Don’t Forget: The White Supremacist Movement Supports Abortion

[Today’s guest post by Perri is part of our paid blogging program. This post was submitted some time ago, and was originally slated for publication this past Monday, but was postponed for obvious reasons. For our official statement on Charlottesville, see here. For more information about the “alt-right” white supremacist movement, see here.]

White supremacist leader and abortion advocate Richard Spencer

Pro-choice liberal feminists and the alt-right would like to consider themselves polar opposites in every way. And in most ways, they are. But when it comes to abortion, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

It turns out that those mean alt-right “Nazis” are not in favor of “forcing a woman to go through with a pregnancy,” as it is so often put. Rather, they are in favor of “degenerates” and undesirables weeding themselves out of the population through the use of abortion.

In a video defending political commentator Tomi Lahren’s pro-choice views, alt-right icon and self-described “Identitarian” Richard Spencer states that “People who are having abortions generally are very often black or Hispanic and very often in very poor circumstances to be honest,” highlighting that abortion mainly affects populations that the alt-right considers not worth reproducing.

Spencer adds, tellingly, “and so the anti-abortion crusade becomes this human rights crusade…that every being that’s human has a right to life and so on and that’s not how we think as Identitarians.”

Spencer’s view of the pro-life philosophy, labeled by the alt-right commentator as “a kind of dysgenic, ‘we are the world’ dogma” echoes the sentiments of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who is believed by many to have been a eugenicist who targeted African-American children for extermination.  According to the most recent Center for Disease Control (CDC) statistics (2013), non-Hispanic black women had the highest abortion rate and ratio whereas non-Hispanic white women had the lowest abortion rate and ratio. The CDC report states that there were 664,435 abortions reported that year.

Most members of the alt-right, who concern themselves only with the wellbeing of white children, are not at all distressed at the mass death toll of abortion because many of the children killed are not white. And those that are white, they believe, are terminated children of “degenerates”- drug addicts, hedonists, and other irresponsible people whom they feel should not be breeding anyway.

This wholesale dehumanization of the fetus and rejection of life is held in common with more mainstream or liberal pro-choice views. Although liberal feminists like to couch their pro-choice dogma in statements about a “woman’s body,” the fact remains that these individuals are choosing to dehumanize and disregard the life of the fetus in the very premise of their argument. If the abortion debate is only a matter of “her body, her choice,” that negates the existence of the fetus.

While the alt-right is dehumanizing these children on the basis of race and the activities of parents, liberal pro-choicers dehumanize children on the basis of age or developmental stage. Discrimination is discrimination. Both groups are able to arrive at a pro-choice philosophy as a result of negating the worth and existence of the fetus.

If you are a pro-choice liberal feminist, please think about the logical basis of your arguments and whether you can really defend them when placed under a humanitarian lens.