Justice Thomas Instructs on Eugenics

"The use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical. The foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement. That movement developed alongside the American eugenics movement. And significantly, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause.

Margaret Sanger

This case highlights the fact that abortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation. From the beginning, birth control and abortion were promoted as means of effectuating eugenics. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was particularly open about the fact that birth control could be used for eugenic purposes. These arguments about the eugenic potential for birth control apply with even greater force to abortion, which can be used to target specific children with unwanted characteristics. Even after World War II, future Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher and other abortion advocates endorsed abortion for eugenic reasons and promoted it as a means of controlling the population and improving its quality. As explained below, a growing body of evidence suggests that eugenic goals are already being realized through abortion."

--Thomas in Box v Planned parenthood.

Justice Thomas

Scholars and educators also rushed toward a eugenic future with enthusiasm. Harvard, Columbia, Wisconsin, Northwestern and other universities added eugenics to their curricula. Booker T. Washingt, who harbored the belief that self improvement could be passed along genetically, invited Davenport to speak at the Tuskegee Institute.

--Danile Okrent, "The Guarded Gate"

In  his opinion in Box v Planned Parenthood, Justice Thomas says Planned Parenthood is a vile organization, determined to use abortion to eliminate Black babies as a way of maintaining the racial purity of America. He particularly savages Margaret Sanger, who was addressing the needs for contraception in the early 20th century. He does include Alan Guttmacher, who was still active in the 1950's.

Of course, Thomas is an amateur historian, and is apparently unaware of the tenure of the times in which Sanger and even as late as Guttmacher, functioned. He knows only what he wants to know about the waters in which Sanger swam.

When we think about the recent criticisms of Justice John Stevens, attacks which focus on his willingness to admit he came to his conclusions based on facts, experiences and thinking which occur outside legal cases, one should think immediately of Justice Thomas, who like the "orginalist" Scalia, refers to history extensively, to justify his opinions, and that history is a selective reading of sources, often biased. 

The problem is, history is one long argument and you can never have enough information. Just when you think you know something, another piece of information arises. (Think of Abraham Lincoln, who has been knocked from his pedestal with the case of the 38 Dakota Sioux--he signed the order for their execution, the largest mass execution in American history: Turns out the people of Minnesota presented him with the demand to execute over 300, and the ultimatum that he execute Indians or they would take the law into their own hands and  kill Sioux men, women and children, without the help of the government if he did not sign on.)

Reading Okrent's illuminating book on immigration,"The Guarded Gate", you find long chapters  devoted to the eugenics movement in America, which formed the basis for an attempt to discern who we should want to allow to live in the United States.

It is astonishing how thoroughly "eugenic" beliefs permeated the "intelligentsia" of the country, and in England, where Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin's son, and a host of intellectual luminaries signed on.

Underlying the eugenics thing was the idea, based in an agrarian society, that you could improve "stock" by selective breeding, as you do with cattle and horses, and that over time, given the immense wisdom and perspective of the educated, intelligent and right sort of person (Theodore Roosevelt's phrase) you could produce a stronger, more vital, successful and dominant nation.

Willet Hays, of the American Breeders Association, would give men and women an eleven digit number so that they could chose to mate with "those of equal genetic excellence." (Susan Patton, the Princeton grad and mother of Princeton grads echoed this sentiment when she advised Princeton women to marry Princeton men, who were most likely to be "worthy" of them.) There was a Better Babies Bureau which sponsored competitions and Charles Davenport, the Harvard physician and "eugenics scholar" advised the BBB to judge babies by their heredity as much as by what they could see in front of them.

Peter Kropotkin 

There were, of course, detractors, who questioned whether men were wise enough to actually know what "good" genes are, and the idea of genes was still fairly rudimentary. Peter Kropotkin, a wonderful character, a descendant of the Russian czars Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible, who self exiled to London, and who had been brought up in an Moscow home with 75 servants and a country estate with 100 more, attending a meeting of eugenicists rose to ask them, when they proposed sterilizing imbeciles, whom the eugenicists proposed to sterilize: "Those who produced degenerates in slums, or those who produced them in palaces?"

Bad Stock, Inferior Race

And a Methodist pastor from Minnesota, Samuel G. Smith,  noted that "genius was the surprise of history" noting Lincoln, Michelangelo and Luther arose from ordinary, undistinguished families. Nurture and environment mattered to the assessment: "Shakespeare could have done nothing among the Hottentots, or Beethoven among the Alaskans."

Samuel G. Smith

But then he got to the essence of the argument: The world, he said, has "suffered more from the vices of the rich than from those of the poor."

This struck at the heart of the eugenics movement, which flowered from the drawing rooms of the successful, the rich and the prominent. These people believed either tacitly or overtly that criminality, poverty was genetically inherited, and that whatever it was they had inherited, made them successful. ("The rich are different," as Fitzgerald said. "Yes," Hemingway replied, "They have more money.")

The cream rises to the top, and the rest is used and some spoiled milk must simply be discarded.

All this was so pervasive to assail Margaret Sanger for having dabbled in this thinking is like attacking George Washington and his doctors for believing bad vapors caused disease, before the day of microbiology, Semmelweis, Lister and germ theory. And how do we know what people actually thought? Was Shakespeare an anti Semite? No surprise if he were, given the prevalence in Elizabethan England, but the Jew in "The Merchant of Venice" asks, "Am I not a man? If you prick me, do I not bleed?" Not the question you would expect from a thorough going hater. Hate depends on de humanization, and yet Shakespeare gives the Jew that line.

Again, what we know about historical figures, what they believed and even what they did is shroud in the webs of history.

I lived through history--the war in Vietnam, the protests, the Civil Rights era, the moon shot and the reaction among Americans who thought it arrogant to shoot for the moon while our cities burned in race riots--and what I read of that "history" now always leaves me shaking my head--yes, that was true, that happened, but that does not tell the whole story.

So it is with Margaret Sanger and Justice Thomas, who rages against eugenics, which deserves to be railed against, but in his outrage, he neglects the "what else"?

Of course, in the case Box v Planned Parenthood, the whole question of history is misused. What does it matter what the origin story of Planned Parenthood is if it is not that today? Ford Motor company was founded by a man who wrote "The International Jew" and who traveled to Berlin so Hitler could pin a medal on his chest. Name a company which existed in the 1930's and you come up with a Nazi, from Mercedes to Volkswagen to American companies now owned by German conglomerates. 

Corporations, and Planned Parenthood, dear justice, are not people.