The driving force for
abortion, globally, is population control. That’s not what’s on the minds of
women and couples who show up at abortion clinics, but it is a huge part of the
motivation form the people who build the clinics and run the industry.
The eugenics movement in
the 20th and 21st centuries, aiming to construct a new
and improved human race, has four parts. There’s “more from the fit,” via
genetic engineering supported by the new and growing discipline called “bioethics.”
And there’s “less from the fit,” via population control supported by
immigration restrictions.
From a eugenic and white
supremacist perspective, population control isn’t all that important in
America. Most Americans are white, so from a eugenics perspective it’s okay if
they have lots of kids, unless they’re “feeble-minded.”
Population control is far
more visible in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There’s lots of white money from
American and Europe available for programs designed to reduce population there.
The nitty-gritty of
population control includes contraception, sterilization, and abortion. Some programs are based on the users’ choice;
some are based on coercion. But most are based on a hybrid – not openly and
physically coercive, but not honest choice either. The eugenicists in the 1950s
called it “unconscious voluntary selection.” It’s propaganda, or manipulation.
(For more, see The
Roots of Racism and Abortion.)
Chapter 5: Population
Control
four brief
insights
The Giant Accountant (#37) 93
A coopted movement (#38) 95
Refugees and abortion (#39) 97
MAGA versus Pelosi (#40) 99
In 1986, Bill O’Reilly –
an accountant, not the TV celebrity – was invited to Bangladesh to audit the
Bank of Bangladesh. He worked alone, in a small office in Bethesda; but he had
credentials. During the Kennedy administration, he had run the accounting
department for the US Post Office. But more importantly for Bangladesh, Bill’s
career included an investigation of the finances of New York City, which
concluded with a controversial declaration that the city was bankrupt. He was
very modest, but he was a serious guy.
When he accepted the
Bangladesh job, Bill planned a six-week trip to Bangladesh; but he actually
finished his work almost right away. When he got there, it only took a day or
two to figure out his job. The Bank was not independent; it was
government-controlled. And it was bankrupt. Everyone knew it, but nobody could
say it. They hired him, an outside expert, to say it. So he said it. Then he
had almost the whole six weeks left to explore a wonderful although
poverty-stricken country.
Pro-lifers can make odd
tourists. Bill poked around here and there, and discovered that the World Bank
was preparing a development loan for the country, with a long list of
much-needed projects for a variety of social services, including 400 maternal
and child health clinics. But the clinics all included a “menstrual regulation”
component.
Bangladesh was a Muslim
nation, and abortion was illegal. But the plan was to offer help for women
whose menstrual cycle became irregular. The plan was, if a woman realized that
she hadn’t menstruated for six weeks or longer, and that there might be some
complication, she could visit a clinic for a simple procedure that would
restore a regular flow. In plainer terms, skipping the euphemisms and the
disguise, the World Bank was about to build 400 abortion clinics, despite the
law.
Bill returned to the
United States and wrote it up. He pulled me into his project, and I helped
write his pamphlet, “Deadly Neo-Colonialism.” Fr. Paul Marx at Human Life
International funded publication. Armed with a clear and concise explanation of
the violent fraud, O’Reilly lobbied the World Bank to cancel the project. It
was too late to alter the project; the loan was facing an up-or-down vote. The
Bank is supposed to be lobby-proof, but Bill didn’t know that, so he did it –
and succeeded. The Bank didn’t cancel the project, but rather added a side
agreement, that none of the funds in the loan would be used for abortion, under
any name.
Bill (with a little help)
closed 400 abortion clinics. It is plausible that approximately 15% of the
people alive in Bangladesh today owe their lives to this gentle giant, this
obscure accountant.
Not long after this, a
great feminist opponent of coercive population control, Betsy Hartmann, wrote a
masterful dissection of Western interference (Reproductive Rights and
Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control), citing her experience
in Bangladesh, and denouncing the sterilization campaign there. She made
reference to the odd support she got from a couple of “rightwingers,” meaning
Bill and me. We wrote to explain that we were pro-life Democrats, and we
joked that we would sue her if she impugned our reputations in this way again.
I don’t know whether she laughed, but she fixed the error.
In 2000, I attended a
meeting of the International Association of Bioethics, in London. Daniel
Wikler, a former president of the IAB, was just releasing his new book about
the difference between old destructive eugenics and new hopeful eugenics. He
had announced his plan for the book at a meeting in 1996, and I had argued with
him about it, but he ignored my criticisms. The book argues that the old
eugenics was bloody: think Hitler. But, he argues, the new eugenics can
be helpful: think babies with improved genes. The problem is, the new eugenics
includes coercive abortion in national population control programs – anti-life,
anti-choice, anti-child, anti-woman, government-run. Wikler’s book was
applauded by the Chinese family planners. Eugenics is still a massively bloody
utopian nightmare.
The thing that matters
here is that a murderous eugenics campaign can include opposition to abortion,
can include a sustained push to protect babies and births and marriages and
fatherhood and motherhood and family life – in wellborn wealthy educated white
communities. A serious and organized eugenic push can use a pro-life movement –
in white nations. The flip side of “less from the unfit” is “more from
the fit” – two sides of as single coin. Hitler was for abortion for Jews and
against abortion for Aryans. In some settings, he was “pro-life” (if you accept
that word as a synonym for opposing abortion).
Can that happen again? Of
course! Look at Hungary, poor bloodied Hungary! And look at the enthusiasm
among American pro-lifers about Hungary’s brave new efforts!
God have mercy on
Hungary, a proud but haunted nation. It was smashed up the Nazis, recovered
briefly and then was smashed up by the Soviets, recovered briefly and then was
smashed up again by a rightwing dictatorship.
My best friend in grade
school was Hungarian. His father, Aladar Szegedy-Maszak, was Hungarian
ambassador to the United States after World War II. He was in a Nazi
concentration camp, and then was exiled by the Communists. I remember him as a
man of immense dignity, visibly tortured by memories.
Hungary today is working
hard to raise its birthrate, and also to keep out non-whites. It has a happy
encouraging pro-birth national policy, and a savagely inhospitable anti-Muslim
border policy.
In the greatest refugee
crisis since World War II, much of Europe has been hospitable – including
Sweden, Germany, France, and the UK. But some nations have refused to help
refugees – including Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. In
2018, Hungary’s ruling party, Fidesz, tightened its grip on the nation’s
parliament by running a single-issue campaign: anti-immigrant.
The last national census
in Hungary (in 2011) found 5,579 Muslims, less than a tenth of a percent of the
nation.
Faced with a steep
population decline, the Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, supports incentives for
marriage and births, including tax breaks, mortgage repayments, car purchase
subsidies, payments to care for grandparents, and grants to pro-life
organizations. The 2012 Hungarian constitution states that life will be
protected from conception; that has not ended access to abortion – yet.
Orban is determined to
avoid “an exchange of populations, to replace the population of Europeans with
others.” “Others”: that means non-white.
The Trump administration
applauds Hungary’s explicit immigration-abortion link, Orban’s slogan:
“Pro-creation, not immigration.”
It makes me sick to admit
it, but the pro-life movement is full of people who applaud Orban’s murderous
eugenics program.
Understanding the bloody
impact of America’s immigration restrictions requires a little history. Let me
race through a century in five paragraphs to make a point.
First, when eugenicists
gained power in America in the 1920s, they launched three legislative
initiatives. They banned miscegenation (“inter-racial” marriage), the began
compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded,” and they restricted
immigration. Our immigration laws today are reforms of eugenic and racist laws.
Restricting immigration protects the racial purity of a nation. The intent was
clear.
Second, the
anti-immigration laws here supported Hitler’s work in Europe. In 1937, a
passenger ship, the St Louis. sailed out of Hamburg, carrying hundreds of
Jewish refugees to America. But when the ship arrived here, we refused to
permit passengers to disembark. The ship returned to Germany, and most of those
people whom we turned away, who had seen the lights of Miami, were killed in
death camps. At the Holocaust Museum in Washington, there’s a list of the names
of passengers who sailed back to Europe to die – killed by our laws which
supported Hitler’s aims. Restricting immigration here strengthened murderous
depopulation measures there.
Third, the Golden Venture
incident shows that restricting immigration here can strengthen forced abortion
elsewhere. In 1993, a cargo ship, the Golden Venture, ran aground on Long
Island. There were 286 Chinese men and women on board; the vessel belonged to
“snakeheads,” Chinese gangsters who smuggled “illegal aliens.” The fugitives
were rounded up for deportation. But some of them were pregnant women fleeing
from forced abortion, a brutal aspect of China’s one-child-only policy. Rep.
Chris Smith (R-NJ) and other pro-lifers fought to protect fleeing women and
their unborn children. Smith, a member of the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs, pushed though legislation to grant asylum to a limited number of
refugees from forced abortion or sterilization. The incident forced pro-lifers
to consider the links between our border policies and brutality elsewhere; at
that time, pro-lifers chose to protect life.
In 1995, a French novel
that promoted white supremacy, Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints, was
re-published with a cover that appears to be taken from the Golden Venture
incident – a rusty ship in the background and poorly dressed non-white people
pouring ashore. Today, immigration policy in the Trump administration is often
devised and promoted by Stephen Miller, who has been urging people to read this
book for years.
In the 1970s, pro-lifers
understood population control and resisted it. The change was slow, but broad
and deep. Pro-life leaders are now generally supportive of Trump’s
anti-immigrant policies, due in some part to the successful propaganda from
NumbersUSA. This is one of the organization’s founded by John Tanton, a
proponent of global population control. Tanton worked with Planned Parenthood
for years, but considered them too slow and inefficient. He went off to build
his own groups. NumbersUSA is a propaganda powerhouse that has successfully
recruited huge numbers of pro-lifers to support population control. For years,
their cute little video about gumballs has been circulating among pro-lifers.
Margaret Sanger recruited feminists into the eugenics movement; Tanton recruits
pro-lifers.
Pro-life leaders hate to
admit it, but they are not making plans to end abortion. It’s their desire, but
not their plan. In the foreseeable future, they plan to trim. A realistic
strategy to end abortion begins with a campaign of nonviolence, but at this
time most pro-life leaders are committed to polarization, demonizing their
opponents; this is not nonviolence. If the plan is to trim, not end, let’s talk
about how to trim the most.
Most pro-life leaders
talk as if they are about to reverse Roe v. Wade. I think that’s crazy,
but to make my point, let’s assume it happens. Most pro-lifers assume quietly,
without much discussion, that reversing Roe will end abortion. I think
that’s total nonsense, but to make my point, let’s assume it happens. Most
pro-lifers don’t get around to discussing what happens when you try to enforce
a law like the one they propose, but to make my point, let’s assume the law is
enforced successfully. If we give pro-life leaders everything they want – they
get a reversal, and new protective laws, and they even get a third miracle,
effective enforcement – how much do we get?
2%. Maybe 3%. America has
about 5% of the world’s population, and 2-3% of the world’s surgical abortions.
2-3%. That’s it, that’s
all. This is about MAGA, Trump’s Make America Great Again. America
helped to start and grow abortion all over the world, but pro-life leaders are
aiming – in their wildest dreams – to end abortion in America only,
which means that they want to protect 2% of the babies in danger in the world.
Their wildest dream, unprecedented in the history of the world, succeeding with
a list of miracles, is a trim: 2-3%.
By contrast, suppose we
work with Nancy Pelosi, and get everything she wants but nothing more.
She opposes forced
abortion. The statistics on that are really messy! How do you define “force”?
But a reasonable ballpark estimate is that 30% of abortion globally is coerced.
(My friend John Ryan, a
true pro-life hero, insists that we keep in mind that all abortion is
coercive from the perspective of the unborn child. Noted.)
But about 30% of
abortions include some form of coercion applied to the mother. The worst
campaign of forced abortion in the world – indeed the bloodiest chapter in all
of human history, in my view as a pro-lifer) – is the one-child-only depopulation
policy in China. It’s been eased a bit, but not erased; it’s a two-child-only
policy now. It’s anti-life, anti-choice, anti-child, anti-woman. And Pelosi has
opposed it for decades.
Pro-lifer leaders are
working to trim abortion, not end it. And if you let them trim all they want
(all they are currently talking about in their wildest dreams), they will trim 2-3%.
If Pelosi got everything
she wanted in her wildest dreams, she would trim abortion 30%.
MAGA pro-lifers, given
everything they want, would divide America bitterly and save a million babies’
lives each year.
Pelosi, given everything
she wants, would unite America and save 15 million babies’ lives each year.
I admit that Pelosi,
although she is remarkable, probably can’t get global cooperation and stop
coercive abortion. But that’s where her ideas aim: 30%.
I wish pro-lifers would
admit that they won’t reverse Roe (miracle #1) and get protective laws
in 50 states (15 more miracles) and enforce them successfully (50 more
miracles). But their ideas, their most ambitious ideas – MAGA to the max, with
66 miracles – would trim 2%, maybe 3%.
So I’m a pro-life Democrat, with a global view.
