The Dutch solution
By Alisa Craddock
web posted February 27, 2006
Holland is always on the cutting edge of progress in social issues. The age-of-consent (for sexual activity) in that country is 12 (unless an "interested party" files a complaint), euthanasia is practiced, supposedly observing a set of guidelines which require consent of the euthanized, but horror stories do emerge more and more frequently, and the aged, poor, and infirm feel compelled to carry little cards with them that say "Do not euthanize me" for fear some doctor will decide their quality of life is not good enough (for whom?) and compassionately end their life.
The latest forward thinking proposal coming out of Holland is mandatory abortion of unwanted children. (Of course, if you have to force the woman to abort a child, one is inclined to question who it is that doesn't want it.) The woman who is proposing this "debate" is Marianne van den Anker, who is the official in charge of Rotterdam's health and security portfolios. The communities she wishes to target are Antilleans and Arubans, She is specifically looking to target teenaged mothers, drug addicts and the mentally handicapped, and has a litany of "compassionate" reasons for her proposal, complete with a worst case scenario (in typical liberal fashion) with which to define the entire debate in order to defend what many of us regard as the reprehensible.
Isn't that what Norma McCorvey's lawyer did that resulted in the infamous Roe v. Wade ruling? McCorvey's lawyer said she was gang-raped, but in fact she was never gang-raped, or even raped at all, but that is the heart-wrenching story that was used to justify legalizing abortion and calling it a "right". It's easier to say you have a "right" not to be compelled to bear a child that is the result of so degrading a violation than it is to say you have a right to kill your child. The key is to manipulate peoples' compassion, fear and sense of outrage? Roe v. Wade became a license for wholesale infanticide because of compassion (supposedly) for a brutalized woman. But in fact it was on the agenda in any case. Preachings on population control and ecological awareness, and some wildly exaggerated figures about back-alley abortions and deaths from mutilated wombs had already paved the way for the inevitable. But how could you protest the decision in Roe v. Wade without looking like an ogre or a tyrant or a (religious) fanatic? That one might be accused of being uncompassionate is just intolerable.
Adolf Hitler understood the malleability of the conscience when he commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to make the euthanasia propaganda film "I Accuse," which launched his "compassionate" euthanasia program that eventually took out six million Jews, millions of Christians (3,000,000 Catholics, primarily, and other Christians in Poland alone), assorted mentally and physically handicapped persons, homosexuals, racial minorities, conscientious objectors...
And compassion for the children is the reason given by van den Anker, as well. In her view, children born to these ethnic mothers are at an unacceptable risk of being unloved and mistreated, resulting in roving Antillean street gangs who are perpetrating all kinds of mischief on the city. Her "worst case scenario" went like this: "What would you think of a 24-year old Antillean mother [she specifically stated the woman's ethnicity, as though these circumstances would be less horrendous if she were some other race] who visits the doctor, is 19 weeks pregnant, has three existing children, then abuses one of her other children in the hospital, before announcing to the doctor that she wishes to proceed with her pregnancy, even though she doesn't know who the father is, has no idea how she's going to raise another child, take care, feed and dress the child, and on top of that is HIV positive?" Her solution?--mandatory abortion and contraception. Reproductive "rights" apparently only means if you don't want to have kids, not if you do.
Van den Anker's proposal, actually, is right out of Margaret Sanger's The Pivot of Civilization, a book which I call the Mein Kampf of the population control movement. She starts out so compassionate toward these woman, slaves of the industrial revolution, bearing child after child, coming home from 12 hours of exhausting labor on the night shift in a factory, only to have to prepare food for her husband and 10 children before she can begin her housekeeping and maybe, finally, get a few hours of sleep before she has to get up and do it all again. Who would not be moved by their plight? And, to be fair, the plight was real. And Sanger was most eloquent in expressing her compassion for them.
But gradually she begins slipping in a word here or there that shows the underlying contempt she has for these people whom she regards as dysgenic stock, and who are breeding indiscriminately, and in much greater numbers than the intellectual elites of society who are now threatened with being overrun by them. The moron, feeble-minded, mentally defective, and the poverty-stricken, she maintains, must be prevented from overwhelming the population and polluting the gene pool. It's interesting to note that she claimed that her program for birth control "is not aiming to interfere in the private lives of poor people, to tell them how many children they should have, nor to sit in judgment upon their fitness to become parents. It aims, rather, to awaken responsibility, to answer the demand for a scientific means by which and through which each human life may be self-directed and self-controlled." But later, her true intentions are revealed: "The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type [my emphasis], especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise she is almost certain to bear imbecile children who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives…we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded." Who are considered "mentally defective" in Margaret's view? The net could be cast rather widely. "We should make sure…that mental defect is not concealed even in such dignified bodies as state legislatures and among those leaders who are urging men and women to reckless and irresponsible procreation." So that net was wide enough to take in political enemies and religious leaders as well. Eugenics, she believed, was " the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems. (Birth Control Review, Vol V (10) October 1921, page 5). Apparently van den Anker agrees with her .The pro-abortion forces in Europe and the rest of the world are no strangers to coercive contraception, abortion, and sterilization programs. The European Union is beginning to work on its member states that don't permit abortion (such as Poland and Ireland) to compel them to recognize it as a "human right", while in other countries, such as China, population control methods are mandatory, coercive and/or entrenched. China's notorious one child policy is a page right out of Sanger's own book, which identified especially Chinese (and blacks) as "dysgenic stock" (in Sanger's view). Since the Chinese can only have one child, and male children are more valuable to the parents, infanticide of female children is a common occurrence, to such an extent that there is now an imbalance in the ratio of women to men. It is not unthinkable that at some future date, the Chinese army will come screaming out of China, conquering its neighbors so it can replenish its population of women.
In Central and South America, mandatory sterilization programs have been used (as in Peru in the mid-nineties), sometimes without the knowledge of those being sterilized. Often food and medicines have been withheld by the population control organs of the UN unless the countries accepted "reproductive health" programs. In El Salvador, for example, in 2001, there was a massive and devastating earthquake. The UN would only give relief aid to their people if the government promised to institute programs for "reproductive health" (which always means abortion) and promote the use of abortifacient pills. Many of these countries are predominantly Catholic. Recently some in the government of the Philipines tried to enact a program similar to China's one-child policy. It failed for lack of support, but I'm sure those who want to see it happen will persist. In addition, the EU now is trying to force its member states to deny the conscience clause that would enable doctors to refuse to perform abortions. The "EU Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights" (E xperts?...) argues that a doctor's right to refuse on religious grounds has limits. "Indeed the right to religious conscientious objection may conflict with other rights, also recognized under international law. The indication is that if a woman wants an abortion and Doctor A is the only one available, Doctor A would be compelled to perform the abortion, because the woman's "right" to an abortion may not be sacrificed to the right of the doctor to refuse to perform abortions. Of course the reverse doesn't apply.
The problem in Holland is not an isolated one. The ironic part is that unwed pregnancy increased when sex education and "reproductive health centers" were established, and crime increased as more and more children grew up without fathers. The assumption was, I think, that women would "choose" to have an abortion under those trying circumstances, but if they did not, the state had an obligation to step in (in Sanger's opinion) and compel them to do so, and to accept mandatory sterilization. It is not widely known that at the dawn of last century, thousands of American citizens were sterilized in the United States which tried to put into practice some of Sanger's eugenics ideas.
The Margaret Sanger solution hasn't worked. It only degrades our sense of the dignity of human life and lowers the bar on what we will find acceptable as means of culling the herd that is the horrible consequence of those policies. Sanger called charity a great evil, because it enabled continued breeding of the "unfit" and prevented the so-called defective offspring from dying. But her solution, readily available contraceptives and abortion on demand, has not fixed the social problems, has in fact made them worse. Fifty four percent of abortions are performed on women and girls who were using a birth control method that failed. And in the years since Roe v. Wade, and with the institution of welfare entitlement programs, and with the militant saturation of our culture with sexual images and opportunities, unwed pregnancy has increased to such a degree that our prisons are now full of men and women who grew up without fathers. The conclusion one has to draw is that society's problems are not caused by irresponsible breeding of poor people, but by the breakdown of the family, and Sanger's policies are anti-family to an extreme degree.
Margaret Sanger believed "The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." (The Woman Rebel, Vol 1(1), 1922). But I am inclined to believe that when we abandon a belief in the sanctity of human life, when we try to eliminate suffering by eliminating those who suffer, we find the greatest casualty is our own ability to feel compassion, or even the ability to want to feel it. If we continue on this path, we may be aborting our own humanity. 
Alisa Craddock is a Library Technical Assistant at a state university, a convert to Catholicism, and describes herself as a Christian Libertarian. She may be contacted at acrock43_j@yahoo.com.