Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on birth-control funding as part of the $825 billion stimulus package: "Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government."
Eugenics was a social policy pushed heavily by the academic and political elite prior to the end of World War II. The practice was used to categorize some people as unfit for reproduction based on their poverty status, IQ, or skin color, among other speculative traits.
For Nancy Pelosi to suggest that part of a package meant for stimulation of our economy, kill off the "undesirables" of society is absurd and ridiculous. Exactly who gets government help in contraceptive and abortion funding? The poor do. Planned Parenthood buildings are primarily constructed in poor inner-city neighborhoods.
To be pushing an agenda of government funded death and prevention on procreation in order to restore the sociological and productive order of things, seems to be a bit of a throwback to an uglier time in Germany. To be duping women into doing it by telling them it is their "choice" and they deserve to not contribute to the gene pool is even worse.
Valerie,
ReplyDeleteDid you write this? I don't see a byline so I'm going to address this to you. Please forgive me if this was just something you posted from somewhere else.
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Are you seriously calling this a eugenic approach? Contraceptives allow women to choose whether to become pregnant or not. They don't kill off anyone. Furthermore, no one has even suggested that contraceptives be forced on anyone. They are simply something that some people think women should be able to CHOOSE if they don't want to have any children right now. How is that a bad thing? Do we want people who don't want children or don't feel ready to have children to wind up pregnant and in need of (rather expensive) care?
Contraceptives don't prevent women from contributing to the gene pool unless you prevent women from opting not to use them. I haven't seen anything from Pelosi that even hints at the idea that we should be doing that. Besides, if you think that preventing women from contributing to the gene pool is such a horrendous thing, then how do you feel about forcing women to have babies? Is that any better? If making contraceptives available prevents women from having babies, then we can say that making them unavailable forces them to have children.
While I have a lot of feelings about how Planned Parenthood operates, it's absurd to assume that they are only used by the poor. It can take months to get a new patient appointment with the majority of gynecologists in town. However, Planned Parenthood is one of the few places that will accept walk-ins. If a woman or girl is in need of gynecological services for the first time in her life, it probably isn't a GOOD thing if she has to wait months before she can be seen.
If people are going to complain about the government helping to make contraceptives available to those who want them, then they have no room to complain about how much of their tax money goes towards the educational system, the food stamp programs, the welfare programs, and all those other programs like these.