HEARTLESS "CHOICE" AND NO "SOCIAL JUSTICE"

This is an election year. There will be lots of posturing for " choice" and "social justice." So let's just see how much social justice has come from legalized abortion on demand.

Since 1973, over 39 million children have been sacrificed on the altar of "choice." The abortion industry defends these abortions as serving a high moral purpose: "Every child, a wanted child," goes the Planned Parenthood slogan.

In their opinion, the "unwanted" child is better off being dead. They want to do the child a favor by aborting it. If the propagandists at Planned Parenthood were honest they would be saying: "Every unwanted child, a dead child." That at least would describe what the so-called "right to choose" is for. The principle of "wantedness" and the so-called "right to choose" cannot deliver social justice. Obviously, social justice is impossible if our right to life and our personhood are contingent upon somebody else wanting us to exist. "Every child, a wanted child" ultimately implies "every person, a wanted person." The next step is "every unwanted person, a dead person." And that's the end of liberty and justice.

The social injustice generated by abortion is evident when you look at who gets aborted. A statistical survey for the years 1994 and 1995 in the July/August 1996 issue of the journal Family Planning Perspectives reveals a heavy racial and ethnic bias.

Black women made up only 14% of women of childbearing age, but they had 31.1% of all abortions. Hispanic women constituted only 10.6% of that age group, but accounted for 20.2% of all abortions. Thus, these two minority groups alone suffered over 51% of all abortions, although they together represented less than 25% of women of childbearing age.

Does this mean that African-Americans and Hispanics are less pro- life than the general population? No.

This year, a Washington Post poll showed that 33% of Latinos thought that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and 24% wanted abortion to be illegal in most cases. Surveys of the attitudes of African-Americans have produced similar results. For example, in a 1988 survey by the National Opinion Research Center, 62% of African-Americans said that abortion should be illegal. Thus the high abortion rates do not correlate with attitudes about abortion.

Now let's look at income. A short article in the October 18, 1999, issue of Forbes magazine provides figures from data supplied by Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher Institute. About 28% of abortions are done on women coming from households with incomes under $15,000. And another 29% of abortions are done on women with household incomes between $15,000 and $30,000. Thus 57% of abortions are done on low-income women.

These numbers come as no surprise when you remember that abortion advocacy in this country has its roots in eugenics. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, once remarked that "all our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class." While Planned Parenthood does not openly admit to its systemic prejudice against the poor and minorities, it admits that its "core clients" are "young women, low- income women, and women of color."

Decades ago, the American eugenics and birth control movement became engaged in a long-term campaign for population control that to this day targets the poor and the members of non-white races here and abroad. In the sixties, the population-control types cautiously began to advocate abortion as a means of birth control. Now the campaign is in full swing, with money flowing in by the hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars. Many of America's super-rich and their foundations are spending astonishing amounts of money to promote population control in developing countries. Unfortunately, these misguided private efforts are now massively aided by the power and money of the United States government.

After World War II, population control in developing countries was promoted as a means of securing America's access to raw materials in these countries. Under the Nixon administration, public moneys began to fund population-control programs run by the U.N. and private groups. Even though the Helms Amendment of 1973 prohibited the use of U.S. foreign assistance funds to pay for abortions or promote them, organizations performing abortions continued to get as much as 90% of their budget from the U.S. taxpayer.

The policy was changed during the Reagan/Bush administrations. In 1984, President Reagan instituted the "Mexico City Policy" that stopped the flow of funds to organizations performing and promoting abortion as a method of family planning. One of the first acts of the new Clinton-Gore administration was to rescind the Mexico City Policy in January 1993. Ever since, this administration has actively promoted abortion as a means of family planning and population control in developing countries.

On April 1, 1993, White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers told reporters that abortion was to be "part of the overall approach to population control." On May 11, 1993, State Department official Timothy Wirth told reporters that the administration was insisting on access to abortion as a reproductive choice and that foreign governments may not "hide behind the defense of sovereignty." This is nothing less than "cultural imperialism."

In a story dated January 22, 1994--the 21st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision--Steven Greenhouse reported in the New York Times that "Administration officials said that the population strategy was perhaps the most concrete sign of Vice President Al Gore's influence on foreign policy."

Al Gore subsequently led the U.S. delegation to the U.N.- sponsored International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. The large American delegation exerted relentless pressure on representatives from developing countries to accept abortion as family planning even when it was contrary to their laws, customs, and religions. The threat to withhold U.S. foreign aid money and funds from international bodies was used as a club.

They didn't succeed then and they didn't succeed at the follow-up conference that just recently concluded in New York, but they will try again and again to impose abortion on demand on every single country on this earth. Just think what they could accomplish in a Gore presidency with "earth-tone Al," the cultural imperialist, the most powerful man in the world.