Later, the Spirit to Scrooge: "Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child."
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At the beginning of the year I wrote about Nancy Pelosi making it very clear that poor children are draining the economy and that Planned Parenthood in low-income areas will help staunch the flow of government spending. Ruth Bader Ginsburg made similar comments a few weeks back. I've had conversations with friends in the past year where they've expressed the same sentiment: abortion is bad, but maybe it keeps people who would have a bad life from coming into the world.
So who has a bad life? Who drains the economy?
Eugenics is the practice of human breeding. Positive eugenics involves encouraging the supposedly healthy, wealthy, and bright to have children-- not too many, but just enough to push their genes into the next generation and still give their kids the best life possible. Negative eugenics is about preventing "undesirable" people from procreating; this is most horrifically exemplified with Margaret Sanger's "Negro Project" which forced sterilization on thousands of black women in the rural south. Sanger was a strong supporter of eugenics and believed her Planned Parenthood centers would encourage more and more poor black, disabled, mentally troubled people to have fewer and fewer children.
Have we come so far since then or has Sanger and the other early 20th century eugenicists dream of a "better" race of people started to take form?
Disabled children are often headed off at the OB/GYN or the geneticist's office. The amnio that will "help you decide before its too late" should there be something "wrong" and the IVF that ensures only a "good" egg implants is probably why, in some places, the number of Down Syndrome births has been halved. Is this a victory for the human race?
Poor children have people like the speaker of the house and supreme court justices against them. A friend of a friend recently had an abortion at her doctor's suggestion. She explained that although the couple was in their mid twenties, were married, and both held jobs the fact that they were on Medicaid showed they were not financially ready for children. Like the line from Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up," everyone encouraged them to wait for a "real" baby, one that would have all the material provisions needed to be successful. And so the couple aborted their first child.
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A better generation of people-- a smarter, healthier, whiter, wealthier, less expensive generation of people--- is that what would make things better? Is it possible that in supporting abortion we encourage the ideas of Margaret Sanger and the ideals of eugenicists to live on in the minds of other people who hate?
4 comments:
Wow, I don't even know where to start. Maybe I will let this sink in a little bit and then get my jaw off of the floor first. Thanks for writing about this.
Nicely done, Sarah. I think you do a great job of exposing the insidious racism, elitism, and classism near the heart of Western brands of democracy. Democratic ideals are so important, after all, that we're willing to kill people for them. This seems afar off when we think of the murderous rampage of American foreign policy in parts distant. But I like that you brought it home to the poor neighborhoods, the black neighborhoods, the mentally handicapped communities, and the like. The willingness of our elected officials to kill the likes of these is perhaps all the more murderous for all the confusion, secrecy, forgetfulness, and ignorance surrounding it.
thanks, Sarah. good word.
Great bit of writing. I'll reread it many times. i think about eugenics,abortion, mercy killings, Dr. Kervorkian, etc. I do have one thought. Our planet is finite. Our population grows at an alarming rate. Is it possible to reach a point where we all perish? Stephen Hawking says"If man has no exit strategy from the planet, He has no future" What should we do?
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