Contrary to his party's stated preference for "hands off" governance, a Republican state rep in Louisiana, John LaBruzzo, is calling for finanical incentives so that low-income people will get sterilized and the well-off and educated will have more kids. He may not be calling attention to it, but is there not a certain suspect ethnic/racial as well as class distribution between the two portions of this scheme? And I have to wonder: does Rep. LaBruzzo himself come from any immigrant ethnic or working-class background that he now regards with contempt? Some people do, alas, when they "make it" in America.
This isn't just the specter of eugenics--specter, as if it ever passed away with the Third Reich. It *is* eugenics, and a cardinal principle of it: "More children from the fit, fewer from the unfit." With practically the same definitions of who is and isn't reproductively fit, handed down from the same place: on high.
Now where have we heard all this before? I highly recommend the coverage of eugenics in ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition
, as well as in Edwin Black's War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master RaceThe Nonviolent Choice Directory stands for voluntary contraception and against sterilization abuse and other forced uses (or nonuses) of family planning. Please see our resources on All Pregnancy Prevention Methods, which includes a section titled Protest Coercion in Family Planning.
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