703 - Peace & Life: SCOTUS/Eugenics - March 29, 2024
SCOTUS and the Abortion Pill
As is customary when intellectuals rationalize horrific violence, the U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments focused on a side-issue: standing to bring a lawsuit. Were the plaintiffs injured by loosening regulations, giving them the OK to sue? The fact that these pills kill unborn children – that very wording – was in the discourse and wasn’t argued against. It was only whether people whose consciences don’t allow for it get to avoid participating. The children themselves are in no position to sue, and their rights were ignored. Any other reason the Court should provide a remedy to the damage of the new regulations got little attention.
First Things offers a good article explaining the medical problems.
One important aspect got no notice at all: the pill has far more dire consequences than most medicine if it’s given inadvertently, as indicated in this Google review for the Planned Parenthood in Aurora IL (accessed April 4, 2021):
Even worse, there are several known cases, and surely many unknown, where someone else snuck an abortion pill to the unsuspecting mother. She’ll know she had a miscarriage, but won’t necessarily know that someone else induced it.
This shows that this medication requires more stringent safeguards than might be applied otherwise.
The 19th century feminists had to deal with the prevalence of abortion drugs and opposed them to the point of turning down lucrative ad revenue, as shown in the Quote of the Week below.
Eugenics Documentary
Eugenics and its history underpin several of our issues, so much so that being familiar with the history of it is part of the basic education of understanding the consistent life ethic. It was clearly racist, it targeted people with disabilities, and it proposed eliminating poverty by preventing the existence of poor people. The connection of the American eugenics movement to the Nazis, who took it to murderous extremes, has always been clear. All these points are covered in a recent nearly two-hour episode of the PBS series American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade.
They don’t cover the connection of eugenics to abortion – just a short part on Margaret Sanger connecting birth control to the eugenics campaign. But it’s still obvious from the history that’s so well laid out here that abortion and all these other forms of violence were fostered by this crusade.
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Quotation of the Week
Parker Pillsbury
The Revolution (paper of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
March 26, 1868
Explaining the newspaper’s policy of not accepting advertisements for abortion drugs.
Quack Medicine venders, however rich, proud, and pretentious, Foeticides and Infanticides, should be classed together and regarded with shuddering horror by the whole human race. And yet in every large city they hold more control over the public health and public morals, than all the regular medical schools and the pulpit combined. And by arts the most wily and diabolical, they continue through the newspaper press to beguile the wise and prudent, the high as well as the low, the rich, the poor, the religious, the reprobate, and levy upon them all the most fearful contributions.