"We need to make abortions less necessary." - Bill Clinton
During interviews with theGrio, U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley and law professor Michele Goodwin call out the embedded racism in the anti-abortion movement over the centuries.
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The topic of abortion and racism dates back centuries, says Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California Irvine and a member of the ACLU executive committee. At its core, she contends, is the desire to achieve white expansion — which is intrinsically connected to the United States’ founding and participation in the Transatlantic slave trade.
“If we read Dobbs [vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] as just an opinion of 2022, then we’re missing the Dobbs of the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s,” Goodwin said in an interview with theGrio. “There has been since the times of colonization in the United States, the interest in the expansion of white settlement in colonies, that was explicitly understood when colonists arrived.”
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Popular white physicians like Horatio Storer, J. Marion Sims and Joseph DeLee in the late 1800s and early 1900s wanted to “monopolize” the field of obstetrics and gynecology. In order to do that, they formed a medical smear campaign against women, particularly Black midwives, in an effort to thwart their work in reproductive health care.
“We go from in the 1800s nearly 100% of reproductive health care being governed by women and about 50% of that being by Black women … to women basically caring for about 1% of the field by the 1900s,” said Goodwin.
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Goodwin also noted that Sims, who’s known as the father of gynecology, wrote about “torturing Black women.”
“He wrote in his own words about having epiphanies in the middle of the night, where he would then get these Black women who were chained in the back of his home and begin cutting into their uteruses,” she recalled. “He believed that Black women did not feel pain, so he did not provide them anesthesia.”
Due to the rise of the abolition movement, Goodwin said, these white physicians also wrote about the need for white women to “use their loins and go east, south, north and west.”
“They aligned themselves with a white supremacy movement,” she added.
The historical reality of the anti-abortion movement being rooted in a desire to protect the white race has a modern context. In 2019, famed educator and anti-racism scholar Jane Elliott highlighted the implications of a declining white population in a country founded on the idea that whites are superior to Black and brown people.
“Right now, white people are really frightened,” Elliott said during her interview with Black Nouveau. She referenced Ben Wattenberg, author of the 1987 book “The Birth Dearth,” who wrote that “the main problem confronting the United States today is there aren’t enough white babies being born in this country.”
“[Wattenberg] says that if we don’t change this and change it rapidly, white people will lose their numerical majority in this country,” said Elliott, “and this will no longer be a white man’s land.”
Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg was born on August 26, 1933, to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe
Census data showing a shrinking white population released during the administration of former President Barack Obama, America’s first Black commander in chief, has been seen as a turning point in the modern rise of white grievance politics. Elliott referenced this connection.
“Finding out now, recently, that within 30 years, white people will be in the numerical minority in this country is going to be traumatic,” she said, “and that’s the reason we have to solve this problem, and we have to solve it now.”
The day after the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dobbs case overturning Roe, at a rally in Illinois, U.S. Rep. Mary Miller sparked outrage when she thanked former President Donald Trump for his role in what she said was a “victory for white life.” Miller’s campaign later said the Republican congresswoman misread the text of her speech, however, her flub only fueled criticisms that the conservative movement to ban abortion was rooted in white supremacy.
In response to her Republican House colleague, Congresswoman Pressley told theGrio, “We find ourselves in a moment where they’re saying the quiet part out loud.”
Turns out the founding fathers didn't include abortion in the constitution because it was VERY common place even before the declaration of independencehttps://youtu.be/kYFa2yIx0QM
Where life begins is a gray area. The bible says first breath. The Quran says four months. But abortion still causes harm, and it should be treated as a medical issue like drug addiction. In our current situation, criminalization would create more problems than it would ever solve. The best way to reduce abortions is comprehensive sex education, contraception, and better childcare services. That's the real pro-life position.
--In a stunning reversal, Democrats are suddenly winning every major recent 2022 generic ballot pollhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Osr7wj0DUGQ
Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel (9 October 1907 – 23 February 1930) was a Berlin Sturmführer ("Assault Leader", the lowest commissioned officer rank) of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party's stormtroopers. After his killing in 1930, he was made into a martyr for the Nazi cause by Joseph Goebbels.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Wessel
Wessel first joined a number of youth groups and extreme right-wing paramilitary groups, but later resigned from them and joined the SA, the brownshirted street-fighting stormtroopers of the Nazi Party. He rose to command several SA squads and districts. On 14 January 1930, he was shot in the head by two members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Albrecht "Ali" Höhler was arrested and charged with his murder. Höhler was initially sentenced to six years in prison, but was forcibly taken out of jail and killed by the SA after the Nazis came to power.
Wessel's funeral was given wide attention in Berlin, with many of the Nazi elite in attendance. After his death, he became a major propaganda symbol in Nazi Germany. A march he had written the lyrics to was renamed the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" ("Horst Wessel Song"), and became the official anthem of the Nazi Party. After Adolf Hitler came to national power in 1933, the song became the co-national anthem of Germany, along with the first verse of the "Deutschlandlied", also known as "Deutschland über alles".
U.S. Rep. Mary Miller immediately drew fierce backlash on social media and elsewhere at a Saturday night rally with former President Donald Trump when she credited him for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade calling it a “victory for white life.”
“I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday,” Miller said, then raised her arms in an animated clap amid cheers from the crowd, which numbered in the thousands on a sweltering day in West Central Illinois.
I cannot endorse a policy of abortion even of illegally conceived children, because the children cannot consent to this either, any more than they can consent to being conceived in the first place. (I would only support abortion of children who are so severely deformed that they would be physically incapable of expressing a wish for euthanasia after birth.) It is precisely because abortion is NOT an ethically acceptable option for us that we must be absolutely merciless in punishing conception.