Abortion for Abnormality, Part I: The Popular View
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to rule on a portion of Indiana’s recent law outlawing abortion based on abnormalities, deformities, or other imperfections discovered in pre-natal testing. Lower courts have already stricken this ban from the law, and Indiana anti-abortionists were petitioning to have the Supreme Court restore the original wording of the law.
Clarence Thomas, the only current member of the court whose opinions are worth two seconds’ consideration, wrote a statement, without any co-signatories, noting the significance of the issue at hand — deciding the life or death of a fetus based on preferred traits — and opining that the Supreme Court would have to rule on this matter of “eugenic abortions” eventually.
“The Court’s decision to allow further percolation should not be interpreted as agreement” with the 7th Circuit, Thomas wrote. He included a long history of the birth-control movement.
“Enshrining a constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement.”
The fact that there is only one genuine defender of the principles and spirit of the U.S. Constitution currently sitting on the highest court in the land — the constitutional court — would be alarming, were one not already all too aware that the United States of America, as a limited republic, has ended.
This trend toward the complete normalization of social-preference-based abortion is an eloquent microcosm of the methods and historical trajectory of progressivism. What was considered reasonable paternalism among early twentieth century progressives — Margaret Sanger, a Democrat icon, was obsessed with culling the black race; Tommy Douglas, the godfather of socialized medicine, wrote his master’s thesis defending eugenics; the Rockefeller Foundation, the financial heart of early progressive totalitarianism, supported eugenics experiments in both America and Germany — became officially “horrific” in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s fall, and therefore fell into temporary dishonor. The innate progressive urge to kill for purposes of social engineering was not expunged from the movement’s soul, but it was silenced, forced underground by history’s harshest rebuke.
Like all totalitarian notions that at first fail due to being pushed along too quickly and without sufficient socio-psychological tenderizing, however, eugenics has gradually reformed its presentation style, and is now thriving like never before, behind more superficially benign rhetoric. So it is that today, many European nations declare with cheerful pride that they have nearly “eradicated” Down syndrome, meaning simply that they have made common and almost mandatory practice of aborting all fetuses that show a high likelihood of being born with this disability.
Down syndrome, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg — a gateway drug for modern eugenics, if you will. “If we can eliminate this socially undesirable outcome,” they muse enthusiastically, “then why not any or all others?”
That many normal, essentially sane people find this notion attractive, or at least morally complex, shows what a century of universal public schooling can do to the human mind’s perspective on its own worth, and half a century of government-controlled health care to the human heart’s reckonings concerning the value of an individual life. For the initial response to these poetic-progressive waxings, of course — the response that would spring as a normal reflex from the common man in a healthy society — is simple:
“And who gets to choose which outcomes are desirable and undesirable? And what is the standard of desirability? And is the standard being applied here private, utilitarian, pragmatic, Christian, socialistic, or other? And who set this standard? And by what authority was it determined that they ought to be able to impose their standard on others, including on the unborn, whose lives, after all, are the primary ones hanging in the balance in this matter?”
Alas, we do live in the aftermath of a century of public schooling and half a century of public health care, so the cold-blooded sociopathy of today’s eugenicists is regarded with deference, or at least as sensible medicine. We submit to illogic, to known and historically-evidenced irrationality, to the myopia of the past, merely because our “experts,” our betters, have spoken. We make the same tragic errors of personal and societal self-immolation all over again.
Sanger, Douglas, Rockefeller, and Mengele are smiling.
