Wednesday, June 5, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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Criticizing his fellow Supreme Court justices’ decision to block part of an Indiana law that banned abortion based on sex, race or disability, Clarence Thomas performed a public service: He brought two competing historical narratives into contact with each other, on an issue where ideological arguments often pass like trains in the night.
The Thomas argument, common inside the anti-abortion movement but startling to many, is that the present “reproductive rights” regime may effectively extend older eugenic efforts to reduce populations deemed unfit. His dissent cited the eugenic inclinations of progressive icons like Margaret Sanger, while pointing out that today’s abortion rates are highest among populations — racial minorities and the disabled — that the older eugenicists hoped to cull.
This argument prompted multiple rejoinders. First, that many past progressives were racist but today’s pro-choice progressivism isn’t, and it is a “genetic fallacy” to link the two. Second, that the original eugenicists, Sanger included, did not usually favor abortion, so it’s a mistake to connect their views to the pro-choice case. Third, that the original eugenicists wanted governments to practice “collective biosocial engineering,” while the contemporary effects Thomas decries are the result of dispersed individual choices.
It is, indeed, far too simple to say, “Margaret Sanger was a Social Darwinist, therefore Planned Parenthood is eugenicist today.” Instead, it’s useful to divide progressive reproductive policy into three historical stages, with attitudes changing substantially but older impulses lingering in each new dispensation.
The first stage is the eugenic period, defined by a starkly racist confidence in efforts to engineer a fitter species. In this era, Sanger’s emphasis on empowering women was a minor theme, subordinated to male dreams of racial engineering. And both the would-be engineers and the Sangerian feminists often opposed abortion.
This stage ended with World War II and revulsion against Nazi eugenics. Thereafter, forced-sterilization policies lingered, but the broader progressive program shifted from genetic improvement to population control — with the promise that poorer communities and countries could be uplifted, not just culled, by reducing birthrates, and that such reductions would save the world from famine, plague and war.
This program was still male-dominated, but women’s rights arguments slowly became more important. There was less overt, but plenty of tacit, racism. Support for abortion increased for feminist and population-controlling reasons, with the latter (and the racism) contributing to support for authoritarian population policies in Africa and Asia.
The legalization of abortion in America happened in the transition from this second dispensation to the third, contemporary one, in which feminist arguments predominate and reproductive policy is understood in terms of female liberty and general sexual emancipation. Which is why, in those 1970s debates over abortion, you can see both arguments at work — with what Ruth Bader Ginsburg once described as a desire to subsidize abortions for “populations that we don’t want to have too many of” coexisting with her own rights-of-woman arguments.
In this transition, the line between the two kinds of pro-choice arguments was blurrier than today’s progressives like to acknowledge. But still, that was almost 50 years ago: Today, feminist arguments are dominant, population-control arguments are in relative abeyance, and the pro-choice consensus officially abjures both racism and authoritarian eugenics.
However: In any other area, the left would look at a history like this and ask whether those formal convictions are the only thing that matters, or whether the eugenic past still exerts a structural influence on the present. And in any other area of policy, Thomas’ point about how legal abortion appears to act in racist and eugenic ways would be taken as an indicator that something more than just emancipation is at work.
Yes, in their theoretical self-conception, pro-choice institutions are neutral custodians of the right to choose. In theory, the genetic-screening industry exists only to provide information. In theory, the high abortion rate in black America is just the result of countless individual decisions.
But in practice, liberal technocracy still has a “solve poverty by cutting birthrates” bias inherited from a population-panic age, and abortion-rights rhetoric still has a way of sliding into Malthusian fears about too many poor kids in foster care. In practice, the medical system encourages abortion in response to disability. In practice, abortion clinics are not in the adoption business — and the disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates is shaped by that reality and others, not just by free choice.
None of this tells us whether abortion should be legal.
Nor does any of this imply that social conservatives are paladins of racial justice.
But the complicated history and the contemporary patterns are still important signposts — pointing toward a more skeptical view of progressivism’s progress and away from the all-good-things-are-liberal-things take that many of Thomas’ critics instinctively believe.
Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.
