We editorialize this month about racism, eugenics and abortion, and link it to both a recent New York Times story on abortion and race, and Michael Ignatieff’s desire to have abortion included as part of Canada’s maternal health initiative in the developing world. The editorial concludes:
Women who are encouraged to cultivate their “reproductive health” through the killing of their children are deemed not healthy enough to reproduce. This corrosive attitude is also evident in the arresting figures reported by the Times: when poor, black mothers face unplanned pregnancies, they are not offered help in raising their children, but rather help in getting rid of them. Instead of real assistance in bringing their children to term, they are offered only the coercive compassion of abortion-as-birth-control.
The anti-apartheid activist, Stephen Biko, once wrote that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” The eugenic principles of the abortion movement are a toxic export, the barbarism of the so-called developed world foisted upon other nations. But it is not absent in the West itself. If black women – in North America and elsewhere – are subtly coerced into aborting their own children in the name of “reproductive health,” then the ideologues who teach them to see their own children as ailments in search of a cure have perpetrated the worst kind of intellectual abuse. Reproduction is not an obstacle to health, a hindrance, or a diminishment of a full life. That it is seen as such by women today is evidence of how pernicious and how pervasive the eugenic beliefs of Sanger have become.
Read the whole editorial here.
