Feminist Eugenics
By Carey Roberts (03/07/07)
Nearly a century ago a young Austrian corporal became inspired by the vision of creating a Master Race. Once he declared himself the Führer, Adolf Hitler set out to assure the ascendancy of biologically “valuable” Germans. From 1934 to 1937 the Nazi regime sterilized an estimated 400,000 persons whom they viewed as physically and mentally unfit.
To silence his critics, Hitler justified his extermination program by invoking the scientific discipline of eugenics, a word derived from the Greek for “good birth.”
Across the Atlantic, Margaret Sanger was another proponent of the burgeoning movement. A member of the Eugenics Societies in both the United States and England, Sanger penned Woman and the New Race which spelled out her utopian, if unconventional vision. [ www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap06.html ]
Laced with contempt for the female sex, Sanger wrote in 1920, “woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth … Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.”
Sanger’s 1932 “Plan for Peace” took this analysis to its logical conclusion. She argued for the need to “apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted” and to “give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.” Sanger would later clarify that “dysgenic groups” included African-Americans.
The legacy of Margaret Sanger continues to this day. As we know, Sanger founded the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America, which later gave rise to the establishment of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952.
So in 1979, China implemented its infamous One-Child Policy, which soon spurred complaints of forced sterilizations, coercive abortions, and infanticides. A 2001 report revealed that government authorities in Guangdong province had set a quota of 20,000 forced abortions.
But if a couple is allowed only one child, many may confront a difficult choice. Most families eke out a hard-scrabble existence where the next day’s meal can never be taken for granted. By all accounts, a boy can be sent to work the fields and tend the herd at an earlier age than a girl. And in many societies, aging parents can expect to receive financial support from their son.
Fetal ultrasound became the technology that allowed couples to make this decision. A portable ultrasound machine can be purchased for only a few thousand dollars. And an abortion can be had at little or no cost.
This soon gave rise to what doctors in India call “coffee-bar abortions” – terminate your pregnancy and then hang out at the nearby coffee-bar to sip cappuccino.
Joseph D’Agostino has dubbed the rise in sex-selective abortions as “Feminism’s Triumph: Exterminating Girls.” [ www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=19061 ] Experts disagree on the overall toll, but an article published in the medical journal Lancet pegs the number at 100 million aborted girls, mostly in China and India. In China alone, UNICEF estimates there are only 832 girls per 1,000 boys.
Feminists have a compulsion to impose radical social change and when things go sour, blaming the subsequent fiasco on the patriarchy. The problem of sex-selective abortions is no exception to this rule.
Over the past several decades, the Avatars of Abortion have waged a determined campaign to make abortions available around the world. Of course they will never admit to the possibility that their lethal crusade has anything to do with the current population imbalance.
Instead, the fems deflect the blame, speaking darkly of the “deep-seated power differences between the sexes.” That aspersion conveniently ignores the fact that in India, a large segment of the doctors who profit from the nation’s $100 million sex-selection industry are women.
And exactly how is “male privilege” fostered by leaving millions of Asian men without any prospect of finding a wife?
Ultrasound machines were popularized in the mid-1980s. Twenty years later, we now have a generation of men in their late teens and early twenties in search of a partner. This has the makings of a demographic disaster. In western India, for example, young women from Nepal and Bangladesh are trucked in as “paros” – for a price, of course -- to rectify the gender imbalance.
So what is the solution to the epidemic of female feticides? Laws that ban the practice have been found to be ineffective. Requiring doctors to fill out extra forms, as they do in India, hasn’t worked. And posting warning signs at ultrasound facilities is worthless.
So what can be done to stop this 21st century population time-bomb? To my mind, there is one obvious cure for this modern-day eugenics experiment, an approach that indeed has a reasonable chance of success: Ban abortions.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Carey Roberts
