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

Foreword

Foreword In the heated atmosphere surrounding the abortion debate, it is often forgotten that abortion is a human rights issue. If a pregnant woman is desperately poor and unsupported, to presume that what she needs are abortion rights is surely an abuse of her human rights. And if abortion is an unwarranted act of violence against a defenseless unborn child, it is just another act of violence in an increasingly violent world, where the human rights of the poor and the powerless are under daily threat. But violent times do not come about all at once; we slip into them gradually—even the horrors of Auschwitz. Many feel unhappy about abortion, but, as with Nazism , very few repudiate it. As Martin Luther King pointed out, cowardice asks, “Is it safe?”; expediency asks, “Is it politic?”; vanity asks “Is it popular ?”; but conscience asks, “Is it right?” Every age has its monstrous inhumanities, and sometimes they are arrived at by the road paved with good intentions. In the face of apparently huge numbers of backstreet abortions among poor women, the British Abortion Act was seen by many as the lesser of two evils. However, By Their Fruits reveals much about the monstrous philosophy that was supposed to have perished at Auschwitz, because in tracing with scrupulous accuracy the history of the English abortion campaign, it finds its origins not in concern about backstreet abortion, but in eugenics and population control. In fact, the legalization of abortion was but one step in a long journey —that of altering the very essence of the traveler, man. Far from wild speculation, this is the result of years of painstaking research in the archives of the eugenics, abortion, and population control movements. From its official inauguration in 1936, through its relationship with the eugenics movements in America, Sweden, and Nazi Germany, to vii   the Abortion Act of 1967 and beyond, the abortion campaign is subjected to forensic examination, and found to share the same influences and the same cavalier approach to human rights. Using much unpublished material, By Their Fruits scrutinizes the handful of obscure women who were the female face of the abortion campaign and reveals, from private communications with fellow eugenicists and population controllers, that their abiding interest in poor women centered on a desire to stop them from breeding. Portrayed (albeit sketchily) as feminist icons, the abortion pioneers should be judged not on their rhetoric about backstreet abortion but, as the title of the book suggests, by their fruits. In this restrained and balanced account we learn how abortion advocates sympathized with backstreet abortionists rather than with their victims and—unlike that great opponent of eugenics, G. K. Chesterton—how they ignored Nazi anti-Semitism in their enthusiasm for eugenics. Some even advocated the lethal chamber. Contrary to popular belief, the Abortion Act “gave birth” to feminism rather than the other way round. In fact, libertarian and eugenicist men steered the campaign, and although campaigners claimed that poor women habitually sought illegal abortion, privately they admitted that legalization was needed in order to encourage them to seek it. This is of particular interest, since it has been feared that any restriction of legal abortion would lead to just as many abortions (though conducted illegally) but many more maternal deaths. By Their Fruits, with a wealth of historical material about backstreet abortion, demonstrates the inaccuracy of such claims, which are further undermined by an evaluation of the disastrous social outcomes of legalization. Most significant, too, has been the Abortion Act’s underpinning of population control across the developing world, with the same priorities that have come to dominate British public policy on health and welfare. By Their Fruits is an unparalleled study of the English abortion campaign and its role in modern history; thorough and rigorous in its approach , it will be a valuable resource for the academic and the general reader. In examining the crusade for abortion, comparing fact to fiction and memory to myth, it provides firm historical background for issues as diverse as birth control and euthanasia, showing that such campaigns are simply individual battles in a much wider war against the “unfit.” Moreviii    Foreword over, it shows that in this struggle for human rights, there are no bystanders . Sooner or later, it will affect each and every one of us, from the cradle to the grave. —Lord Alton of Liverpool, Independent Life Peer   (formerly Member of House...