Via Caleb Howe comes this astonishing clip of MSNBC host Alex Wagner showing some justified concern about how eugenics is still practiced even today. Amazingly, however, she seems to believe that the most important means through which eugenics is practiced today is actually important to the prevention of eugenics.

On MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner on Monday, the host unleashed a tirade at Republicans over their supposed secret desire to control or eliminate minorities through eugenics. As part of her rant, she specifically cites the early 20th century movement. Conspicuously absent from Wagner’s remarks: founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.

Wagner was discussing comments made by a now former local party chair and Arizon Senator, Russell Pearce, who advocated for sterilization of women on government assistance. In so doing, she brought up eugenics and its history in the United States. Sort of . . . 

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“Today forced sterilization is not practiced here in the United States of America. For that you have to go to China or India or Uzbekistan. And while Russell Pearce and his Medicaid strategy are unlikely to become planks of the Republican party platform, severely restricting a woman’s right to choose is something the GOP already does. In the first half of 2014 alone, 13 states adopted 21 new restrictions on abortion access.”

This is a subject I have written about at very great length before. The primary method by which eugenics is practiced in this country is abortion. Overwhelmingly, women who get abortions come from lower-income families. As I noted before:

The statistics with respect to abortion present troubling racial implications. According to the CDC, black women are approximately 3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion.²⁷ The abortion rate for black children is an astonishing 491 abortions per 1000 live births.²⁸ Indeed, one could scarcely invent a policy short of active eugenocide that would more effectively stagnate and/or reduce the black proportional population than legalized abortion. The effect of abortion on the black community is so pervasive that Jesse Jackson once exclaimed:

That is why the Constitution called us three-fifths human and then whites further dehumanized us by calling us “n*****s.” It was part of the dehumanizing process. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do and not even feel like they had done anything wrong. Those advocates of taking. life prior to birth do not call it killing or murder; they call it abortion. They further never talk about aborting a baby because that would imply something human. Rather they talk about aborting the fetus. Fetus sounds less than human and therefore can be justified.²⁹

Numerous public supporters of legalized abortion – too many to count – have also publicly made the eugenistic argument that abortion must remain legal so that there will not be a sudden influx of poor children in society.³⁰

Perhaps just as troubling, the advances of modern science combined with the legalization of abortion-on-demand have supposedly created a world in which the truly unwanted can be eliminated before they are born. This reality is especially insidious because it provides the so-called “benefits” of eugenics, without forcing people to confront the reality of what means are necessary to produce those benefits. Before, someone had to leave the child born with Down’s Syndrome outside to starve; a choice not many have the intestinal fortitude to make. Now, the mother can just get an amniocentesis, and have the “unfit” child eliminated before anyone has to look it in the face and make the conscious choice that it does not deserve to live. The evidence suggests that as many as 80 per cent of children who are prenatally diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome are aborted today,³¹ which suggests that we have come to the a priori conclusion that those with Down’s Syndrome do not deserve to live. When those sorts of decisions are made a priori, rather than on a case-by-case basis, monstrosity is never far around the corner.

In other words, the safest way to make sure eugenics is not practiced is to restrict the indiscriminate use of abortion as a birth control method. Somehow, Alex Wagner has been brainwashed into thinking that the exact opposite is true – that the right to abortion on demand for any reason at all must be preserved in order to prevent abortions from occurring. Sadly, it seems that Alex Wagner is completely ignorant about who who is actually getting abortions in this country, and why.