Group’s Phony Charge: Bush Is Anti-Family

It is all well and good, as TomPaine.com does in its Feb. 19 blast at President Bush, to go after a political opponent. That would be fair, if it were based on fact. But the regulations being changed impact no families, adoptive or otherwise, because not a single state chose to implement them. To criticize President Bush for an action that impacts no one, and that supposedly discourages people from having children, as the Feb. 19 article does, is phony. Especially when the group has a track record of promoting abortion and criticizing President Bush for his pro-life stands.

Consider this paragraph from the Feb. 19, 2003 TomPaine.com and its pro-natalist spin:

Furthermore, paid leave is a family-friendly policy that recognizes the staggering burdens that so many Americans face in their efforts to provide for their loved ones and maintain a decent standard of living. Given the economic sacrifices of taking unpaid leave following the birth or adoption of a child, it’s little wonder that the numbers of households with dependent children has declined dramatically from 45 percent in 1970 to 33 percent today. Absent realistic and workable family policies like paid leave, the United States is seeing that more couples are postponing having children, or foregoing parenthood altogether.

But then there are the repeated attacks on President Bush for his pro-life stand, and especially his unwillingness to allow U.S. taxpayer money to go to international nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion. TomPaine.com has had five editorials blasting President Bush for that policy, which TomPaine and others have cleverly labeled the “global gag rule.” Those articles were published on Feb. 2, Feb. 6, and May 15, 2001, another on March 5, 2002, and one on Jan. 3, 2003.

The first of those columns, published Feb. 2, 2001, acknowledged the reason why the Bush Administration, and the Reagan Administration before it, instituted the policy. As TomPaine.com wrote:

Consequently, if you provide millions to an overseas family planning program for non-abortion services, that allows it to divert other funds to its abortion-related work.

For a while, it looked like the current Bush Administration was backing away from a consistent application of the policy first established by President Reagan, but an Associated Press story – smothered in all the weekend coverage of the big snowstorm that hit the East Coast of the U.S. – clarified the fact that no such flip-flop had taken place.

There is another possible explanation for TomPaine.com being a dedicated defender of abortion in other countries but all for population growth among certain segments of the U.S. population. But that explanation would smack of elitist eugenics, and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, wouldn’t have taken such a position, would she?

Well, it seems she did, as this quote from Chapter XII, “Women and the Future,” from The Pivot of Civilization, makes clear:

Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes.

“Biological and racial mistakes?” One supposes that the woman who wrote the cover story for The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Feb. 16, would qualify in the “biological” category although she is a self-supporting lawyer. As for “racial,” there’s not a lot of mystery there, since most of the countries where abortion is being so actively marketed are populated largely by non-Caucasian people. Here in the U.S., of course, the data are clear: African-American women are over-represented in the abortion statistics, a fact that may help explain the headlines proclaiming that Hispanics are now the country’s largest ethnic minority.

Viewed through the lens of the eugenics movement, TomPaine.com’s seeming contradictions are perfectly logical.

William L. Pierce, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute. Pierce is also the Executive Director of the U.S. Committee for the International Association of Voluntary Adoption Agencies & NGOs (IAVAAN), the Publisher and Executive Editor of Adoption/Medical News, and was the Founding President & CEO of The National Council For Adoption. Pierce writes from Washington, D.C.