Abortion proponents’ darker philosophy
In the days since the super-precedent of Roe v. Wade tumbled into the sea of irrelevance, I’ve noticed a few things that have very little to do with abortion rights. They were things that I sometimes suspected, but that were never as clear as they became on June 24, 2022. I see them, even though I’ve had to avert my eyes. The imprint is like the phantom image that scars your vision after having looked too long at the sun.
The first is that people who support abortion rights really do believe in eugenics. That’s obvious, given the historical roots of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger’s embrace of the ideology, but they’ve usually been more clever about hiding it. “Women’s Health” has replaced “Choice” as the buzzword for the advocates, but that benign terminology masks a darker philosophy.
This was evident from the words of Ana Navarro, a former aide to Jeb Bush and current pundit on CNN and ABC’s “The View.” On the day that Dobbs was issued, Navarro went on national TV and talked about how she understood why a woman might need an abortion. After all, she had a 57-yearold brother who “had the mental capacity of a 1-year-old.” She was also the (Evil) Step-Grandmother to a young woman with Down syndrome and had another family member who was severely autistic. Navarro didn’t need to spell it out for us. Her disdain for the imperfect, the physically challenged and the mentally infirm was clear. This woman, who like me has no children of her own, was perfectly capable of judging the value of other people’s sons and daughters. In her estimation, they lacked enough worth to justify their existence.
Another thing that became apparent as I watched the reaction from abortion supporters was their latent racism. That is not surprising, since racism and eugenics go hand in hand. Margaret Sanger wanted women to have access to birth control not only to allow them to determine the size of their families but also to determine the color of society. Eugenics fought for the elimination of black and brown people, immigrants, and the poor. It was based upon the idea, embraced by luminaries like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Thomas Edison, that society should be purged of its baser elements, to ensure the longevity and prosperity of the more genetically gifted. Sanger, like Navarro, was keenly aware of the burdens that imperfect humans placed on the community. They both wanted to eliminate them.
And according to eugenicists, race was a factor in “worth.” That’s why I find it so telling that people on the left are focusing on Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined in but did not write the majority decision in Dobbs. He penned a concurrence in which no one else joined, which means that no one else is likely to agree with his beliefs that there is no such thing as substantive rights to gay marriage, birth control, abortion and socalled “gay sex.” And while there has been enough anger to spread around for the majority, which I’ll get to in a minute, the only justice who has been personally targeted over and over again is the Black one.
Finally, religion. As an immigration attorney, I’ve often told my clients who are seeking asylum based on religious persecution how lucky they are to be in a country that protects their right to belong to any faith or none at all. I tell them that our sad history of religious intolerance is long past. But these last few days have proven that I’m naive. Catholic churches have been burned, something that last happened during the Know-Nothing era in Philadelphia, a sordid historical fact I’m reminded of every time I pass by St. Augustine’s church in Old City. Religiously-affiliated pro-life clinics have been vandalized. Statues of saints have been beheaded, and Catholic cemeteries have been defaced. This has only increased since the decision in Dobbs was leaked in May. It cannot be a coincidence that as the left became more agitated by the impending loss of abortion rights, so did it become more intent on wreaking vengeance on the people they felt responsible for it: 6 Catholic justices (Gorsuch is now an Episcopalian but was raised in the church.)
It is possible that all of this will settle down, and the anger will cool. It is possible that we will regain our sense of balance. Time heals all wounds.
But it’s also possible that the raw, uncensored reaction of so many Americans to Dobbs is the canary in a coal mine, and we can expect much more of it in the days to come.