By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign

By Ann Famer, hardback $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8132-1530-3, http://cuapress.cua.edu/, 421 pages.

“Hitler warred openly with people and their fertility, while in democracies population controllers have moved incrementally and employed stealth.”

Ann Farmer's above words reflect her successful argument that abortion “rights” originated not in feminism but in eugenics.

By Their Fruits powerfully testifies to the uncomfortably close relationship – philosophically, spiritually, and ideologically – between the Nazis and American and British eugenics supporters. Feminists had little-to-nothing to do with the decades-long fight that eugenics-supporters raged against society from the 1930s onwards to incrementally increase population control and to put final control of family life in the hands of the state.

Eugenics, as seen with the Nazis, reverses the Judeo-Christian view of things. Rather than protecting the poor, the Culture of Death eugenics society kills them off, whether at life's beginning or near the end. By Their Fruits shows abortion as just one arm of the eugenics movement. Not surprisingly, eugenics supporters in Britain began to talk about euthanasia soon after abortion's legalization.

Farmer understands well modern philosophy's contribution to this spiritual and ethical debacle, especially espoused by utilitarianism. Utilitarians focus on the usefulness, especially economic, of a person or thing. Eugenics, hiding behind abortion “rights,” focus on the potentially enormous financial costs to society over the lifetime of a disabled person. The Nazis had the same concern, wondering why the old and the disabled were allowed to eat the bread that should have been going to the soldiers and mothers of Germany.

Farmer also points out that, in addition to the changed values from Judeo-Christian to utilitarian, the meaning of compassion has also changed for the worse. Abortion of the disabled saves society money and the disabled person decades of suffering. The person is “compassionately” put out of misery. Yet who decides whether someone should be aborted for these reasons? Who says that a person who will suffer should necessarily be put out of their suffering? Why is suffering not a dignified part of human life?

The abortion and eugenics campaigns were built on lies, lies, and more lies. First, as mentioned, abortion hid the greater and real agenda of eugenics; second, pro-abortion campaigners grossly inflated the number of 'backstreet abortions' before the legalization of the late sixties; third, campaigners asserted that poor, lower-class women wanted (and already often sought) abortions, when in reality upper class women were the greatest abortion users; forth, campaigners equaled abortion to compassion for poor, lower-class women, when in fact the main abortion campaigners were mostly upper-class men and women who sneered at the poor and were hoping to use abortion to limit the number of the uneducated masses being born.

Campaigners also lied by portraying backstreet abortionists as warm-hearted grandmothers-next-door who were simply trying to help out their sisters. The police and others had experienced backstreet abortionists as being “not the heroines of our area, they were the pariahs; the bloodsuckers who bled our people dry physically and metaphorically.”

The evil nature and anti-Christian values of the eugenics supporters pushed them to use questionable logic such as the following, discussed in By Their Fruits: “Like early campaigners, [Nafis] Sadik assumed that because poor people do not use birth control, and thus have not consciously 'chosen' to have children, any children they do have must be unwanted. Despite her emphasis on women's rights, Sadik has lauded China's population program, with its overt compulsion, claiming that women were dying worldwide because of 'lack of access' to abortion.”

By Their Fruits concludes that “Abuse of language has run parallel to the abuse of women under such programs... In the feminized language of population control, 'elevating the status of women' means increasing their workload in order to get them to have fewer children, by making children a burden instead of a blessing.”