Richard Spencer, the leader of the “alt-right” movement and a proud white supremacist, just provided the most damning defense of abortion I have ever encountered, and everyone should read it. If you believe abortion is a woman’s “right,” or that it is just a personal choice the government should stay out of – even if you are Pro-Life but consider it just another issue – you need to read what he said.
Jonathan van Maren offers a spot-on analysis here; feel free to skip the rest of this post and just read his instead.
The big problem with the Pro-Life movement, according to Spencer, is that it promotes human rights:
And so the anti-abortion crusade becomes this ‘human rights’ crusade… (the idea) that every being that is human has a right to life and so on. Well that’s not how we think… You are part of a community, you’re part of a family, you’re part of a collective. You do not have some human right, some abstract thing given to you by God or by the world or something like that. You’re part of a community and that’s where you gain your meaning or your rights. The anti-abortion crusade is often associated with family, the traditional family, but to be honest it’s descended into not just a human rights dogma but a kind of dysgenic “we are the world” dogma.
Did you get that? Well? Do we have human rights simply by virtue of being human, or do our rights depend on the opinion of someone else, or the decision of the group? If you support abortion in any circumstance, you have to place yourself in the latter camp. Also notice how the totalitarian right blends into the totalitarian left in that both ultimately dismiss the individual and value only the group.
Unborn humans are still humans. They don’t magically become homo sapiens when they exit the womb. Do their lives matter? The pro-abortion side says “that depends.” To them, an unborn child’s value is contingent upon the whims of the mother. If a pregnant woman is murdered in most states, it is considered a double homicide. But if a woman ends the life of the child growing inside her, it is simply a private decision.
As a culture, why should we care about the lives and rights of the unborn? They leave behind no friends to mourn them. Society has yet to invest in them; from an economic standpoint, they certainly consume more than they produce. The answer is that a human’s value is not determined by their productivity, intelligence, or social connections, but by virtue of the fact that we are all “endowed by our Creator” with the inalienable right to life.
In “alienating” the rights of some, we deny the rights of all. Either all lives matter, or no lives matter. “Some lives matter” may seem to work for a while, but it eventually leads to concentration camps and mass graves. The Nazis began their executions not with Jews but with the mentally and physically handicapped, individuals whose value was determined to be less than the cost of even allowing them to remain alive. World War II claimed the lives of 60 million human beings, most of whom were not Jewish. You may not personally mourn the loss of the unborn – fragile, helpless beings you never got the chance to meet – just as you may not personally mourn the shooting of an inner-city youth. But when one group’s rights are declared contingent upon the decisions of others, or when society offers only an indifferent shrug in the face of their slaughter, it inevitably diminishes the rights of all. A culture that tolerates or promotes abortion will also accept euthanasia, suicide, child abuse, and domestic violence. Instead of universal respect, the world becomes one in which, to quote Thucydides: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
According to Spencer, the abortion issue is “complicated” and not a “‘good or evil’ binary.” In his twisted world view, abortion is good when it is used to control the population of “undesirables” – for Spencer, the poor and minorities – but bad when it is used to control the reproduction of intelligent whites. Spencer bemoans the use of contraception by “highly intelligent career women” who should be passing on their superior genetics to advance the white race. He concludes:
We should recognize that the pro-life movement—this is not the alt-right… we should be genuinely suspicious of people who think in terms of human rights and who are interested in adopting African children and bringing them to this country and who get caught up on this issue… We want to be eugenic in the deepest sense of the word. Pro-lifers want to be radically dysgenic, egalitarian, multi-racial human rights thumpers—and they’re not us.
To echo Von Maren – no, we are not!
The Front Porch Philosopher 