "is".
Does the word is mean that there is an "ontology of issues"?
Mr. Douthat, as a good conservative Catholic uses, the expression "turns on" a surrogate for the word "is'. For him the "is-ness" of issues is rooted in ontology, "natural law", i.e. what "really is.
In my mind the determination of what should be discussed and the means by which issues should be discussed are not ontological matters they are epistemological matters.
In this sense, the ontological questions are relegated to the status of "assumptions".
Assumptions are perfectly fine, but they do not compel anyone else to agree with those who hold them.
19
@Meta1
Perhaps I should have stated: Morality IMHO, is not a moral issue, it is a rights issue. The opinion is mine. I was not commenting on the "ontological question" of "being".
My personal truth comes from being a scientist and from being a woman and from being an escort at a clinic which performs pregnancy terminations. Being on the front lines of the abortion issue does bring knowledge. Having choice provides a woman self determination within her own set of values and beliefs. Whatever choice she makes should be hers and hers alone to make, IMHO. Those who call themselves "pro life" want that right taken away from women. They leave no room for debate.
125
@Diana, I'd just like to point out that according to their most recent annual report abortions services account for about 3.4% of the services they provide, not 1/3.
103
The current anti-abortion drive is motivated by religious beliefs and cannot stand against the First Amendment. That's all that needs to be said on the matter.
Roe v Wade instituted a system in which greater protections were given as the fetus became increasingly viable. Any effort to extend these protections to clumps of cells or even a fertilized egg (which is what the current anti-abortion movement wishes) is based on persons' religious beliefs and cannot be the law of the land. So much for Constitutional originalists... only when it suits them.
370
@Thomas, the First Amendment is silent on abortion, and so is the Constitution.
Also, every law is based on moral choices that we make collectively as a democracy. People WILL bring their beliefs about the greater meaning of life (ie religion) into the ballot box and that will shape our laws.
Trump is president, in large part, because voters wanted a Supreme Court that better reflected their moral, ethical and religious beliefs. And it's working.
7
@Jazz
Fine, then pass a Constitutional amendment, if you can. The Founders made slaves 3/5 persons, they did not grant personhood to fetuses and it is pretzel logic that tries to assert it today. Constitutionally speaking, embryos are not people and have no rights. However, born women do.
And as for the Supreme Court, we have a court that decides for corporations as people (another great stretch) and routinely favors corporate rights over real people. I don't think you would find that people wanted this, nor that it conforms to any morality other than what is implicit in American capitalism run amok.
73
@Jazz
"Trump is president, in large part, because voters wanted a Supreme Court that better reflected their moral, ethical and religious beliefs.".....not so fast, Trump is neither moral, ethical nor religious. While I will admit that some supported him on a belief that he would appoint conservative judges, and he has, I believe that there is much evidence to say that much of his support came from voters who wanted "to shake Washington up". However, it is true that Republicans in Congress have made the Faustian bargain to ignore Trump's amoral, unethical and anti-Constitutional actions in order to gain a more conservative federal judiciary.
I do agree that for many Americans, religious beliefs do affect how they vote, particularly on abortion and the death penalty. However, there are many truly religious individuals who find themselves on opposing sides of each of these questions. The linking of support for abortion to a modern day eugenics movement is an argument that does not hold any water. While I do not agree with Justice Thomas' opinion in this case, I will accept that he came to it based on his interpretation of the Constitution. Fortunately, his view was not the majority opinion on the Supreme Court. Trump's anti-abortion position is merely a self-serving political tool and does not reflect any deep-seated belief on his part. Indeed, his only deep-seated belief is support for whatever makes him money.
47
What an utterly strange article Mr. Douthat penned again, starting with forced abortions based on eugenics, but coming to the conclusion t
"None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal. That question still turns on the moral status of unborn life, the requirements of female equality."
While even vast Catholic majority countries in the advanced world have legitimized abortions - the latest being Ireland -, female equality is in no way based on the "moral status" of unborn life.
16
One very good thing about these columns by Ross Douthat is that if abortion is outlawed many people he generally considers friends, women in particular, will, if they remain friends, know to keep huge secrets from him. If an underground is formed, if there is a major crisis faced they will know better than to trust him with any information. His sense of morality could drive him to inform on them, reveal to authorities places where women's freedom and dignity and medical care are paramount.
10
@Robert Roth
Robert! Argumentum non sequitur!
The DNA “invention” is fairly recent. Today we know that we are pretty well all the same. Access to birth control and women’s reproductive choice is now mainly a social and economic issue that places family planning on the shoulders of the woman herself.
As it should be. Raising a family is the most important job in the world.
7
This is an interesting commentary on the historical shifts in the discourse of what has become essentially abortion choice advocacy as a slice of women's rights advocacy (where power to control one's own body is naturally primary). It is right to point out the lopsided socioeconomic distribution of abortions, but strange to so mildly chide Justice Thomas's critics over their reflexive complaint. Honestly, I'd rather read further arguments for pro-family policies of the sort that Ross schemed up with Reihan so long ago, because those were the sorts of policies that could in theory address the imbalanced distribution of aborted pregnancies.
1
Yes, I remember in the 1980s coming in on a conversation among friends about housing projects and black teenagers having babies out of wedlock, and asking whether it wouldn't be better for poor teenaged girls to use birth control and finish school. The reaction from my friends was swift and fierce: Birth control would be eugenics.
I certainly was puzzled, in that it seemed to me that, given the single-mother phenomenon and exploding crime rate, what was happening in that segment of the black community was, if anything, a sort of reverse eugenics.
And certainly abortion is a remedy to which women of all social classes and colors have for thousands of years been availing themselves. It is a good, practical thing, not a bad, immoral thing. It is certainly not eugenics.
22
@B.
According to Pew Research data released in April 2018, 47% of black mothers are raising their children without a father, compared to 23% of Hispanic mothers, 13% of white mothers, and 7% of Asian mothers.
There are many reasons for this; but one that stands out is the racial disparity in incarceration. At the low end, Asians make up only 1.5% of the prison population.
Again according to Pew Research, blacks make up 12% of the population but 33% of the prison population; Hispanics make up 16% of the population but 23% of the prison population; and whites make up 64% of the population but 30% of the prison population.
It might be interesting to note that in poorer southern states the disproportion between black and white prisoners is much less because a larger percentage of the white population in those states is in prison.
It seems to me absurd and repugnant to assert that aborting black infants is a remedy for single motherhood in the black community. Let's address racism in law enforcement, and the bad schools and lack of employment opportunities in black communities instead.
Also, the romanticization of criminal culture in the black community needs to be addressed. It goes hand-in-hand with the lack of jobs and the "cool" cachet of drug-dealing as a remedy for unemployment.
Reducing the population of a minority you find problematic might seem reasonable and acceptable to you, but maybe not to them. Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet" comes to mind.
Eugenics programs grant "superior" people the right to determine who is "inferior" and the right to reduce that population, usually through birth control.
Abortion laws allow individuals to decide for *themselves* whether they want to carry a pregnancy to term.
That is a big difference: self determination versus a societal judgement of fitness.
Our policies can have unintended consequences. Drug policies, as well as a push to privatize, can shift social spending from welfare to prisons. Poverty housing funding, food stamp funding, education funding, daycare funding, job hours, wages can push people who are poorer to determine that they cannot afford children. That is not eugenics. That is bad, and heartless social policy.
If as Thomas asserts, the unintended consequence of abortion is eugenic, I have to thoughts. First, Thomas thinks he is the "superior" sort of judge who identifies who he feels is useless or lesser; and second, it can be fixed by social policy which values the child over the fetus.
17
Why are there no national statistics about women who have abortions and why they have them? Age, marital status, previous children, income, etc. It infuriates me that there is so much policy debate, and so much at stake, but the debate is based on antecedents, not statistics.
8
Let me answer this for you: I had a legal abortion in 1976. In a NY hospital, by my own doctor. Nobody asked me any of those questions. It was my body, my choice and it was nobody's business why I decided to have this abortion. And that is how it should be.
26
We need a more thoughtful discussion internationally about baby-making. Earth’s varying capacity, the number of people who can be alive at one time without seriously degrading the ecosystem (and maybe collapsing it), is about 10 billion per the UN. We’ll hit that number around mid-century. Then what? As is too often the case in red-blue “discussions” we’re arguing about the wrong topic when we only focus on abortion.
12
The Constitution was written by people who held ideas about women and African Americans that most now agree are reprehensible, yet Thomas and Douthat would never argue that its white-men-only tenets taint American democracy forever. The idea is absurd. Furthermore, the anti choice fervor we see today is only about as old as the industrial revolution and it comes from other movements based on fear of women’s new freedom and the desire to keep them subjugated. The abortion-is-murder concept came out of movements that even the justice and the columnist would have to admit were mired in horrible prejudices and desire to treat women as chattel. In fact, Douthat’s argument renders pretty much all political positions ever held inherently contaminated.
45
@Jon Silberg, Thank you for pointing out the idiocy of Thomas and others that think the Constitution is not a living document. Our Founders were imperfect men, trying to create a democracy that could last, and I respect them for that. We must continue to create a more perfect union, allowing women the rights that land-owning white men always had.
1
Applying past reasoning to present day issues is a conservative's mainstay. To keep a patriarchal outlook modern context has to be set aside. If this truly is a moral problem when abortion numbers are declining and could even more so with easy access to effective birth control. Traditionalists continue to fight this tooth and nail.
There is also the reality that miscarriages and stillbirths far outnumber elected abortions. Justice should not apply to a natural phenomenon. The answer is using knowledge so either situation is avoided. It is scientific intervention that has brought more reproductive control to the sexes, not stale beliefs. They make the situation worse.
Nowhere in Mr. Douthat's article does he give any assessment what fertile males' role should be. This is in the face that a sperm producer is always ready to impregnate while the female is much less frequently able to cause a pregnancy to begin. Society still does not impose significant responsibility on men to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Those who are anti abortion are silent when it comes to what men must do to be a partner in sexual intercourse.
It is ironic that Clarence Thomas's thoughts are the takeoff for Douthat's article given that he is not a poster boy(man) for sexual morality.
38
As Trump’s legitimacy plummets, the right clings with increasing desperation to the single-issue voters who are somehow able to sustain the cognitive dissonance needed to keep supporting a man who in every other way is despicable but for his own cynical and nominal stance on abortion.
It is, along with guns, racism and xenophobia, one of the few ways the upper 0.1 percent can build a motley consortium that votes against their interests in every other way but one.
The mission-from-God ferocity of this Southern surge in abortion laws lacks any circumspection, it is so absolute, it does not seem real. And I don’t believe it is. It is a cover, to give folks a justification to vote for Trump precisely for his racism, misogyny and bigotry. “Oh, Trump, he does have some baggage, but who doesn’t, but I just have to vote for him anyway, because, you know, he is pro-life.” Pull that veil off, and you’ll find good old fashioned racism and misogyny just like the days when abortion was illegal.
Just like Trump’s escalating irrationality — daring for an impeachment fight, these provocative abortion laws aim to elicit an uncomfortable over-reaction from the left.
But the moderate suburban soccer moms will want their daughters to have the option of safe, and early, access to abortion, as a safety net, even as they send them off to college on the pill. Watch young women’s enrollment in the colleges of these anti-abortion states drop like a stone.
49
@Toms Quill
Do I hear an "Amen?"
Clarence Thomas and other so called “pro-life” judges and elected officials simply favor mass poverty in the understanding that early, frequent and unplanned pregnancy keeps families weak and without adequate financial resources. Poor people burdened by a daily struggle to care for their families will never threaten privileged lackeys like Thomas and the elites he so faithfully serves.
45
@Mark Conway
Amen, Clarence was placed on the Supreme Court to do nothing but be an obstructionist. Yes he is the son of a sharecropper like so many other people are. However instead of doing his job by thinking ,he is puffing out hot air and being not a supporter for democracy for everyone but a social/class segregationist
Racism has a well connected infrastructure to ensure minorities except a few get out of the dire projects. Ben Carson whose ignorance is doing a great job of running HUD by ignorance into the ground.
Men especially white political men who have cut funding for family support programs in the country have no Right to open there mouths about what women can and can not do with there bodies.
Nazi Germany came to the states to learn about Ms Singers beliefs and we all know how they carried out the extermination plan in Europe.
America has racist policies to provide the cover of legitimacy but the same murdeous population control is being enacted . The sight of the anti Abortion movement are the same people who were smiling at the Jim Crow lynchings.
Today Planned Parenthood is not a tool of white racism but an instrument to support the well being of women and families.women who have no safety net men are not even in the picture because we don’t even enforce child support across the board except for poor men.
If you don’t understand then you are a member of the elite white superiority it thrives on keeping minorities, disabled on the lowest rungs.
As a Hispanic I am saddened by the preponderance of Planned Parenthood facilities in our neighborhoods of color. The solution for hispanic and black poverty and family dysfunction should NOT be abortion and the lowering of our numbers, but solutions that help us bring our beautiful brown and black babies into the world. I do feel that the eugenic past of corporate abortion is built into today's Planned Parenthood.
5
@Jazz Planned parenthood offers birth control, std screenings and other services for reproductive, sexual and gynaecological health. The predominance in your neighbourhood of planned parenthood speaks to the need of many low income women who do not have health coverage to access these services. Would you rather the women of your community suffer untreated pelvic infections, stds, endometriosis, and other frequent gynaecological problems that can lead to a lifetime of pain and infertility l? Would you deny them the right to practise birth control and the agency of choosing when to start a family? I hope not.
77
@Jazz Sad that that's the way you see Planned Parenthood, or any other clinic helping women determining their own destinies. These clinics are
not primarily for abortion, but for birth control, which
then helps women control their own lives and not be
subjected to the whims of biology or sex. These women, able to use birth control facilities, can direct their own lives, be financially independent, and could
even support children when spouse or partner are no
longer able to partner in child care and financial
responsibility. Abortion should not be the first objective of any responsible woman, but is a choice
made with difficulty and necessity. Try and rethink the importance, for your community, of bringing wanted and loved babies into the world, not merely
the onerous effects of coupling.
34
@Jazz And, on further reflection, all these babies you want brought into the world, what is the thought about making them into productive citizens? Is the thought, just to bring babies into the world? That's seems to be the only thought of the anti-abortionists. No real thoughtful consideration of what happens after birth!
That's what missing from this whole discussion.
11
During the Civil War, a soldier may steal the boots or a coat of a fallen soldier because he had none, and that may seem to us to be a brutal symbol of war. But how brutal if he had the ability to steal the man's heart, liver, kidney or lung and replace his own worn out organs, how brutal would that be in an imaginary world where that would be possible. Oh, wait, it is now possible. Equating the stealing of boots to Heart Transplant today would seem to be "reductio ad absurdum". To ignore advances is medical technology while discussion of 21st Century ethics about health issues and Ostriches have a common behavior.
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Douthat and Thomas would be more convincing if they weren't doing what they always do: looking for another slightly zany way to try to post hoc justify their prior beliefs. It's not like they were pro-choice and then heard this argument about eugenics and changed their minds. Instead they know that they are losing the battle for public opinion and are looking to re-write history in order to try to confuse the public.
Abortion rights aren't discriminatory against the poor and minorities, the direct opposite is true. The arguments are so well worn so I won't bother to repeat them. But these folks will tell any lie to try to defend their views. Douthat likes to pretend to be anti-Trump, his commitment to warping the truth shows that he is instead profoundly Trumpian.
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The nexus between abortion and eugenics that Douthat presents here is not convincing and his concluding two paragraphs needlessly politicize the relevant issues. Eugenics was about sterilization, not abortion.
Advocates of the fetal heartbeat standard for banning abortion should contextualize this issue in relation to broader US public and foreign policy.
If the idea is to safeguard the sanctity of human life, why do so many opponents of Planned Parenthood support policies that endanger human life, including the heedless right to bear arms, environmental racism, climate change, militarism, urban poverty, lack of universal healthcare, the exorbitant cost of prescription drugs?
The closest thing we have to eugenics right now is Trump’s tax cuts and immigration policy: his “boy who cried wolf” drumbeat on behalf of a border wall to contain the imagined specter of a brown caravan winding its way to the US; and the Muslim ban.
It goes without saying that the current “immigration crisis” is a direct consequence of US foreign policy, whether the destabilization of inchoate socialist regimes in Central America or the Iraq War.
Let us think outside the box.
Reproductive rights belong to women.
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@Andrew Shin
"Eugenics was about sterilization, not abortion."
If the present administration's chronic habit (or, better said, policy) of misrepresenting facts is repugnant, then please don't join them in that practice. It only serves your argument until the truth comes out.
‘Nazi abortion law sharply distinguished between life that was worthy of life and “unworthy lives” (lebensunwertes Leben), forbidding abortion in the former but demanding it in the latter case. In 1935, the Nazis introduced a “eugenic justification” for abortion into the criminal code, and in 1943 they supplemented §218 with a clause demanding the death penalty for abortion “in cases where the vitality (Lebenskraft) of the German people is threatened” (Koonz 1986).’ – Shaping Abortion Discourse, by Myra Marx Ferree, William Anthony Gamson, Dieter Rucht, Jürgen Gerhards, Cambridge University Press
@Andrew Shin Excellent response to this op-ed!
@Andrew Shin
"Eugenics was about sterilization, not abortion."
Profound historical insight.
Glad I read your note.
Excellent analysis which pulls together much history in a short bit of writing and offers a succinct analysis questioning the left's goals in supporting abortion rights.
Personally, I think a woman should have a right to choose her course of action in regard to pregnancy and that her race matters not.
I have never associated the above perspective with race in my own mind, even once.
I did not understand what Thomas was writing about a couple of weeks back and figured it was just some rantings of a progressively disabled mind.
I will have to think about this much more.
Thank you.
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@Michael Keep reading, keep thinking. Douthat's column is in a doubtful and slightly specious shorthand, and hides a bias in the way smart writers can hide bias. The historical argument is shaky, and the confusion of eugenics and racism is only one problem here.
@Michael
Questioning the left's goals? Seriously?
Let me lay this to rest--as a woman who, thankfully, never needed an abortion, my ardent desire to keep that right alive in our increasingly regressive society headed by religious extremists like Ross Douthat has absolutely nothing to do with eugenics whatsoever. Nothing.
I can just see people like Douthat sitting around saying, yeah, I'll get some people to buy into this idea.
Well, not me, because it's just wrong. The left has no secret, racist agenda.
All Douthat wants is more babies. More and more babies--whether or not women can take care of them. He's said it many times--we need more bodies, our birth rate is too low, our GDP can't continue to rise unless we either let more people in or have more babies. His preference for babies stems from his devout Catholicism, but it serves his purposes either way--more babies.
Being a devout Catholic, he's also required to believe that using birth control is wrong, so I guess if we subsidize birth control for women who can't afford it, women who may be 'part of a population we don't want to have too many of,' that's a sort of eugenics program perpetrated by the lefties also. Yeah, that'll be the next column.
The religious right just wants to impose their religious beliefs on a nation that was founded on the belief that nobody has the right to force religious beliefs on anyone.
I would ask Mr. Thomas if cells used for cloning are considered human beings too ; after all , they live and perhaps feel pain too . Ridiculous arguments the right to life concoct . It is all about controlling __non reproductive rights ; women making their decisions , since we are past the shaming part , they would have women regress to barefoot and pregnant at all times. Or perhaps the nefarious more babies more workers to pay the taxes they don't .This issue has been politicized from the very beginning ; if the concern is about life being sacred then they should all adopt all those orphaned and unwanted babies from countries such as the Sudan , Somalia , Syria , and where the U. S. has been active in destabilizing for profit and gain .
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Dear Ross,
For a little more perspective, it would have been helpful to talk about the history of abortion rights internationally. As is frequently the case, many of the most interesting and helpful ideas emanate from outside the U.S. Sweden, for example, has had legal abortion since 1939. There is no viable movement to overturn that right there. It is settled law. (Much like gun laws in Japan and other countries, which your colleague Nicholas Kristof examined recently). Unregulated, illegal abortion does not work and endangers women's lives in whatever country abortion is illegal. The preoccupation with the fetus--a very American preoccupation--is derived in the US almost exclusively from religious beliefs. Science is there only as needed to buttress the argument. Public policy, medicine and safety (of women) are simply excluded from the analysis. In some respects the US is a very, very backward country. When, if ever, will it begin to learn from the rest of the world. Neal Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas et al are thinkers only within the narrowest confines of American legal thought on the far right wing. In every other developed country their reactionary views would, as they should, be dismissed outright.
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@juan swift
Well stated. Thank you!
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I appreciate this article, and it is always refreshing to view the historical perspective. But there's on line of history this piece leaves out. That is the history of countless individual choices that were made before we legalized abortion in America. A few interesting questions to ask along that line:
What were the economic and racial divides among abortions before Roe v Wade?
How many women died because of illegal abortion?
What were the individual decisions that drove these abortions? Do they differ from decisions of today, and how?
How far into the past can we find evidence of abortions, and what can we learn from that?
Of course, answering these questions isn't easy. There is literature on this -- story telling of women who survived these illegal abortions. But the practice was underground, so there are few if any records.
By ignoring this line of history, Russ Douthat and Clarence Thomas tell a one-sided story. They're asking me to listen to that story... I wonder if they have listened to the stories of women who survived illegal abortions?
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@cud
Perhaps the use of historical events/themes/motives to justify a description of any political group's ethical basis is like using tea leaves to predict the future. Neither is sound, valid, reasonable or well informed.
It's like saying that the well-intended motives of slave owners was to overcome the sub-par abilities of slaves and afford them stable lives. Sounded good back then, but we actually advanced in our thinking beyond this, at best, ambiguous subjugation of a particular group.
Oh! You don't mean to subjugate women. Well we never would have guessed. Thanks for informing us.
We need to choose carefully from the reasonings offered by influential groups of the past, as many were far from "for the good of the people."
An important difference today is that no one is forcing anyone to have an abortion. The eugenics argument holds somewhat in re: the disabled, as a significant number of women may choose abortion with that foreknowledge. But race? I don't see it. Today's anti-abortion argument is largely religious.
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@Julie It's wronger than that. No one was forcing women to have abortions n the past, except for husbands, parents, and men responsible for unwanted pregnancies. There were no laws mandating abortions. Margaret Sanger didn't advocate them. Those who do not remember history are condemned to repr=eat it, at least in think pieces. Read with caution, study history.
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The author refers to the "population-panic age" as a thing from the past. Perhaps we are not as concerned with feeding the world as we were before but now we have global warming to be concerned with. It is inconceivable that a solution to global warming can be reached in the short term with the current rate of population growth. Simply put, more people means more carbon dioxide.
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@TH
... and more depletion of resources, and killing-off of the very ecosystems that make humanity possible.
Thank you for this.
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Mr. Douthat acknowledges in passing that eugenicists opposed abortion, then continues to draw a bright line connecting them. But Margaret Sanger, the supposed eugenicist, opposed abortion morally, so to be consistent, Mr. Douthat (and Justice Thomas) would have to argue that assisting underprivileged populations with access to contraception is eugenics. Moreover, Margaret Sanger was clear that her promotion of contraception (again, not abortion) was about the lives of individual women, not about their offspring, and definitely not about specific populations. Mr. Douthat is deliberately misleading to suggest otherwise.
And I don't know how many times it has to be said before conservatives stop their slander: Planned Parenthood clinics do much, much more than provide abortions. They are NOT in "the abortion business." He's right that they are not in the adoption business. They are in the women's health business.
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The two things are utter opposites.
The history of eugenics in the US is largely a history of forced sterilizations. Much of the movement took place while abortion was illegal, and several of its leaders were vocally against abortion as a means of accomplishing their ends. But tens of thousands of people, if not more, were forcibly sterilized to prevent them from making decisions about whether to have children.
Forced sterilizations took away people's choices over their own reproduction. They violated people's rights over their own bodies. So does forcing women to give birth against their will.
Choice is the opposite on both counts. Anti-choicers want to go back to a time when the "wrong" kinds of people--mostly women, and mostly poor--didn't have choices about their reproduction and didn't own their own bodies.
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Poverty pushes people to get abortions. Lack of resources encourages abortion in response to disability, and this lack of resources has little to do with the medical system. The availability of resources to raise a child, or another child, or a disabled child is ultimately due to decisions of those with the power to make or influence decisions. These decisions make and keep resources scarce for poor people.
The question of whether abortion should be illegal rests on the right of some of the population to impose its beliefs on those who do not share these beliefs. It is like prohibition or the illegality of marijuana in that bad results come from legislating a morality that is not generally accepted; it is much better to leave it legal and talk people out of it.
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I somewhat agree but society today has an obsession with the “moment” and rarely takes into consideration the total sum of the future based on the past.
Economics based on more government reliance rather than opportunity is a poor investment.
Investing in the needs to stimulate opportunities for any person is more vital than constantly repaving the same road or investing in a political party or politician that wants to protect on the basis of identity.
I was walking around Montclair NJ last night and for a town to be a progressive as they claim I was shaking my head of how many smaller store fronts are empty yet larger construction projects continue.
@MDCooks8
So, what are those "larger construction projects" for, exactly? There's got to be a reason, and if it's buildings, it's probably to house some businesses that have put the storefronts out of work. But, no worries, I'm sure they'll be all sorts of upscale boutiques and lunch spots to service the people working in those buildings very shortly.
If it's roads, then they're needed to service industry. We absolutely do not 'pave the same road over and over' in this country--our infrastructure is, frankly, terrible. If you're lucky enough to have funding for improved roads, good for you. BTW, road surfaces do wear out, so I'm not entirely correct about the 'over and over.' But, we don't repave for no reason. You are just wrong.
We should spend some money on infrastructure improvement in this country. That would create plenty of jobs and opportunity.
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@MDCooks8
Economics based on reliance on anyone, pubic or private, is a bad thing (except for those relied on, who have the opportunity to abuse and exploit and oppress). Economics based on opportunity has to make sure that the playing field is level enough for all to have some opportunity. The socialistic revenue sharing and player draft mechanisms of professional sports, and the powerful and uncorrupt referees, make sure that all have some opportunity while leaving dynasties such as the Yankees or Patriots, possible. These mechanisms are designed to keep the game healthy rather than keep the current winners winning.
For similar reasons, our economy needs similar mechanisms.
Douthat's history avoids the fallacy of Thomas's argument. The fallacy of Thomas' argument is Roe was not based on the struggles against racism or eugenics, but on the recognition of a right of medical privacy that has only gotten stronger over the years. It is completely hypocritical of Thomas to invoke those struggles, because he knows that there has never been evidence presented to the Supreme Court that banning abortion would reduce racism or prevent a new eugenics movement. As for Douthat, no twisted interpretation of history can create a justification for something which is simply not true.
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A contorted and finally unsuccessful effort to make Clarence Thomas' bizarre rationalization seem reasonable. "None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal" indeed. What tells us that abortion should be legal is that it's a medical procedure sometimes necessary to save a woman's life.
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i'm curious why liberals must have "instinctive" beliefs, and a "bias" in technological health care. i'm also curious why conservatives choose to opine on individual and personal health care decisions as if they represented an ideology, a programme, an agenda originating from above.
as for curing poverty and controlling population growth: i'm all ears. let's hear your answers. and let's hear them based on facts.
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If this country was serious about stopping abortions, states with current so called pro-life legislation, could have come up with numerous viable solutions that would have had a much more effective impact on reducing abortions.
States could have:
1) Imposed 25 years to life sentences for convictions of rape and sexual assault of adult women 2) Made a conviction of Incest a death penalty matter 3) Made a conviction of rape or sexual assault of a child under 15 a death penalty matter 4) Increased the number of free and low cost family planning clinics 5) Made birth control completely free for all women and men 6) Provided domestic violence programs with funding so that women can safely leave the men who repeadely rape and abuse them 7) Provided free childcare to women who want to enter the workforce so they don't have to be beholden to anyone for their financial security and don't have to barter sex for money. 8) Made it mandatory the father pay a child support bill from the moment of birth, and the health care bills of the woman from the moment of conception.
All of these actions could have been taken by so called pro-life states instead these states choose to curtail a woman's right to a legal and safe abortion, curtail women's reproductive rights, stymie women's economic rights and decided to make it harder for women to leave abusive partners. It has nothing to do with race. These states chose to regulate women and their uteruses instead of men and their penii.
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@Angel
I agree with almost all of what you said, excepting the death penalty. Jail penalties, but not death penalties. We have enough of these already.
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I have a real problem with men who will never be pregnant, and who lack a clear understanding of how a female body functions, explaining what abortion is or isn't, and determining whether women can/should have access to it.
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@Jeannie
That must be frustrating beyond measure. But arguments that deny others the right to opine on issues based on broad categories such as race, sex, age, occupation are not strong arguments.
I have read comments in threads (elsewhere) that state that civilians should not weigh in on matters of police abuse. “If you haven’t worn the uniform...” a spouse or relative usually begins his/her warm up just before declaring others’ opinions invalid per se.
More recently this same censoring impulse can be seen in accusations of cultural appropriation against artists (novelist, musician, playwright) or artisans (a chef, say). ‘You must not cook and serve x or write story y if you are not of a particular ethnicity’ it seems to go.
A final example, the NRA dismissing doctors groups’ views on gun issues with the arrogant and silencing demand that the doctors “stay in their lane,” — presumably tending to gun shot wounds.
I think a strong pro-choice argument can be made without attempts to dismiss others out of hand. (What of men who are prochoice? Should they be silenced?)
Meanwhile I find the posters that tackle the merits of Douthat's gloss on eugenics engaging. Some offer compelling counter arguments.
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@LMT
I hear you, LMT, but there is something to having an experience that does make it legitimate to say "you haven't worn the uniform." It's not dismissing out of hand, it's a way of pushing back. It does not prevent anyone from countering with something like, okay, person in the uniform, when you see a black person, do you automatically consider them to be a threat, if so why, and let's look at some real data, okay?
When men like Douthat start mumbling about the 'moral status of unborn life' he's not making a cogent argument, he's making a religious pronouncement--one in which women are absolutely being dismissed out of hand. He starts wandering into lefties and eugenics programs and ulterior motives to scrub populations--it's just so offensive to and dismissive of women that the only response it deserves is to be dismissed out of hand.
How about a topic like this: "slavery/white supremacy, let's discuss pros and cons." No, I'm not going to engage. We're done with that, and I am going to dismiss out of hand. Sorry if you think I'm not being open minded, but there are limits.
Douthat and his religious imperatives are against everything this nation stands for--namely, freedom from religion--so I'm not going to indulge his eugenics argument fantasy which he's just throwing out here as a smokescreen for his conservative religious agenda.
7
I did not (and still do not) believe that I was practicing eugenics when I terminated a wanted pregnancy three years ago for lethal skeletal dysplasia. I believed that I was sparing my son from slowly suffocating after birth because his heart and lungs were too small to support cardio-respiratory activity.
The blithe way that Ross refers to disability belies the range of complex conditions that babies are diagnosed with prenatally, which include brains that are missing, have holes or lack folds (so that the babies are constantly seizing and unable to swallow), are missing kidneys (which hinder lung development), have organs growing outside their body, or are missing half their heart, are among a few of the conditions that lead to short pain-filled lives that their parents wish to spare them from. Even Down Syndrome, which the media often treats as a minor intellectual disability but in fact has a large range of outcomes, is in many cases accompanied by serious heart and intestinal problems that make their condition incompatible with life.
This is NOT eugenics.
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Republicans would much rather women carry catastrophically malformed or even non-viable fetuses to term rather than allow women to abort them.
But given the GOP's refusal to countenance complete health insurance for all and the paying out of the many millions of dollars it would cost to take care of such babies, even in the short run, even for a few months or years, they would be returning us, for all intents and purposes, to the old days when the ancient Greeks left their unwanted offspring exposed on mountaintops, or when the Chinese turned theirs facedown into ash pits.
8
Douthat’s logic is barely any improvement (if you could call it that) on Clarence Thomas’. Maybe higher abortion rates among minorities and lower-income classes are because they have higher pregnancy rates to begin with, as well as more problems supporting a family? The facts speak for themselves: Yes, and yes.
Better access to birth control, health care, and economic support for these same groups of people seems like a good place to start. Once that little problem is solved, then let’s delve into the nuances of this column’s discussion.
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So who should make the decision? It all boils down to this one question. There is no perfect solution.
5
@HLR There is in fact a perfect solution to this one question: Simply mind your own business, and respect women's basis human right to their own personal lives, and their own family planning choices.
Our lives and our bodies, and decisions about wether or not we wish to carry a pregnancy to full term, belong to us, and are not anyone else's to be regulated or controlled by laws.
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@HLR
It definitely should NOT be a bunch of old white male legislators.
P.S. - I'm an old white man.
3
One highly important and relevant word that you've ignored (and omitted) in this argument is EDUCATION. To say abortion is a predominantly poor and minority concern -- without taking into account the ages of (girls) and women and their level of knowledge about how reproduction is achieved -- is irresponsible on both your and Clarence Thomas's parts. Check statistics on the ages of the girls who most frequently need abortions, their educational level, and then give us your addendum to this essay.
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@Alfred Yul
Interesting that you don't include the ages of boys and men, and their level of knowledge about how reproduction is achieved, in your EDUCATION argument.
Or do you think that females are the sole agents of their gestational status ?
1
@irene
I very much favor educating boys on DNA testing and enacting laws that automatically place them on the hook for the financial welfare of the child until adulthood--it will take all of five minutes for this whole issue to disappear like magic.
Only one of the three Abrahamic gods interpreters' hold that life begins at conception. And not even all of his sects believes he believes that. And at least on believes life begins *before* conception, while at least one believes in post-death confirmation.
Sweep all else away and this becomes, as Justice Stevens rightly pointed out some 30 years ago, a gross violation of the Establishment Clause with absolutely no foundation in science or law. Roe v Wade is a terribly flawed decision precisely because it pretended to find a "right" for women rather than finding a violation of the first amendment.
13
I keep looking for the logic here, whether from Thomas or the author.
Example: " In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business ..." Say what? Planned Parenthood is not and never was one of the over 3000 Adoption Agencies in the USA. They provide health services, not placements.
Example: "the present “reproductive rights” regime may effectively extend older eugenic efforts to reduce populations deemed unfit." Are the individual women who decide individually to have abortions are actually part of a massive Progressive conspiracy to achieve neo-eugenics? Do poor minority women choose it to reduce their collective population numbers? Or they individuals making tough personal choices? Like economists say, Micro vs Macro.
Eugenics advocates sought government control over individual reproduction. Today's Right to Life forces seek the same. Modern Progressives including every woman in my family are pro-choice because they deny the right of others to make reproductive decisions for them, just as almost all American men oppose government mandated mass vasectomies to control birth rates.
We need a skeptical view all right, but not just of Progressives.
22