Is the anti-choice agenda fueled by white supremacy?

 

During the 1990s the term – white supremacy – was either a historical description of America’s social hierarchy before the success of the Civil Rights Movement or a reference to an archaic doctrine held by small Neo-Nazi groups.

Shelby Steele, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, made an important observation in 2006.  He stated: The most important event in the late 20th century, even more than the collapse of communism that happened in the 1980s, was the collapse of white supremacy. White supremacy was an idea in the world for centuries and organized the entire globe. After World War II revolutions began from one end of the globe to another, and these revolutions succeeded. The Western powers retreated. Britain and France withdrew from their colonies. The Civil Rights Movement in America was victorious. The idea that whiteness in and of itself constituted authority was killed off.  Steele lamented the defeat of white supremacy had gone unacknowledged.

Then Donald Trump ran for president in 2016.

Suddenly, the term white supremacy was injected back into the mainstream discourse. Prominent liberals admitted the left labeled previous Republican candidates racists just to defeat them, but they never thought those individuals were racists. This time, the left was convinced Trump was a racist, but they overused the term and rendered it meaningless. So, the left insisted Trump was a white supremacist.

But that’s politics, smear campaigns come with the territory. Unfortunately, the cohorts of the left didn’t restrict the term white supremacy to political gamesmanship, and the term has reemerged in the national discourse in ways that don’t make sense.

For example, Cosmopolitan just published an article titled Reality Check: The Anti-Choice Argument Has Always Been Fueled by White Supremacy. The author was deeply concerned about recent Supreme Court cases that challenged Roe v. Wade. The author asserted, “Attempts to restrict reproductive freedom are rooted in a racist agenda” bent on “preserving white supremacy”. “The reproductive justice movement has been connecting the dots between racism and attacks on reproductive freedom for decades. These attacks are motivated by an agenda to control people – especially women of color.”

But this assertion is backward because the origins of “reproductive freedom” are rooted in white supremacy. The pioneers of the birth control movement claimed they were concerned about the hardships that childbirth and self-induced abortions brought to low-income women. However, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, specifically explained, “Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extirpation of defective stocks – those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

Who were the “finest flowers” and who were the “human weeds”?

Blackfeminism.com went further and stated, “The eugenics movement evolved from biological determinism in the late 1800s. The movement used pseudo-scientific theories of race and heredity to promote the reproduction of ‘racially superior’ people … Over time, eugenicists started to embrace birth control advocacy and other population control policies, arguing that black people and other ‘undesirables’ might gain political power if permitted to breed. Indeed, white feminists like Margaret Sanger engaged with white nationalists and eugenicists, forming alliances that helped build a political establishment that exerted racist population control at people of color’s expense.”

In the 21st century race-conscious “people of color” brag about the “browning of America” and look forward to the estimated decade (2040 or 2050) when whites are the minorities in the United States.  White supremacists would do everything in their power to prevent that from happening. According to the Center for Disease Control, the black abortion rate is currently 3.8 times greater than white abortion rates and 2.1 times higher than the Hispanic abortion rate.

Proponents of the white supremacy Shelby Steele pronounced – defeated – would have encouraged the current high rates of abortion amongst black women.  Any headline that states there’s an anti-choice version of white supremacy is nothing but fake news to non-cosmopolitan white supremacists.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 12/15/21