Genocide and Roe v Wade

Today is the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade.

The accusation is sometimes made that abortion is a form of genocide, especially aimed at the African American population. The Rev. Dr. Clenard H Childress Jr.'s Black Genocide web site is a leading example. A summery of his key arguments is is here.  It is pointed out deaths caused by abortion in the African American population is proportionally several times that in the white population, and it is claimed that this is the result of a deliberate policy and not just the result of a "pattern and pratice" or coincidence.


 The July 7, 2009 edition of the New York Times carried an interview on The Place of Women on the Court with Justice of the United States Ruth Bader Ginsburg  which provides a good place to start..

  Q: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda? 

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often. 

 Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women? 

 JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong. 

Q: When you say that reproductive rights need to be straightened out, what do you mean? 

 JUSTICE GINSBURG: The basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman. Emphsis is mine.

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 N. B. To be fair to Justice Ginsburg (who was not on the court when the case was decided) it is not clear whether she is saying that she herself supported using the combination of Medicaid and abortion to reduce “populations we do not want to many of.” Clearly her stated opinion now is that abortion should only be an individual choice for a woman.
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 But it is also clear testimony from a reliable source that there was significant approval in some political and judicial circles for deliberately using abortion and Medicaid to harm populations “we do not want to many of“. Nor does she seem upset, that instead of protecting groups that some how meet the disapproval of the upper echelons of society the US government and especially the Supreme Court should help harm them. One can't help but wonder how she would handle an a certiorari petition from a member of group "we do want to many of."

Along with Justice Ginsburg, I remember that there was concern about population growth for supporting legalized abortion, the arguments supporting this reminded me of the Nazi arguments for the policy lebensraum of which the Holocaust was the most prominent part, but with a much better sugar coating.

The strong emphasis by the current administration that abortion and contraception benefits be included in the "Affordable Health Care Act" (Obamcare) at no cost to women seems to be a resurrection of the concept; this time combing Abortion and Obamacare to reduce populations "we do not want too many of"

Who are these groups "we do not want to many of." Justice Ginsburg does not seem to have identified them. Given the history of race relations in the United States it is not surprising that many people feel that she was using “a code word” for African Americans among others.   "Reducing populations we do not want to many of" seems like an understated description of the the Holocaust, Gulag, Cambodia's killing fields and the Rwandan genocide. Some of the more polemical comments would put her in the figurative ranks of the KKK and the SS, though as I noted she does not seem to have commented on whether or not she approves.


 African Americans are a group that is protected under the CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE, ADOPTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS ON 9 DECEMBER 1948 and Ratified by the Senate on 25/11/1988 to take effect 23/02/1989 Of course Roe v Wade was decided before the US adopted the Convention, But people had been tried and convicted for Genocide before the convention was approved by the UN and the implementation of Roe v Wade is continuing..

 Let's look at what the convention says:

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such :

 a) Killing members of the group;

 . . .

 (f) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

By the Convention Abortion per se is not genocide, but it can used a a means to kill members of a protected group and/or prevent births in a protected group; which would be genocide.  At the very least "imposing measures intended to prevent births" sounds similar to what Justice Ginsburg was saying about reducing populations "we do not want to many of."

The key legal phrase in the Convention's definition is "intent to destroy, in whole or in part,"  One of the motivations for the action must be "intent to destroy, in whole or in part." The same action taken without this motivation may be legal or illegal on other grounds, but it is not the crime of Genocide.

 Justice Ginsburg provides us with a reasonable suspicion,  from a reliable source, that Roe v Wade was intended to and is being used to commit genocide.  The question comes down to what are the targeted groups and what are the motivations of the key players. The proponents of abortion and Roe v Wade have always been careful to publicly state other motivations. As noted Justice Ginsburg  states
 that her only motivation is the protection of women's rights.

Are there other publicly unstated illegal motivations?

 A discovery or Grand Jury process would certainly be interesting, if some official had the political courage to start one.

Abortion posts :

Cause Not Harm
Roe vs. Wade - Choice
When Oh Lord When
Criss Cross: Democrats Republicans and Abortion
Jenny Change Your Mind
Roe v Wade is absurd


Related Posts

Death by Government
Never Again and Again and Again
Rwanda and Darfur Compared

More information.

UN Convention on Genocide
What is Genocide

R J Rummel's Power Kills site
Genocide Watch

My Genocide posts


Crisis Pregnancy Resources

Storms - Stoplights - Equality

Last Monday a storm came through. Sustained hurricane force winds in Northeast Illinois!? I suppose the usual suspects will allege global warming or cooling as a cause though common sense meteorology would say just an extreme local variation, no matter the long term pattern. As I drove home from work the closer I got the more and more trees and branches were on the ground - and power lines. When I got home, aside from lesser problems like a flying branch wrecking the fence gate, the electricity was out, it did not come back until Friday evening.

One thing I learned to appreciate during this is the common stoplight. One thinks of them just as a safety feature so many cars can get through an intersection safely. However when the light is out you go to stop sign rules. Every one gets through safely, but it takes forever. Even if one catches a red light at the beginning of the cycle one get through the intersection much faster than one gets through on stop sign rules. One intersection regularly had back up of over a mile in three directions.

While sitting in that four lane parking lot waiting my turn I mused that this is a good example of an equality of results. It takes every one about the same amount of time to get to the light and through the intersection. Stop lights are a great source of inequality, some cars get to the intersection with a green light and zip though at 60 miles an hour. Some catch the beginning of the red light cycle and sit there for a few minutes waiting for the green. This is so unequal, yes everyone gets through much faster with the stop light, but shouldn’t radical equality be a goal, it commonly espoused for economics and politics, why not traffic control?

While equality is certainly important in some areas, i.e. everyone should be equal before the law. Everyone should have and equal opportunity to seek education and employment of their choice. But when an equality of results is promised how do you get them?

The items that have been driving the growth of western and now world economies for the past few hundred years are the concentration of capital, free trade, and technological development. But all of these produce uneven results. While even those on the lower end do better than they would otherwise the discrepancy between the top and bottom is larger than before this development. The only way to equalize the results in to put such major impediments in the place of concentrating capital, free trade and technological development that these discrepancies cannot exist which means every one gets poorer and poorer. But it is closer to equal results!

That wait for my turn to go through the intersection was way to long.


See also:
Freedom
The Fourth of July

Never Again and Again and Again

Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.

In the the February 1, 2011 issue of Policy Review, David Rieff looks at The Persistence of Genocide, “Never Again,” again and again and asks an unaskable question. Is it even possible to prevent future genocides?


. . Bluntly put, an undeniable gulf exists between the frequency with which the phrase [never again] is used — above all on days of remembrance most commonly marking the Shoah, but now, increasingly, other great crimes against humanity — and the reality, which is that 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, “never again” has proved to be nothing more than a promise on which no state has ever been willing to deliver. When, last May, the writer Elie Wiesel, himself a former prisoner in Buchenwald, accompanied President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel to the site of the camp, he said that he had always imagined that he would return some day and tell his father’s ghost that the world had learned from the Holocaust and that it had become a “sacred duty” for people everywhere to prevent it from recurring. But, Wiesel continued, had the world actually learned anything, “there would be no Cambodia, and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.”

Wiesel was right: The world has learned very little. But this has not stopped it from pontificating much. The Obama administration’s National Security Strategy Paper, issued in May 2010, exemplifies this tendency. It asserts confidently that “The United States is committed to working with our allies, and to strengthening our own internal capabilities, in order to ensure that the United States and the international community are proactively engaged in a strategic effort to prevent mass atrocities and genocide.” And yet again, we are treated to the promise, “never again.” “In the event that prevention fails,” the report states, “the United States will work both multilaterally and bilaterally to mobilize diplomatic, humanitarian, financial, and — in certain instances — military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities.”

Of course, this is not strategy, but a promise that, decade in and decade out, has proved to be empty. For if one were to evaluate these commitments by the results they have produced so far, one would have to say that all this “proactive engagement” and “diplomatic, financial, and humanitarian mobilization” has not accomplished very much. No one should be surprised by this. The U.S. is fighting two wars and still coping (though it has fallen from the headlines) with the floods in Pakistan, whose effects will be felt for many years in a country where America’s security interests and humanitarian relief efforts are inseparable. At the same time, the crisis over Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons capability is approaching its culmination. Add to this the fact that the American economy is in shambles, and you do not exactly have a recipe for engagement. The stark fact is that “never again” has never been a political priority for either the United States or the so-called international community . . . . Nor, despite all the bluff talk about moral imperatives backed by international resolve, is there any evidence that it is becoming one.

Read the entire article

HT: Arts and Letters Daily


Analysis.

There is trend to call for handling International Law problems with what can be described as a 911 mentality (phone number - not date.)

If there is a problem in a town some one calls the 911 and a policeman is sent, if he can’t handle it he calls for support, if the support can’t handle it perhaps a SWAT team or whatever. AFTER it is over the courts sort it out. The decisions to deploy the first policeman and the reinforcements based on nominal information.

Contrary wise, if there is an international situation that calls for military force, presumable and quite often there is considerable discovery discussion and calculation as to the practical and moral implications of the intervention BEFORE deployment, even if it held behind closed doors. Hopefully the tenets of the International Law Just War Doctrine were consulted.

More and more, there is a call for international problems to be handled on a 911 basis. In this case, the first preliminary reports of a genocide cause troops to deploy. In Rwanda this would have saved mnany lives. But it would be awfully easy for ordinary street riots or civil unrest to be inadvertently or tactically elevated to “incipient Genocide” and force deployed and used only to find out it wasn‘t justified. In a police 911 situation force is deployed in the confidence that the police can deal with any opposition, but applied to the international community it would mean a policy of going to war before asking if the war can be won.

I think there are things that can be done prevent Genocide and move toward it's elimnation, but making a promise of "Never Again" with no intent or willingness to enforce it is useless.

My Genocide Topic

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Author David Rieff is a New York-based writer and policy analyst who has written extensively about humanitarian aid and human rights. He is the author of eight books, including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis and At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, and is currently writing a book on the global food crisis
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Roe vs Wade "Jenny Change Your Mind"

Audio on this clip is NOT work safe
See Also:

Cause Not Harm
Roe vs. Wade - Choice
When Oh Lord When
Criss Cross: Democrats Republicans and Abortion

Crisis Pregnancy Resources

I Have A Dream

I HAVE A DREAM
By Dr. Martin L. King Jr.
[Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963]

When we lose his dream we are lost!




I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

James Chapter Two: Show No Partiality

In the New Testament reading for this Sunday James takes the Church to task for showing partiality.

My brethren, show no partiality as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man with gold rings and in fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, "Have a seat here, please," while you say to the poor man, "Stand there," or, "Sit at my feet," have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brethren. Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? (James 2:1-5)


I can see it now:

James visits a modern American parish. A couple comes in wearing nice suits and the usher takes them to a pew in the front of the Church. Some people come in wearing faded and ripped blue jeans and the usher puts them in the dark corner in the back.

James starts off with “show no partiality!” Some one points out, “Uuuggghh, excuse me Jimbaby - the couple in the front is barely getting buy and got there suits from the St Vincent DePaul Society. The ones in the back are the richest people in town wearing pre-faded and pre-ripped blue jeans bought at Needless Markups”.

When James the Righteous recovers his poise, he intones: “Show no partiality!”



James is challenging us several ways.

First there is: Justice the moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbor. Justice toward God is called the "virtue of religion." Justice toward men disposes one to respect the rights of each and to establish in human relationships the harmony that promotes equity with regard to persons and to the common good. The just man, often mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures, is distinguished by habitual right thinking and the uprightness of his conduct toward his neighbor. "You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor." (Lev 19:15) "Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven." (Col 4:1)Catechism 1807

Notice that Justice is an attitude, a disposition not a state of being or program. The ushers show justice when they show no partiality because wealth or race or irrelevant categories. Of course some categories are relevant such as seeing that a family sits together. How could there be an objective state of being where it could be measured because some people come later and earlier and the ushers could not be expected to know that much detail about every one in the parish. A program that said we will sit the same number of poor middle and wealthy in every pew would require showing extreme partiality and be unjust to families since it is there due to be able to sit together. Showing partiality against the poor, by those in authority, is especially unjust.





Second we are also called to a preferential love for the poor.

In its various forms—material deprivation, unjust oppression, physical and psychological illness and death—human misery is the obvious sign of the inherited condition of frailty and need for salvation in which man finds himself as a consequence of original sin. This misery elicited the compassion of Christ the Savior, who willingly took it upon himself and identified himself with the least of his brethren. Hence, those who are oppressed by poverty are the object of a preferential love on the part of the Church which, since her origin and in spite of the failings of many of her members, has not ceased to work for their relief, defense, and liberation through numerous works of charity which remain indispensable always and everywhere.

Beginning with the Old Testament, all kinds of juridical measures (the jubilee year of forgiveness of debts, prohibition of loans at interest and the keeping of collateral, the obligation to tithe, the daily payment of the day-laborer, the right to glean vines and fields) answer the exhortation of Deuteronomy (15:11): "For the poor will never cease out of the land; therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land.'" Jesus makes these words his own: "The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me."(John 12:8) In so doing he does not soften the vehemence of former oracles against "buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals . . .," (Amos 8:6) but invites us to recognize his own presence in the poor who are his brethren.Catechism 2448 -9

This not to be partial to the poor but to see that first that they have what is justly theirs and refrain from doing things that will hurt the poor. Secondly because we are brothers and sisters in Christ and we help the poor as we can but never by committing an injustice against another.



Remember:


Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him?




See also:

What is Social Justice
Scripture Posts
Social Justice Posts