Posted on 02/12/2016 6:55:15 AM PST by wagglebee
Margaret Sanger’s dream of controlling the fertility of the poor is coming to fruition, thanks to the federal government.
Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and a population control activist. She advocated that the “unfit”—the poor and the disabled—should have their fertility controlled. In her view, “hap-hazard, uncontrolled parentage leads directly and inevitably to poverty, overcrowding, delinquency, defectiveness, child labor, [and] infant mortality.”
Sanger emphasized the financial burden that the marginalized classes impose on the broader society, asserting that “if they are not able to support and care for themselves, they should certainly not be allowed to bring offspring into this world for others to look after.” In other words, to wipe out poverty, society should wipe out the poor—by wiping out the ability of poor people to have children.
These same cost-saving arguments are being used by the federal government to justify targeting low-income women for contraception, especially long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs).
LARCs are Margaret Sanger’s dream solution. LARCs, such as IUDs and implants, have a 99 percent effectiveness rate. In effect, they chemically sterilize young women for years. For IUDs, the sterilization lasts as much as five to ten years; for implants, it’s up to three years. Unlike other contraception, which a woman can discontinue using whenever she likes, if a woman wants to stop using a LARC, she must return to a healthcare professional to have it removed.
On both the state and federal level, the provision of LARCs to low-income women and teens is increasingly being pushed as a means to reduce the birthrate of the poor. In my last Public Discourse article, “Attention, Low-Income Women of Oregon: Your Reproduction is Now the Government’s Business,” I raised the alarm about a contraceptive metric being implemented by the state of Oregon. In today’s article, I address troubling but increasingly popular efforts to enact national contraceptive standards for all Medicaid providers, Title X-funded clinics, and federally funded home visiting programs.
Medicaid “Quality” Measure on Contraception
Efforts are underway within the federal government to enact a contraception “quality” measure within Medicaid that would have a widespread impact on the fertility of America’s low-income women.
In August 2015, an advisory body to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommended that HHS adopt a Medicaid quality measure for adults that would measure use of the “most effective” or “moderately effective” contraception by women between the ages of twenty-one and forty-four who are “at risk of unintended pregnancy.” This contraception measure was the advisory body’s top priority for inclusion in the Medicaid performance measures for adults.
Only contraception deemed “highly effective” (e.g., LARCs) or “moderately effective” (e.g., injections) would be included within the measurement. Healthcare providers with a low percentage of female patients of childbearing age using such contraception would be rated as giving lower-quality care. A similar contraception quality measure, including a separate sub-measure of the use of LARCs, was recommended for teenagers as young as fifteen.
If enacted, these standards would put heavy pressure on Medicaid providers to increase their patients’ use of “effective” contraception, especially LARCs, in order to meet quality standards.
It gets worse. The advisory body recommended that HHS adopt a Medicaid quality measure that would measure the percentage of women using “highly effective” or “moderately effective” contraception within ninety-nine days after giving birth. In its report, the advisory body mentioned approvingly that “11 states have made specific policy changes to encourage placement of long-acting reversible contraception immediately postpartum, with the potential for others to follow.”
It is not clear when HHS will act on the recommended Medicaid contraception quality measures, but the agency seems to be taking steps in that direction. In September 2015, HHS awarded grants to thirteen states and one US territory for the collection and reporting of data to the federal government on the use of effective contraception and LARCs by women on Medicaid. The government is also working with an outside entity to standardize contraception data within Electronic Health Records, which could further facilitate the collection of this data.
Title X-Funded Family Planning Clinics
The federal government’s promotion of LARC to low-income women isn’t limited to Medicaid, however. The Title X family planning program will also have a disproportionate impact on minorities nationally.
The federal Title X family planning program provides funding to nearly 4,200 centers nationwide. At the recommendation of both the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department’s Office of Population Affairs (OPA), Title X-funded clinics around the country are aggressively promoting the use of LARCs by low-income women.
Both the CDC and the OPA have been particularly focused on increasing the use of LARCs by adolescents. After analyzing the use of LARCs by females aged 15-19 seeking contraceptive services at Title X-funded sites, the CDC concluded in April 2015 that “continued efforts are needed to increase access and availability of these [LARC] methods for teens.” According to the CDC report, among the states “Colorado had the highest percentage of teen clients using LARC (25.8%), followed by Alaska (19.6%), District of Columbia (17.9%), Iowa (16.6%), Hawaii (14.4%), and Vermont (13.8%).” The acting director of the Office of Population Affairs pointed out that the “Title X National Family Planning program helps to increase teens’ access to long-acting reversible contraception.”
Is this the best that our society can offer to a fifteen-year-old girl? Implanting her with an IUD that will chemically sterilize her for ten years so that she can have sex with an unlimited number of partners before the age of twenty-five? Are we going to ignore any concerns about the detrimental emotional, psychological, and physical impact that such a lifestyle will have on her? And what about the impact on her spiritual well-being? Are all of these concerns to be discounted so long as we can be reasonably confident that our tax dollars won’t have to help pay for the birth and support of a potential child? How can this possibly foster the overall future well-being of this young woman?
The Federal Home Visiting Program
Even in the privacy of their own homes, low-income women cannot avoid the federal government’s eugenic policies, thanks to the fertility control implementation of the new home visiting program, the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program.
This nationwide home visiting program, which was established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), empowers federally funded home visitors to exhort low-income women to increase the intervals between their pregnancies, and then to report back on the success of their efforts to increase “inter-birth intervals.” Twenty-eight states intend to measure success on this measurement concept by either showing an increase in the use of contraception by the women visited (fourteen states) or by showing an increase in birth intervals (fourteen states). The state of Maryland measures its success solely by the use of long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) by the non-pregnant low-income women visited.
When Obamacare was being enacted, there was immediate pushback against using federal home visiting funds for fertility control. A critique of the House-passed bill warned:
These goals of the home visitation program have nothing to do with providing health care. Instead, they are based on the false premise that poor mothers’ childbearing is to blame for social problems. The proposed visitation program is eugenicist, deceptive, discriminatory against low-income women, and utterly inappropriate to the medical work of nurses.
. . . the U.S. House of Representatives seeks to tell low-income women who receive medical assistance how many children to have and when to have them.
If federally sponsored agents were to come into the homes of America’s financially well-off women and start telling them when they should and should not become pregnant, there would be an uproar. Apparently, since this new program targets low-income women, it is somehow acceptable.
A Disproportionate Impact on Minorities
Minorities are often disproportionately represented among those seeking federal government assistance. Usage statistics clearly demonstrate that all three types of programs described above—implemented through Medicaid, Title X-funded clinics, and home visiting programs—would affect and constrict the childbearing of racial minorities at an alarming rate.
In the United States, 31.8 percent of black women and 33.6 percent of Hispanic women are on Medicaid—more than double the percentage of white, non-Hispanic women on Medicaid (14.2 percent). The clients served by Title X-funded clinics nationally are disproportionately black and Hispanic. Twenty-one percent of their family planning clients self-identify as black or African American, and 30 percent of them self-identify as Hispanic or Latino, compared with only 13.2 and 17.4 percent of the general population, respectively.
Like Medicaid and Title X-funded clinics, federally funded home visiting programs are heavily used by racial minorities. Nearly two-thirds of the low-income mothers visited through the federal program are either black or Hispanic, with only a quarter of the mothers being non-Hispanic white. Because of this disparity, the population control policies being implemented through Medicaid, Title X-funded clinics, and the federal home visiting program will result in racially disproportionate outcomes.
The association of lower incomes with minorities in the United States allows these programs to avoid the appearance of being racially motivated. Still, regardless of the intent of those who implement the programs, it is impossible to deny that the effect is to federally fund the chemical sterilization of disproportionate numbers of African American and Hispanic women.
Exposing the Implementation of Eugenic Policies
Recent news that the government-funded Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery was exhibiting a bust of Margaret Sanger as part of its “Struggle for Justice” exhibit was shocking at first. But upon further reflection, it seems totally appropriate in light of the way that Margaret Sanger’s spirit lives on in the federal government today.
Still, it is troubling that the federal government is so aggressively pushing contraception at a time when, as law professor Helen Alvaré puts it,
the Washington Post editorial section is worried that women are suffering because of a lost understanding of what sex even means, when Vanity Fair asks whether we have begun the Dating Apocalypse (instant sex but no relationship), [and] when the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve can write that contraception changes the mating market to women’s disadvantage.
To my female readers: if the information in this article alarms you and inspires you to take action, please know that there is plenty that you can do. Work to expose coercive family planning initiatives launched by your state or local government. Blog about it or write letters to the editor of your local newspaper. Alert the women in your state and let them know what is going on. Post about it on social media, and call your elected representatives to let them know that you object to these programs.
These federal population control policies are problematic for so many reasons: they are discriminatory against minorities, disregard the views of healthcare providers who object to the use of contraception on religious or moral grounds, are offensive to women who have chosen not to use contraception for personal or religious reasons, and reflect an ignorance of the body of research that evidences that widespread use of contraception does not promote the well-being of women in the area of human sexuality and in the mating market.
America’s low-income and minority women need champions as never before. One of those champions could be you.
Susan T. Muskett is a veteran pro-life activist and attorney. Ms. Muskett graduated with honors from Georgetown University and received her law degree from the University of Notre Dame Law School.
Sadly, even some who describe themselves as "conservative" support eugenics.
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Liberals are the real racists, and racialists, in society, and it is the job of the media to cover that up.
I don’t think we need abortion, but it IS insane and unfair of those with no income becoming the parents of so many children.
I think you need a LOT of education in grade school regarding the simple concept that you don’t try and live beyond your means and should be working and married before extending your family.
All these welfare EBT, free medical and housing programs are drawing young uneducated or lazy women into becoming poverty pimps and the children and all of society suffers.
For every mom like Dr. Carson’s there are probably a thousand whose parenting borders on or is criminal.
I have to say that I prefer the contraception approach as opposed to unlimited abortions.
Democrats have been pushing this idea for over 100 years, now, and I'm all for turning them loose and sitting back while they wipe out their base. They would do it to the Right Side of the Bell Curve in a heartbeat.
Remember that Prescott Bush was a colleague sharing her views and the original treasurer of PP. It sort of makes sense of JEBs decision on Terry Schivo.
Making room in the Western World for the invasion of the rape-o-gees.
Notice that they only go after women.
As far as the left is concerned, men are not even part of the biological process of reproduction.
Who is really anti-women?
Just wait until the CDC declares teen-pregnancy an “epidemic” and schools require the LARC treatment for attendance, like immunizations.
First, put into action President Wilson's fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918.Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of individuals. The main objects of the Population Congress would be:
a. to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.
b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.
c. to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.
d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
e. to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.
f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.
The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.
The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.
Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense---defending the unborn against their own disabilities.
The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers' health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives---thus reducing maternal mortality.
The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.
With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.
There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system.
In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace.
Summary of address before the New History Society, January 17th, New York City
Because by law they must report the man is gone to get on the dole.
That said, abortion is NOT a viable alternative.
I am of the opinion that anyone with kids on the dole should not be paid for having more.
Should while on the dole be placed in a camp setting for employment education that has no rec centers or non news TV. No access to Internet except for jobs. Test for drugs. Teach that the dole is NOT where you want to be.
Natural family planning should be taught in schools. Instead of teaching basic birds and bees, schools are just teaching “safe sex” and contraception, which fails. As a result, girls have no idea how their bodies work, boys & girls both believe they have a license to engage in sex without consequences, and the abortion rate is abysmal. Not to mention the rest of us put up with environmental pollution from the birth control pill contaminating our drinking water.
The list of bad fruits from this mentality goes on & on. We’re just reaping what has been sown, yet people continue blindly supporting it.
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