Garrett Epps: The Supreme Court dodges an abortion case

Thomas did not object to the Court’s ruling, but he offered up his lengthy treatise on eugenics to help the Court when it considers more laws like Indiana’s in the future. His motivation was apparently to put a new weapon in the arsenal of the anti-abortion movement. If you do not buy the argument that abortion ends a human life, how about the idea that it is an attempt to restrict reproduction in order to “improve” the human race?

Thomas relied on a kind of historical guilt-by-association. “The foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th century birth-control movement,” he wrote. The birth-control movement, in turn, “developed alongside the American eugenics movement.” Therefore, he suggested, abortion is inseparable from America’s history of eugenics.

In supporting his claim, Thomas cited real history that is not particularly relevant to abortion. It is true, as Thomas said, that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, supported eugenics and that she had some pretty offensive views. (Anyone who doubts that should read what Sanger had to say about “slum mothers” in her book The Pivot of Civilization.) It is also true that Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply diminished immigration of Eastern European Jews and Italians, in part out of a desire to enforce racial “purity.” And Thomas is correct that the Supreme Court played a lamentable role in the eugenics era with its 1927 ruling in Buck v. Bell, the subject of my book. The Court upheld a Virginia law that authorized the state to sterilize people it considered unworthy of reproducing, and it allowed the state to sterilize Carrie Buck, the poor young woman at the center of the case.

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None of this was about abortion, however. The most prominent American eugenicists did not support abortion. As the intellectual leader of the movement, Harry Laughlin—the head of the infamous Eugenics Record Office, on Long Island—put it, the goal of modern eugenics was “preventing the procreation of defectives rather than destroying them before birth.” In fact, at the height of the eugenics movement, abortion was outlawed throughout the United States, so it was not going to be the mechanism for changing the American gene pool.

The American eugenics movement overwhelmingly supported not abortion but forced sterilization. More than half of the states adopted laws like Virginia’s, which allowed the state to sterilize people it deemed unworthy of reproducing because of physical or mental deficiencies or other “failings,” such as alcoholism or poverty.

Between eugenic sterilization and abortion lie two crucial differences: who is making the decision, and why they are making it. In eugenic sterilization, the state decides who may not reproduce, and acts with the goal of “improving” the population. In abortion, a woman decides not to reproduce, for personal reasons related to a specific pregnancy.