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.

 ********
 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.
********

 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

Genocide in Cambodia?

Douglas Levine tells us of his recent visit to Cambodia at at NRO Online.


I went to Cambodia primarily to see the ancient temples of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. They were built in the 12th century, when Angkor was the capital of the Khmer empire and the largest city in the world, with a population of one million. I had first read about Angkor Wat in a Buddhist-art class in 1972. By then, Angkor Wat was off limits to foreign visitors, shrouded in mystery and veiled by war. By some miracle, it and the other temples in the region were untouched by the long years of war. Several hundred years of neglect in the jungle have taken a toll, however, and in recent years many foreign universities and governments have sent experts and aid to help in the restoration of these spectacular wonders of the ancient world.

snip

The other reason to visit Cambodia was to see the killing fields. During their five years in power, the Khmer Rouge killed somewhere between 1 and 2 million people, out of a population that had stood around 10 million. This didn’t come to light until after the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and drove the Khmer Rouge out of Phnom Penh. Pictures of piles of bodies and bones, reminiscent of Auschwitz, began to appear in the world press. Since then, many details have emerged about the Khmer Rouge’s killing spree. Everyone refers to this as the Cambodian genocide.

snip

But calling these murders “genocide” troubles me.

Cambodia is now and was then one of the most ethnically unitary countries in the world: 95 percent of all Cambodians are ethnically Khmer; the remaining 5 percent include Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotians, Hmong, Cham, and others. And 95 percent of all Cambodians, of whatever ethnicity, are Buddhist. Most of the killings were Khmer on Khmer, although the Khmer Rouge did also target Cambodia’s very small Cham Muslim minority.

The term “genocide” historically refers to the mass extermination of a race or ethnicity, as with the Turks and the Armenians, or the Germans and the Jews, or the Serbs and the Bosnians. It doesn’t seem to fit what happened in Cambodia, except for the scale of the slaughter.


He has a point. The UN convention defines Genocide as: In the present Convention, genocide 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

Note that economic and political groups are not listed. They were removed from earlier drafts because the communist Soviet Union had murdered millions in political and economic groups in the previous 20 years and they were not going to put themselves in trouble or limit future policy options.

The Communist Khmer Rouge was only doing what had been specifically excluded from the definition.

Levine continues
Why then do Cambodians and the world call the mass murders by the Khmer Rouge “genocide”? I can think of several possible reasons.

snip

However, I suspect that the most important reason for the usage worldwide is that many people in the international media, international agencies, and international NGOs (not to mention academia) are reluctant to face up to the crimes committed by Communism in the name of equality. To do so might call into question the weight attached by them to equality as the most important social value and undermine the multicultural faith that evil is predominantly the product of inequality, racism, ethnic hatred, or religious fanaticism. That cannot be permitted, so such crimes must be either ignored or mislabeled. And, of course, the remaining Communist regimes in the world are only too happy to cooperate in characterizing the killing fields as the products of irrational paranoia on the part of Pol Pot and his gang rather than the perfectly rational result of the quest for perfect equality.

The Khmer Rouge leadership has been charged and tried for Genocide. It seems the Khmer Rouge left documents where they mentioned by name several sub-groups that are protected by the convention, totaling a few percent of those killed. Gregory H. Stanton of Genocide Watch seems very excited at finding a technicality to charge the Khmer Rouge with Genocide. This however only obscures the source of the tragedy. It was not a crime of racial or ethnic hatred, but a calculated policy to implement a political program.

To prevent recurrences we need to understand the actual sources and recognize that nice sounding political programs, not racial or ethnic hatred, that can only be implanted with gross human rights violations, are the problem. It is always necessary to look beyond the idealistic explanation; and ask can this actully promote, and be implemented with, respect to human dignity and human rights.


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