As the public debate over abortion heats up, the Supreme Court has definitively signaled its willingness to weigh in on state efforts to protect human life. As Justice Clarence Thomas emphasized in his concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, “Given the potential for abortion to become a tool of genetic manipulation, the Court will soon need to confront the constitutionality of laws” banning discriminatory abortions.
While the high court ultimately denied review of Indiana’s ban on abortions that are based on an unborn child’s race, sex, disability, or genetic makeup, it did so only because Box was what’s known as a case of first impression. It left the door wide open for similar cases currently percolating in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Ohio.
Anticipating the Supreme Court’s imminent review of a state ban on certain abortions, Thomas articulated a “compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.” He supported this newly announced state interest with an exhaustive history of the reprehensible eugenics movement in the United States. He declared that “[e]nshrining the 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.”
Planned Parenthood is irredeemably intertwined with the American eugenics movement. The organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, embraced birth control as an effective means of reducing the “ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings that never should have been born at all.” As Thomas notes, her “arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ‘the elimination of the unfit’ … apply with even greater force with abortion, making it a significantly more effective tool for eugenics.”
Adopting Sanger’s wicked logic, former Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher repeatedly endorsed the use of abortion for eugenic purposes and promoted it as a way to control the population and improve its quality in the decades following World War II. As a result, African Americans, women, girls, and the disabled have suffered worldwide under policies promoted by Planned Parenthood and other abortion proponents.
The problems associated with discriminatory abortions have become so pervasive that some international authorities and human rights organizations have petitioned the United Nations to declare sex-selection abortion a crime against women.
Similarly, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has declared that “[l]aws which explicitly allow for abortion on grounds of impairment violate the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.” CRPD also explicitly rejects the “incompatible with life” label often used to describe prenatal diagnoses of disabilities, noting that “experience shows that assessments on impairment conditions are often false,” and that the designation “perpetuates notions of stereotyping disability as incompatible with a good life.”
Alliance Defending Freedom argued in an amicus brief filed in support of the Indiana law that, if we want to eradicate discrimination predicated on race, sex, disability, or genetic makeup, we must ensure that this protection begins in the womb. If we permit aborting unborn children based upon their race, sex, disability, or genetic makeup, we are actively affirming a society in which racial minorities, women, and the disabled are systematically marginalized and dehumanized.
If we permit discrimination against those who are inside the womb, it is not long before it is also sanctioned for those who are outside the womb. As Desmond Tutu wisely cautioned, “abominations such as apartheid do not start with an entire population suddenly becoming inhumane … They start with generalizing unwanted characteristics across an entire segment of a population.” In this instance, that unjustly maligned segment of the population is unborn children deemed to be the wrong race, the wrong sex, “unfit,” or otherwise unworthy of life.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Box, some abortion advocates were curiously and uncharacteristically quiet. Perhaps Thomas’ methodical and unrelenting exposure of the abortion movement’s irrefutable ties to the 20th century’s eugenics movement stunned them into silence.
Or perhaps they are justifiably concerned with Thomas’s emphatic rejection of their inaccurate and self-serving assertion that Supreme Court jurisprudence dictates that “a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy before viability is categorical.” Clearly, the Supreme Court will soon consider the ability of state legislatures and Congress to enact limits on the availability of abortion. This much-anticipated decision will not only implicate the constitutionality of discriminatory abortion bans like Indiana’s, but may also affect other abortion bans and limits, including the 16 already enacted this year that have so enraged abortion advocates nationwide.
Denise M. Burke is senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the Radiance Foundation in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky.
