The Eugenics Mindset Lives
WARNING: This post has very disturbing content.
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If you thought eugenics permanently lost its luster after World War II, this will be a rude awakening.
Blogged-out Saturday was interrupted because of a startling item that was in Best of the Web at OpinionJournal.com yesterday. I missed it in the skim-through because the segment title (”Swift Note Veterans Against Youth”) gave little indication of what it was really about (HTs to FreeRepublic and World Net Daily).
This is what it’s about: On January 6, 1993 (the letter’s 1992 date is a clear typo), Ron Weddington, who along with his wife Sarah represented “Jane Roe,” now known to be Norma McCorvey, in the Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion through the US, wrote a letter to soon-to-be President Clinton advising him to liberalize abortion laws in the name of what can only be seen as eugenics.
The letter reveals so much about the actual mental outlook of one of the proabortion movement’s leading lights that commenting on the horrors contained herein is unnecessary.
The documents below were obtained by Judicial Watch and published in a 5-meg PDF document called “The RU-486 Files” (what is presented here is at the report’s final five pages). Though not at this blog, I have criticized Judicial Watch frequently in the past for being unfocused and publicity-hungry. Though I think those criticisms remain valid, I have to acknowledge that what they have unearthed is monstrously important (literally), and to congratulate them for including it in their report.
The first note is to Mr. Clinton’s assistant, Betsey Wright, who wrote an instruction to file it. That’s important to note, because although there is no direct indication that anyone in the Clinton Administration shared Mr. Weddington’s views, neither did they dismiss him out of hand as an outlier.
That is followed by a four-page letter to Mr. Clinton. I apologize for the lack of clarity in the document; the clarity in JW’s original source is not that good, and more was lost in the translation from PDF to JPEG. Although I will be trying to create better ones myself, anyone who can create clearer images is welcome to send them to me.
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UPDATE: I do have a question — Doesn’t Weddington’s letter make Bill (”That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do”) Bennett look like a saint by comparison? Weddington clearly believes that eliminating “undesirables” is none of the things Bennett mentions.
UPDATE 2, May 16: Life News reports the following Judicial Watch comments:
Commenting on the letter, Judicial Watch said it was surprised the letter was not thrown away or put in a file for unsolicited comments. Instead, it was included in files used to get RU 486 approved by the FDA.
“On the contrary, the Weddington letter is, chronologically and philosophically, the foundation document for the Clinton RU-486 files,” the group said.
Wow! Same thoughts as Margaret Sanger just decades later. Disgusting.
Comment by LargeBill — May 13, 2006 @ 11:49 pm
Stand To Reason has a well-reasoned and short response to the Weddington letter that you might find worth reading.
Comment by Puddle Pirate — May 14, 2006 @ 2:41 am
#2, thanks. I think the STR post totally avoids the contempt Weddington has for those he considers his lessers, the fact that he wants to take control (with “persuasion,” of course) of their reproductive processes, and the incredible pessimism that pervades his thought processes.
Weddington wants fewer of these “problem children,” literally, and is willing to go to great lengths to make sure as few as possible are born. And he sees the good in the 30 million death toll of abortion to that point (essentially “think of all the poverty avoided”).
STR is cutting Weddington way too much slack.
Comment by TBlumer — May 14, 2006 @ 2:57 am
Needless to say, Weddington’s perspective does not represent that of conventional liberals. If anything he is on the extreme left of an extreme fringe of the left.
I’d say that his assertion is equally as reprehensible to Bennett’s. In the conversation in question, Bennett responded to a caller’s statement that we would have a larger pool of contributors to Social Security if Roe vs. Wade were decided in the opposite and the state’s rights were preserved. Bennett addressed this statement that such speculation is flawed and offered that if you aborted every African American fetus, the crime rate would go down. Bennett derived this information from Steven’s Leavitt’s book, Freakonomics. Now is Bennett racist for making that statement? Yes. In Freakonomics, Leavitt proferred that children born to single women who live in urban areas are more prone to become criminals. He states that race is irrelevant. Bennett associated single women in urban areas with “black”. Which by it’s definition, is racist.
Comment by Kevin irwin — May 14, 2006 @ 9:22 am
#4, I am not as convinced as you are that Weddington is on the far fringe.
“Conventional” liberals IMO don’t appreciate how differently elite liberals’ thought processes are. Another example is columnist “Ask Amy” Richards, the feminist who when faced with the prospect of having triplets, aborted two of them, and wrote a full-length column in the NY Times about HER ordeal. The column isn’t available, but a large part of it, with editorializing by the blogger, is here:
http://asmallvictory.net/archives/007236.html
Point being, the liberal bastion NYT didn’t think the idea of someone having this kind of selective abortion was too fringe to print; no, they gave her probably 1,000 words. The NYT has also printed letters from Weddington espousing pieces of what is in his letter to Clinton, and didn’t think his opinions too kooky for the “newspaper of record” not to print.
The text of the Bennett call is here, which I’m going to copy for posterity:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200509280006
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CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I’ve read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn’t — never touches this at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they’re all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don’t know what the costs would be, too. I think as — abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.
CALLER: I don’t know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.
BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don’t know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don’t know. I mean, it cuts both — you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well –
CALLER: Well, I don’t think that statistic is accurate.
BENNETT: Well, I don’t think it is either, I don’t think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don’t know. But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
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I think it’s a silly to assume based on the above that Bennett thinks that “every black baby” born in the US is born in poverty, which is where you would have to go to successfully hang the racist tag on him. He was going out there on a what-if tangent that was not racist, just dumb. Points:
A. He knows Walter Williams the legendary George Mason economist and substitute host on Rush.
B. He knows Williams is black.
C. He knows Williams has kids.
D. He knows Williams isn’t poor.
E. His statement would include aborting Williams’ kids.
F. Therefore his “every black baby” statement wasn’t exclusively about poor black babies.
It is unfortunately true, and therefore not racist, that blacks commit a disproportionate share of violent crime in the US. FBI stats show it.
Comment by TBlumer — May 14, 2006 @ 9:45 am
The confusion that people have with Bennett’s statement is partly why Bennett is a poor choice for radio. Bennett foolishly thinks his audience is smart enough to understand the point he is trying to make. Unfortunately, most people only heard the part of the consersation which would seem inflammatory on its own. The media could easily have read the entire exchange and realized he was taking a point to an extreme angle to show that ends justifying the means is a bad reason to support abortion. The media intentionally misled people by parsing the statement down to means something different.
Comment by LargeBill — May 14, 2006 @ 10:04 am
#4, also, Weddington is openly advocating eliminating the underclass over time, while Bennett spoke in terms things like that being “ridiculous” and “morally reprehensible” — night vs. day.
Comment by TBlumer — May 14, 2006 @ 10:16 am
#4, to my surprise the Amy Richards column is avaiable at The New York Times if you’re registered:
HERE
Comment by TBlumer — May 14, 2006 @ 10:22 am
#6, LB, you are absolutely right. I was listening that morning (Bennett was still on 1160 AM) and as soon as the call went down the “what-if” path, you knew what was going to happen. In hindsight, it was almost as if he was set-up.
I like Bennett, but have concerns about Salem Communications.
Comment by Anon — May 14, 2006 @ 2:58 pm
Not So Far From Margaret Sanger After All
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the founder of Planned Parenthood, I shall let Margaret Sanger speak for herself…
Trackback by A Face Made 4 Radio, A Voice Made 4 the Internet — May 16, 2006 @ 12:19 pm