Dear Jeanne,
I’m searching for my notes about Albuquerque, not to argue about the Latino vote there, but to make a point about our disagreement. After your remarks about the vote there, I went to get all the data I could (not much), and I was convinced that the data available was inconclusive. It did offer soft support for your conclusion, in the sense that I could follow your argument about the data; but there were significant holes, and I thought one could fit the data into a nearly opposite conclusion. (The Latinos did not carry the day for life: true. Also true: the vote became a partisan vote, and pro-lifers failed abysmally to reach across party lines: that was the most obvious lesson from the polls.) I am disinclined to get near the same kind of fight about interpreting statistics about immigration and abortion in the way you propose. I think that the data available shows that the abortion rate has been climbing rapidly all over Latin America for 30 years, that people who choose life but are hard-pressed are likely to flee, that the abortion rate for illegal immigrants in the USA is lower than the abortion rate for people stuck at home, although the abortion rate for second generation immigrants climbs. But I do not think that there stats about ANY of those categories that are reliable enough to draw the conclusions you suggest, nor to strengthen the argument that I make.
I don’t think that the statistical comparison that you suggest is relevant in any case. I think that you are comparing apples and oranges – or, more specifically, coercive abortion and seductive abortion. I think that you assert that seductive abortion (a la USA) is more deadly within a community than coercive abortion (a la Guatemala). [“More deadly”: creates a situation in which more children die. “Coercive”: includes economic situations that are manipulated deliberately in order to put pressure on a person to act in a specific way, as in the Chinese coercive programs.] As I said above, I think you are wrong about the facts, but I admit that I do not have data to prove you are wrong. But much more important: the comparison you suggest is not relevant.
I think that the ways one resists seductive abortion and the ways one resists coercive abortion are different – not totally different, but with many significant differences in details. It seems obvious to me that a pro-lifer would want to resist both coercive abortion and seductive abortion. I cannot imagine why you would propose that we choose between the two. It seems to me obvious that when a woman is subjected to coercive depopulation pressure, we want to alleviate that pressure, in order to help her and the child. Later, when (if) she shows up in the USA and is subject to seductive abortion, we want to help again, in a different way.
You know better than I that when sidewalk counselors meet a woman outside an abortion clinic and offer help, the offer has to be genuine, but it is rarely the offer that matters. When people catch on that giving birth is possible with a little help, they can usually line up the help themselves. I taught a student once whose grandfather had wanted to kill her. In utero, she was diagnosed with spina bifida. I heard about the situation, called him, talked about this and that, but also offered to line up adoptive parents for the child who, he feared, would be a severely disabled. I asked him for 24 hours to find a couple ready to adopt. Actually, it took me less than two hours to find and talk to a person running an adoption agency specializing in placing kids with spina bifida. They had potential adoptive parents on a waiting list; estimate wait time, seven years. So she was ready to place the kid overnight; grand-dad could negotiate all kinds of conditions about the adoptive parents. I called grand-dad back. Convinced it was possible to raise the kid, he chose to support his daughter’s decision to give birth. Grand-dad didn’t need help; he needed hope.
Applying that: a Guatemalan mom may or may not decide to emigrate. But what American restrictions do is to make it easier for population controllers to convince her that she is trapped if she gives birth. She doesn’t need a ticket to America; she needs hope. Opening the door does not mean that Guatemala will tip sideways and dump everyone north; it does mean an increase in immigration (and an end of the problems associated with illegal migration), but mostly it just means hope. I have options.
I reject utterly the proposal that voting for a program that was deliberately designed to put pressure on her to abort is excusable – even mandatory, if I understand you – because it protects her from seductive abortion programs. I think that the proposal, unpacked, is transparently bizarre.
Please tell me if we are in agreement about the following:
1. American immigration laws were written by eugenicists. Stopping indiscriminate immigration was a key program of the eugenics movement.
2. The American immigration policy supported the Nazi population policy. The link between population policies and immigration policies is not hypothetical; we can list some names of Jews who were refused entry and later died.
3. The Golden Venture incident shows several things. First, President Johnson’s immigration reforms did not fix the problem; America’s immigration policy after the last major reform still supported depopulation policies elsewhere. Second, the eugenics movement did not die out after World War II; it was still measurably vibrant in the 1980s, active in resisting immigration. Third, pro-lifers one generation ago understood the links between immigration policy here and population policy elsewhere; the current marriage of pro-lifers and anti-immigration activists does not have deep roots.
4. The leaders of the Catholic Church globally, nationally, and locally (in Maryland) have taught with great force and consistency about marriage and about immigration.
5. The number of Catholics who agree with the Pope and bishops about both marriage and immigration is small – perhaps somewhere between 5% and 20% of Catholics.
Are the assertions above controversial? Before we argue, can you please tell me where we diverge?
