Today Mississippi votes on a “personhood” amendment. Yesterday victims of a sterilization program in North Carolina spoke out on “Rock Center with Brian Williams”. These two articles strike me as: one) they are both about reproductive rights, but two) they are also both about “personhood”.
“North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government run eugenics program. By the 1960s, tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized as a result of these programs.
Eugenics was a scientific theory that grew in popularity during the 1920s. Eugenicists believed that poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were traits that were inherited. To eliminate those society ills and improve society’s gene pool, proponents of the theory argued that those that exhibited the traits should be sterilized. Some of America’s wealthiest citizens of the time were eugenicists including Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble fortune and James Hanes of the hosiery company. Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists.
It began as a way to control welfare spending on poor white women and men, but over time, North Carolina shifted focus, targeting more women and more blacks than whites. A third of the sterilizations performed in North Carolina were done on girls under the age of 18. Some were as young as nine years old."
For the past eight years, North Carolina lawmakers have been working to find a way to compensate those involuntarily sterilized in the state between 1929 and 1974. During that time period, 7,600 people were sterilized in North Carolina. Of those who were sterilized, 85 percent of the victims were female and 40 percent were non-white.” (Rock Center, 7/11/11)
So what we have here is classic victimization. Women and minorities bore the brunt of the forced sterilizations, although anyone deemed “undesirable” would have fallen under the “guidance” of the governmental program. Suffice it to say none of the victims would have been the daughters of industrial or governmental officials, they were the wheat which meads out the judgment to the chaff.
It reminds me of abortion. “How pray tell is that?” The answer is obvious; the baby will drain the parent’s resources, the baby is unwanted, the baby is a psychological hardship, the baby will cause the mother to suffer physically, the baby is just like a good for nothing so and so that drains our society of all its goodness, like someone who would qualify for the eugenics program in North Carolina in the 1960’s.
The baby is not a result of miraculous conception. The baby is a result of two people having sex, unless it was conceived using In Vitro Fertilization which is also a eugenic process. People who are pro-choice should be pro-choice and recognize that 99% of the pregnancies aborted are simply incredibly cruel forms of birth control. Abortion is not actually pro-choice at all but an attempt to invalidate a choice; just as the powers that be seek to invalidate the lives of the victims of forced sterilization.
To sterilize a person is to extinguish that person from the infinity of time. I believe it is in the Midrash of the Jewish faith in which it is explained that to kill a person is not only to kill that individual but also all the persons of his or her lineage and so it is an incredibly grave matter, in other words every murderer is a serial killer with an infinite number of victims over an infinite number of lost generations. The state has tried to erase that person who was sterilized from the fabric of time. A mother who terminates her otherwise viable pregnancy faces the same reality; do you see how sick abortion is? It erases a son or daughter out of time for all eternity.
If one does not believe in the personhood of the baby in the womb then forced sterilization is a victimless crime. For what is taken from the individual but their fertility and fertility only means one thing, a womb will never grow money. What has been taken, as Governor Perdue also states, is more valuable than money it is our children.
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