Clarence Thomas Likens Birth Control and Abortion to Nazi Eugenics

By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair

29 May 19

The Supreme Court Justice on Tuesday offered a preview of how he’ll go after a woman’s right to choose in the future.

n Tuesday, the Supreme Court reached a compromise on an Indiana abortion law, allowing the part that says the “remains” of an abortion must be cremated or buried—to the delight of those who believe fetuses are people—while declining to rule on the part that would have banned abortions based on the race, sex, or disability of the fetus, which had been blocked by a lower court. That keeps the issue, and a showdown over Roe v. Wade, off the court’s docket, for now, which is the good news. The less good news? The batshit broadside against abortion and birth control launched by Justice Clarence Thomas, which serves as a preview for how he might attempt to restrict a woman’s right to choose in the future.

In an insane 20-page opinion, Thomas argues that the government should limit what a woman wants to do with her body on the basis that abortion and birth control are both part of the same state-sanctioned eugenics plot to keep those with “inferior” traits from being born:

I write separately to address the other aspect of Indiana law at issue here—the “Sex Selective and Disability Abortion Ban.” This statute makes it illegal for an abortion provider to perform an abortion in Indiana when the provider knows that the mother is seeking the abortion solely because of the child’s race, sex, diagnosis of Down syndrome, disability, or related characteristics. The law requires that the mother be advised of this restriction and given information about financial assistance and adoption alternatives, but it imposes liability only on the provider. Each of the immutable characteristics protected by this law can be known relatively early in a pregnancy, and the law prevents them from becoming the sole criterion for deciding whether the child will live or die. Put differently, this law and other laws like it promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.

The use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical. The foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement. That movement developed alongside the American eugenics movement. And significantly, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause.

As Thomas naturally fails to mention, whatever grotesque hopes and dreams Sanger might have had 100 years ago never actually came to fruition. As Ian Millhiser notes, “today’s Americans are fully capable of using birth control in a responsible, non-eugenic manner,” just as most people don’t use abortion to further Nazi Germany-esque goals. But not in the alternative universe Thomas is apparently living in:

Some believe that the United States is already experiencing the eugenic effects of abortion. According to one economist, “Roe v. Wade help[ed] trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history.” On this view, “it turns out that not all children are born equal” in terms of criminal propensity. And legalized abortion meant that the children of “poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers” who were “much more likely than average to become criminals” “weren’t being born.” Whether accurate or not, these observations echo the views articulated by the eugenicists and by Sanger decades earlier: “Birth Control of itself . . . will make a better race” and tend “toward the elimination of the unfit.

Here, Clarence introduces a theory that he himself acknowledges may be utterly baseless (“whether accurate or not”) and then uses it to support his absurd argument. Unhinged or not, his purported concern for the nonwhite, non-“superior-race” children who are never born due to the scourge of abortion and birth control would be a lot more convincing if not for the fact that, as Elie Mystal writes, “instead of trying to uplift potential mothers and make it economically and professionally easier for them to have children, conservatives are only interested in forcing women, including black and brown women, to bear pregnancies against their will. Thomas and his ilk dislike abortion and birth control because it amplifies the free will of women.”

Anyway, enjoy your eugenics pills while you still can!