The Pink Flamingo :: Planned Parenthood, and the Hypocricy of the Anti-Immigration Right

Just when I a feeling just a little down in the dumps because I've run out of things to rant and rave about, Jonah Goldberg and NRO just throw this beautiful hanging curve right in my strike zone. There's nothing like the feeling of hitting a sweet one over the right field fence. To the "right" and to anyone who disapproves of abortion, Planned Parenthood is the big, giant boogyman. It is the root of all evil, offering up abortions to any and all. I am strongly anti-abortion. I don't exactly approve of Planned Parenthood. But - I am consistant. I don't like organizations that promote abortion, eugenics, and population control. From what I gather, reading the below, neither does Goldberg.

If this is the case, then why does Goldberg, along with the majority of the conservative right,

Goldberg wrote:

"...The issue here is not the explicit intent of liberals or the rationalizations they invoke to deceive themselves about the nature of abortion. Rather, it is to illustrate that even when motives and arguments change, the substance of the policy remains in its effects. After the Holocaust discredited eugenics per se, neither the eugenicists nor their ideas disappeared. Rather, they went to ground in fields like family planning and demography and in political movements such as feminism. Indeed, in a certain sense Planned Parenthood is today more eugenic than Sanger intended. Sanger, after all, despised abortion. She denounced it as “barbaric” and called abortionists “bloodsucking men with M.D. after their names.” Abortion resulted in “an outrageous slaughter” and “the killing of babies,” which even the degenerate offspring of the unfit did not deserve.

So forget about intent: Look at results. Abortion ends more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, AIDS, and violent crime combined. African Americans constitute little more than 12 percent of the population but have more than a third (37 percent) of abortions. That rate has held relatively constant, though in some regions the numbers are much starker; in Mississippi, black women receive some 72 percent of all abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Nationwide, 512 out of every 1,000 black pregnancies end in an abortion. Revealingly enough, roughly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion centers are in or near minority communities. Liberalism today condemns a Bill Bennett who speculates about the effects of killing unborn black children; but it also celebrates the actual killing of unborn black children, and condemns him for opposing it.

Of course, orthodox eugenics also aimed at the “feebleminded” and “useless bread gobblers” — which included everyone from the mentally retarded to an uneducated and malnourished underclass to recidivist criminals. When it comes to today’s “feebleminded,” influential voices on the left now advocate the killing of “defectives” at the beginning of life and at the end of life. Chief among them is Peter Singer, widely hailed as the most important living philosopher and the world’s leading ethicist. Professor Singer, who teaches at Princeton, argues that unwanted or disabled babies should be killed in the name of “compassion.” He also argues that the elderly and other drags on society should be put down when their lives are no longer worth living. ..."

Over the years Michelle Malkin has assembled an excellent track record rightly condemning Planned Parenthood. Right Wing News also condemns them. Mike Pearce wants to end their federal funding. I did a quickie google blogs with "Conservatives & Planned Parenthood" Nothing exciting, or dramatic. I came up with a handful of current blog posts, all of which condemn Planned Parenthood. They, and the vast majority of conservative blogs have one other thing in common. They strongly support immigration reform and the FAIR & Numbers USA agenda.
Uber Conservative
Desert Conservative
American Conservative Daily
The Conservative Revolution
Conservatives With Attitude
The Everyday Christian

CONSERVATIVES & JOHN TANTON
The problem with immigration form in its current incarnation is the fact that it is the brain-child and precious little baby of John Tanton, who is one of the most active advocates of Planned Parenthood and eugenics anywhere.

"...John Tanton of Petosky, Michigan founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1978, the Center for Immigration Studies (a think-tank supporting the activism of FAIR), and Social Contract Press (a publishing company publishing anti-immigration and racist literature) and is connected to thirteen anti-immigrant groups by way of funding or active involvement at some point over the past thirty years. Of these groups, three—American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF), American Patrol/Voices of Citizens Together (a white nationalist, anti-immigrant organization), and the Social Contract Press—are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Tanton’s FAIR has a variety of connections to white supremacist organizations. Indeed Tanton himself declared in 1997 that unless the borders are closed the United States will be overrun by people “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs” and in the 1980s declared that “whites see their power and control over their lives declined” and asked if “the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile (source). Tanton also coauthored The Immigration Invasion with Wayne Lutton, who is on the advisory board for the Occident Quarterly, a publication produced by the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens...."

If you want to rightly condemn Planned Parenthood, then how can a good, decent anti-abortion conservative covort with organizations like Numbers USA?

"...NumbersUSA is closely associated with the Coalition for the Future American Worker. Both organizations oppose visas for high-tech immigrant workers. NumbersUSA charges that the new pro-immigrant policies adopted by the AFL-CIO under President John Sweeney and by other U.S. labor unions that organize immigrant workers are hurting U.S. workers but are providing a short-term boost to organized labor.

NumbersUSA is a leading voice among those who argue that immigration is a major environmental threat to the United States. The organization together with the Center for Immigration Studies has published a series of reports attributing population growth as the leading cause of sprawl in the United States. Such studies as Sprawl in California, written by Beck and NumbersUSA staff member Leon Kolankiewicz, link urban sprawl to immigration by noting that immigration constitutes the major source of population increases in the United States. Yet this causal argument downplays the fact that immigrants generally settle in city centers, contributing to urban revitalization, not to sprawl. Instead, Numbers USA and the Center for Immigration Studies directly challenge the hypothesis that U.S. natives are the main culprits in urban sprawl: That hypothesis is challenged by the four primary ways that population growth from immigration causes sprawl: 1) Direct settlement by immigrants in the suburbs; 2) High fertility creates larger second generation of households, and children of immigrants desert urban cores by higher margins; 3) Immigrants facilitate movement of natives to outer edges; 4) Natives flee immigrant concentrations." (2)

According to Outsmarting Smart Growth, a joint NumbersUSA-Center for Immigration Studies report, "there are three sources of our national population growth-native fertility (in conjunction with increasing life spans), immigration, and immigrant fertility. We know this about their contribution to long-term growth: Native fertility remains well below replacement level and has not been a source of long-term U.S. population growth since 1971. Immigration and immigrant fertility (births to foreign-born mothers), on the other hand, are far above replacement."

In other reports, such as Forsaking Fundamentals: The Environmental Establishment Abandons U.S. Population Stabilization, Beck bemoans the fact that environmentalists no longer focus on ending U.S. population growth. In keeping with the argument that population growth remains a major factor in U.S. environmental degradation, Roy Beck argues in this report that was published by the Center for Immigration Studies that population growth is "the neglected dimension of America's persistent energy/environmental problems. The underlying message is that the United States could address such related problems as traffic congestion, high energy prices, pollution, and oil-related wars if it only shut off the main source of population growth.

Among the organizations closely associated with Beck and NumbersUSA are Social Contract Press (which publishes and distributes books by Beck, who serves as Washington editor for Social Contract magazine), Center for Immigration Studies, Coalition for the Future American Worker, Evangelicals for Immigration Reform, ProEnglish, and Midwest Coalition for Immigration Reform...."

It is all about one of the most strangely conservative agendas around, promoted by flaming liberals who are among the most rabid enviromentalists in the country. The agenda is to limit the population of the US via eugenics. It is all about limiting the population of the US to "the right people". Unfortunately Tanton's ideas go directly back to the Pioneer Fund and to Garrett Hardin, one of the luminaries of Planned Parenthood and abortion on demand.

"...The Money: The Pioneer Fund

The Pioneer Fund is described as "a New York organization that finances research seeking proof of the genetic superiority of the white race,"(San Francisco Chronicle, 3/30/94) and also as a "neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far Right in American politics."(London Sunday Telegraph, 3/12/89)

The Pioneer Fund was established in 1937 by Wycliffe Draper, a textile millionaire who advocated sending Blacks back to Africa, and crusading eugenics advocate Harry Laughlin, honored for his contributions to Nazi eugenics and "racial hygiene."(Discovery Journal, 7/9/94; Irish Times, 5/23/94) Eugenics is the "pseudo-science embraced by the Nazis that seeks to improve the human race through selective breeding."(Los Angeles Times, 9/29/97) The Pioneer Fund has consistently contributed to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

The Ideas: Garrett Hardin

A recipient of Pioneer Fund grants, Hardin is a longstanding supporter of eugenics and advocates ending immigration. The Wall Street Journal reported that "Mr. Hardin expressed alarm about 'the next generation of breeders' now reproducing uncontrollably in Third World countries. The problem, according to Mr. Hardin, is not simply that there are too many people in the world, but there are too many of the wrong kind of people... It would be better to encourage the breeding of more intelligent people rather than the less intelligent." Hardin, a father of four, advocates letting hungry people starve to death, says that China's coercive birth control program is not strict enough and declares infanticide "an effective population control."(Wall Street Journal, 10/2/97)..."

The Tanton Dream:

"...A fundamental problem the nascent environmental movement identified was, in Tanton’s words, that “the economic system is based on continual growth forever,” which “in a finite world” isn’t possible. The Tantons and others in the movement became convinced that something would have to give, and that it shouldn’t be the planet. To avoid catastrophe, society would have to reconstitute itself to favor conservation over growth. It is a small-c conservative philosophy: What the cheerleaders of modernity called “progress,” they called a plague.

In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich made these ideas mainstream with his book, The Population Bomb. With terrifying certainty, Ehrlich argued that the exponential growth in population and the incremental growth in food could only mean one thing: mass famine. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” the book begins. “In the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

It was an instant sensation, turning “overpopulation” into a hot topic and landing Ehrlich repeatedly on “The Tonight Show.” Tanton had been ahead of the curve. As early as the ’50s, he avidly read reports from the Population Reference Bureau, and by the time Ehrlich’s book was published, he and Mary Lou had already started work on the first Northern Michigan chapter of Planned Parenthood. “I believed in the multiplication tables,” says Tanton. “Since I was a physician and could do something about birth control, it struck me that this was where I could make my contribution to the conservation movement.”

Time hasn’t been kind to Ehrlich’s predictions: Due to a technological revolution in agriculture, there was no mass famine. World population growth has slowed considerably; the United Nations now predicts it could plateau by 2050. Many, if not most, professional demographers today are more worried about depopulation in the developed world.

But in many quarters, this “fixed pie” view persists, and the logic isn’t necessarily flawed. Resources, particularly oil, are finite and the notion that technology will always be able to bail us out is dubious. Perhaps Ehrlich’s predictions weren’t wrong, just premature.

Tanton, whose worldview was forged in this intellectual milieu, is haunted by the spectre of an apocalypse just over the horizon, and the thought that he is one of a select few who see it coming. Sitting at his desk during one of our interviews, he reaches into a drawer, withdraws an electric metronome and flicks it on. As the device pulses at 135 beats per minute, he explains that each beat is a new birth (at the 1969 rate), and each new birth requires resources: food, clothing, education. It’s a trick he used when he gave talks on population in the ’70s, and it’s effective. His voice barely rises over the percussive onslaught, and after just 30 seconds you want to yell: “Make it stop!”

You get the sense that Tanton hears that beat inside his head all the time.

In 1969, Tanton started and chaired the population committee of his local Sierra Club chapter, and when Ehrlich and like-minded environmentalists founded the advocacy group Zero Population Growth (ZPG), he became one of its most active members, rising to its presidency in 1975. By then, the birthrate for Americans had declined below the replacement rate, but the American population was projected to keep growing. Tanton settled on the culprit: immigration.

The number of immigrants was still small by today’s standards but had started to creep upwards, thanks in part to a 1965 immigration bill that instituted family reunification policies and did away with 40 years of quotas that heavily favored northern Europeans. Since immigrants had higher birthrates, reducing their numbers would allow the United States to achieve the zero population growth that had seemed a pipe dream only a few years earlier...."

THE BOTTOM LINE
If you want to support immigration reform, there's nothing wrong with that. There is something terribly disgusting about all this anti-immigration hysteria and outright racism against Hispanics when it is promoted by an individual who has a radical agenda of eugenics and hate. As long as you, the dear anti-immigration conservative, are willing to embrace Planned Parenthood and John Tanton's agenda, that's fine. BUT - if you are against Planned Parenthood, how can you denounce their agenda, yet embrace the agenda of one of its greatest advocates? Conservatives need to recognize the fact that they are being manipulated by people who have an agenda of racial purity. You also need to recognize where racial purity leads.