Daily Archives: July 29, 2022

U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C. is seen during a voting rally for in Greensboro, N.C., Friday, Oct. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

Was Congresswoman Alma Adams arrested for demanding abortion rights? Not really. She was arrested for sitting down in the middle of a busy intersection to block traffic for publicity for abortion. Let me remind you more about Alma Adams.

Congresswoman Adams also served many years in the North Carolina House of Representatives. She was known for support for the victims of the North Carolina Eugenics Program and for her support for any and all abortions. As a result Planned Parenthood gave Representative Adams its honorary Margaret Sanger Award.

It is not well known that in 1967 North Carolina became the second state in the nation (after Colorado) to somewhat liberalize its 1881 abortion law. The main architect of the change was Dr. Wallace Kuralt, the head of Mecklenburg County Social Services. He was the main proponent of involuntary sterilizations in the post war era. The North Carolina program lasted until the early 70s. Kuralts eugenics orientation was the principal rationale for the 1967 liberalization of abortion law.

Margaret Sanger was the main proponent of eugenics in the U.S. as well as contraception. But Margaret Sanger wrote against abortion in her 1920 book The American Woman.

In 2011 during debate on the Womans Right to Know Act, Rep. Adams made a passionate speech against women having the right to know the truth about abortion. I asked a Page to deliver to Rep. Adams, after her speech, a copy of Sangers 1920 Essay opposing abortion. She paced around looking very angry.

Now in the United States House of Representatives, Congresswoman Adams just voted for a bill that goes way beyond even Roe v. Wade. She and all but one Democratic member have taken a position supported by only 10-15% of North Carolina voters.

Has she cancelled her Margaret Sanger award yet?

Paul Stam was the Majority Leader of the North Carolina House in 2011 and Speaker Pro Tem in 2013-2016. He practices law in Apex. For more information http://www.paulstam.info.

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STAM: Alma Adams, eugenics and radical abortion The North State Journal - North State Journal

Op-Ed: Policymakers must follow frameworks that dismantle systems and institutions that are incompatible with all life, especially the lives of Black women.

EDITORS NOTE: Hear Us is a column series that features experts of color and their insights on issues related to the economy and racial justice. We acknowledge that the series title does not honor the experience of Deaf people, so were revisiting the columns name so as to not uphold audism. Follow the series here and at #HearUs4Justice.

WRITERS NOTE: Throughout this op-ed, I use the terms disabled people and people with disabilities interchangeably. The use of identity-first language honors the linguistic shift that self-advocates within the disability community have ushered in over the past years, while affirming that our community is not a monolith and each of us has a right to self-identify as we so choose.

Todays COVID crisis leaves no doubt that U.S. policymakers continue to view disabled people as disposable. The unfathomable loss of life over the last two and a half years is the outcome of policy choices rooted in organized abandonment and eugenics.

The COVID crisis is a mass disabling event, and its a stark reminder of the profound consequences when policymakers ignore ableisms central role in maintaining economic and racial oppression. Advocates of Disability Justice (DJ) a framework created by disabled queer activists of color have long sounded the alarm on the harms of ableism, an entrenched system that targets disabled people, persecuting and punishing them because their bodies and minds dont uphold socially constructed norms. DJ represents a point of departure from the solely rights-based and single-issue focuses of the past, advancing instead an intersectional and collective vision for liberation and justice.

As too many people still yearn to return to normal a time marked by deep inequities made worse by COVID, and in which our economy and society only worked for the powerful, non-disabled, wealthy and white few it is crucial that we confront ableism in ways that center those most harmed by its reach. This is an especially important consideration for those of us working to break free from the shackles of white supremacy and capitalism.

July 26, is National Disability Independence Day, honoring the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), signed into law in 1990. As societal pressures and state interests have redefined the legal bounds of disability over time, the primary issue that policymakers, organizers, and advocates must contend with remains the same: who wields power and who is rendered powerless by systems and policies in place.

Thirty-two years after the ADAs passage, Black disabled women remain disproportionately burdened by the preservation and justification of ableist oppression.

The Entanglement of Disability, Race, and Gender

The legal classification of disability in the US has always been tied to ones ability to produce labor, which is itself heavily racialized and gendered. This, of course, goes all the way back to the legitimization of chattel slavery. From the antebellum period to today, tools of social control, including pathologization and medicalization, have been wielded to structurally marginalize certain groups in service of the economic and political interests of the predominantly white, wealthy few in power. The resulting matrix of mass institutionalization, eugenics, and criminalization continues to marginalize disabled Black women today, causing toxic stress and premature death.

As noted above, our governments eugenic response to COVID has accelerated the rising prevalence of disability in the U.S. In 2021, 1.2 million more people identified as having a disability compared to 2020. Much like race, the incidence of disability is more heavily concentrated in certain geographic areas and within specific communities. Consistently, Black people as a whole have rates of disability up to 2.5 times greater than white people.

Additionally, only 27% of working-age Black disabled women had a job in 2020, which is especially alarming when juxtaposed to white women with disabilities and white disabled men at 33.7 percent and 40.3 percent, respectively. In the same year, 25% of Black adults with disabilities lived in poverty, compared to 14% of white disabled adults. Disabled people as a whole are shut out of the paid labor economy at extraordinarily high rates, with Black disabled women especially affected. And because the state rations access to healthcare and other life-sustaining resources by employment status, the consequences of such economic disenfranchisement are life-altering. Even when Black disabled workers are able to access the labor market, they are met with pay inequity (among other injustices), receiving only 68 cents for every dollar earned by white workers with no disability.

Ableist oppression reaches far past the workplace. Prisoners at the state and federal levels are about 2.5 times as likely as the general adult population to report having a disability or chronic illness. In this domain too, Black women are especially harmed as they are more likely to be incarcerated than their white counterparts. People with mental health disabilities, Black women in particular, face constant risk of involuntary institutionalization, showing one way that carcerality and surveillance extend beyond the walls of prisons and jails.

Together, these policy arrangements cast Black disabled people and their lives as expendable. Similar to the Black Women Best (BWB) framework, Disability Justice (DJ) serves as a point of departure from single-issue advocacy. Jointly applied, these frameworks have the potential to disrupt the drivers and consequences of ableist systems, including economic domination and exploitation. It should be noted that DJ centers the liberatory possibilities of community organizing and grassroots movement-building, but its 10 core principles offer a pathway toward transformative policymaking too.

Disability Justice and Black Women Best

Disabled people, Black women in particular, deserve to thrive. The DJ framework acknowledges the innate value of human life and, in line with BWB, holds a vision born out of collective struggle, as stated by Patty Berne and elevated by Sins Invalid. As Bernes working draft on Disability Justice further explains, central to DJ is the understanding that:

All bodies are unique and essential.

All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.

We are powerful, not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.

All bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation-state, religion, and more, and we cannot separate them.

At minimum, DJ and BWB policymaking must unconditionally provide access to the life-giving resources and community-rooted care that we all need and deserve. By centering Black women, we are better positioned to craft policies capable of facilitating such transformative change for all marginalized groups. Additionally, complementary policy measures must be taken, including those that divest from criminalization and surveillance; disrupt and reverse the capture of public goods by private interests; and meaningfully include and center Black disabled women in the ideation, design, and implementation of DJ and BWB policy.

Abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore reflects that where life is precious, life is precious. To dismantle all policies that are, by design, incompatible with all life, BWB must be jointly applied with DJ. When Black disabled womens lives and their needs are viewed as precious and protected as such then everyones lives and needs will no longer be controlled by the oppressive people and systems that deny us the collective space to not just live, but thrive.

Azza Altiraifi is the senior policy manager at Liberation in a Generation.

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Moving from Rights to Justice: Uprooting Ableism and Cultivating Disability Justice - Next City

When the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade on 24 June, permitting the state criminalisation of abortion in America, the only thing everyone could agree on was that it was a historic decision. Unfortunately for America, the history it was based on was largely fake. The ruling, Dobbs v Jackson Womens Health Organization, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, claims that in reversing Roe v Wade, the court restores the US to an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment [that] persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973, when Roe legalised abortion. This assertion, however, is easily disproven.As historians have exhaustively explained, early American common law (as in Britain) generally permitted abortions until quickening, or perceptible foetal movement, usually between 16 to 20 weeks into a pregnancy. Connecticut was the first state to ban abortion after quickening, in 1821, which is roughly two centuries after the earliest days of American common law. It was not until the 1880s that every US state had some laws restricting abortion, and not until the 1910s that it was criminalised in every state. In the wake of Dobbs, social media was awash with examples from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers that clearly refuted Alitos false assertion, sharing examples of midwives and doctors legally advertising abortifacients, Benjamin Franklins at-home abortion remedies, and accounts of 19th-century doctors performing therapeutic (medically necessary) abortions.

Dobbss inaccurate claims about the history of US abortion law is one of many reasons why it is so controversial. It is arguably the most divisive ruling since 1857, when the supreme court found that Dred Scott, who had been enslaved and was suing for his freedom, had no standing in US federal courts as a Black man. The Dred Scott decision was a casus belli of the US civil war four years later, and there are many reasons to fear that Dobbs could prove as divisive.

Another proximate cause of the civil war was the Fugitive Slave Act, which led Harriet Beecher Stowe to write what was until 1936 the most popular American novel ever, Uncle Toms Cabin, condemning the cruelty of slavery and the insanity of the fugitive slave laws. The Fugitive Slave Act impelled states to return enslaved humans to their enslavers, even if they were residing in free states that did not recognise slavery, and financially incentivised remanding people into slavery. It was this division that prompted Lincoln to give his famous house divided speech, saying that a nation could not endure half-slave and half-free: because an individuals human rights were drastically changing from state to state. Dobbs has created for pregnant women an analogous situation to the fugitive slave laws, with the bounty hunter laws it has permitted in states like Idaho and Texas, where women may be prosecuted by the state in which they reside for obtaining an abortion beyond its borders. It will create legal chaos, triggering inter-state conflict, as fights over extradition and a states legal rights beyond its own borders will certainly erupt once more.

But there is yet another, less well-known cause for all this in civil-war era America. Although most people today assume that anti-abortion laws were motivated by moral or religious beliefs about a foetuss right to life, that is far from the whole story. In fact, the first wave of anti-abortion laws were entangled in arguments about nativism, eugenics and white supremacism, as they dovetailed with a cultural panic that swept the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as a result of the vast changes in American society wrought by the conflict. This panic was referred to at the time in shorthand as race suicide.

The increasing traction today of the far-right great replacement theory, which contends that there is a global conspiracy to replace white people with people of colour, and has explicitly motivated white supremacist massacres in the US, is often said to have originated with a French novel called The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. Published in 1973, the same year that Roe v Wade enshrined American womens rights to reproductive autonomy, it is a dystopian account of swarthy hordes of immigrants sweeping in and destroying western civilisation. But there were many earlier panics over white extinction, and in the US, debates around abortion have been entangled with race panic from the start. The fight to criminalise abortion may have successfully passed itself off as a moral crusade, but its origins are rooted in a political one.The idea of race suicide was popularised in the early 20th century largely by Theodore Roosevelt, who urged white women to have more babies to protect native American society against diminishing birth rates. He harangued Americans that intentional childlessness rendered people guilty of being criminals against the race. Roosevelt gave speeches declaring: I believe in children. I want to see enough of them and of the right kind.

The Dobbs opinion explicitly rejects arguments that anti-abortion laws were historically motivated by eugenicist nativism, rather than by religious or moral beliefs. It says that the opposition was only able to produce one prominent proponent of the idea that earlier anti-abortion laws were driven by fear that Catholic immigrants were having more babies than Protestants and that the availability of abortion was leading White Protestant women to shirk their maternal duties. Yet even a cursory survey of American discourse a century ago shows how utterly ubiquitous this idea was, as newspapers and lectures and sermons warned that abortion would mean that Catholics and other foreign-born immigrants would outnumber Protestant, native-born Americans. To take just one example among thousands, a 1903 editorial on population statistics noted that the Protestant population of the US was increasing by 8.1% while the Catholic population was increasing by 21.8%. This alarming condition of things was reflected by physicians reporting on the average more than five abortions a month, none of them in Catholic families. The piece was headlined Religion and Race Suicide.

As a concept, race suicide goes back to the aftermath of the civil war. The fundamental problem of primogeniture ensuring the legitimacy of property succession in a male-dominated society had an even nastier twist in a slave society. Under the laws of American slavery, the more children a Black woman produced, the more human capital her enslaver acquired, while the more white children a white woman produced, the more political capital white men accrued in a representative democracy in which only white men voted and made laws on behalf of all white citizens. But the civil war, and the civil rights amendments that followed it, upended the legal foundations for that old racial and gendered hierarchy. They would have to be rebuilt, and controlling Protestant white womens reproduction to ensure the reproduction of the Protestant elite was central to that project.

The war had devastated a generation of white men, with estimates of around 750,000 dead, or 2.5% of the population, as the ratio of white men to women plummeted after the war. White women were gaining self-determination, forcing their way into higher education and professions. (Men were fighting back: as historians have shown, when American male doctors professionalised in the mid-19th century, one of their projects was to hobble the competition by undermining the legitimacy of midwives and nurse practitioners in caring for pregnant women, and assert their sole control over womens reproduction, which included supporting anti-abortion laws, except when under their care.) Contraception and medical standards were improving while urban industrialisation mitigated against the need for large families to work farms. As a result, white Americans fertility rates dropped precipitously across the 19th century, with families having an average of seven children in 1800, falling to four by 1900. A newly emancipated racial underclass was suddenly shifting the nations power structures, even as huge waves of immigration threatened to undermine Anglo-Saxon cultural and political dominance.

Already in existence as a phrase, race suicide rapidly became shorthand for the protection of white purity. The expression was used in the former Confederate states to describe mixed-race marriages: an 1884 editorial railed against anyone who approves of miscegenation for tolerating the great shame and crime of race suicide. It was invoked to restrict Asian immigration: to allow coolie competition,, wrotedeclared a 1900 editorial in baldly racist terms, is to commit race suicide.

Soon spokesmen for the patriarchal class (politicians, physicians, preachers and professors) were making explicit claims about the racial obligations of Protestant adults to sustain their political dominance.

When Roosevelt and other prominent figures such as sociologist Edward A Ross took up the cry, a panic about race suicide began sweeping the nation, as elite Americans explicitly discussed how to maintain their political dominance if their numbers were dwindling. Antirace suicide clubs were formed, as students at Ivy League universities pledged to have no fewer than five children. By 1918, the US armys campaign for sexual hygiene among soldiers included an educational film called Beware of Race Suicide! Meanwhile, editorials across America called for lawmakers to prevent the awful waste of life at present so great due to abortions and stillbirths: and, more important still, to refuse the right of marriage to the hopelessly diseased and unfit. The argument was straightforwardly eugenicist; soon it was shaping bestselling books, such as Madison Grants 1916 The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler referred to as his bible.

When the resurgent Ku Klux Klan paraded in Louisiana in 1922, they bore banners that read White Supremacy, America First, One Hundred Per Cent American, Race Purity and Abortionists, Beware! People are sometimes confused by the Klans animus against abortionists, or impute it to generalised patriarchal authoritarianism, but it was much more specifically about race purity: white domination can only be maintained by white reproduction.

Along the way, improvements in medical science had revealed the gradual development of a human foetus and eliminated the simpler idea of quickening, as moral and existential questions about the beginnings of human life became more complex. By the late 1920s and 30s, the successful criminalisation of abortion had sent it underground, while purporting to protect the purity of white women. By 1938, abortion had become so synonymous with the phrase that a film about a criminal abortion ring that preys on young women was titled Race Suicide.

In a forgotten 1928 bestseller called Bad Girl, a married young white woman considers an abortion to maintain her freedom; having decided to keep the baby, she casually employs a racist slur in thinking about the Black mothers with whom she will have to share a ward: But I guess you dont care who your neighbours are once the pain starts, she reflects. The same point is made from an anti-racist perspective in Langston Hughess 1936 story Cora Unashamed, in which a white girl dies from the abortion her mother forces her to undergo rather than see her bear the child of a Greek immigrant. Cora, the Black protagonist, although racially and economically subjugated, has at least borne her own illegitimate mixed-race child free of these lethal hypocrisies.

It was the same year Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind, which replaced Uncle Toms Cabin as Americas bestselling novel. It is also, by no coincidence, a tale of slavery and the civil war, although instead of condemning slavery, it defends it and condemns the war that ended it. The plot of Gone With the Wind is driven less by war, however, than by pregnancy and childbirth. Melanie Wilkes narrowly survives her first labour only to die following a later miscarriage. Scarlett miscarries one child, loses a daughter and contemplates a back-alley abortion.

This focus on the dangers of pregnancy for 19th-century women is part of Gone With the Winds white feminism but is also inextricable from its white supremacism. Melanie wont move north after the war because her son would go to school with Yankees and Black children. Wanting her children to bear witness, and to bear power, she teaches them to hate the Yankees, who have set the darkies up to lord it over us, who are robbing us and keeping our men from voting! Scarlett thinks in similar terms when contemplating her plantation Tara, the red earth which would bear cotton for their sons and their sons sons. Meanwhile Rhetts love for the daughter he forcibly stops Scarlett from aborting is more than paternal adoration and displaced love for Scarlett. Mitchell also makes clear that Rhetts devotion to his daughter is a reflection of his dedication to his people his race and his determination not to let them die out.

By 1939, the year Gone With the Wind premiered as a film, the subtext of race suicide had become manifest. Reporting the latest population statistics, a California paper declared the race suicide prophecies we have heard for many years dont seem to have been justified, as theres evidently life in the white race yet.

Fifteen years later, the United States launched into another of its periodic surges of violence in the onward fight for civil rights and a multiracial democracy. Another landmark supreme court ruling, Brown v Board of Education in 1954, desegregated American public schools. In response, social conservatives began setting up private Christian schools, which also happened to be all-white. As late as 1968, evangelicals at a symposium refused to denounce abortion as a sin, citing individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility as justifications for ending a pregnancy. But with the passage of Roe in 1973, the picture altered, as ever more single women began exercising their rights to bodily autonomy. At the same time, the Nixon administration decided to remove the tax-exempt status of segregated white Christian schools, causing leading social conservatives to seek a wedge issue. As historians have shown, archival correspondence reveals they found in abortion a socially acceptable pretext for a battle that would mobilise social conservatives and allow them to fight for white Christian patriarchy as they understood it, reproducing their dominance.

The day after Dobbs revoked American womens right to reproductive autonomy, Republican congresswoman Mary Miller of Illinois publicly thanked Donald Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, for putting on to the court the justices who created the historic victory for white life in the supreme court. She later claimed it was a slip of the tongue, but the crowd cheered nonetheless. Anyone who was startled by this reaction to the injection of race into a decision supposedly about womens rights does not know the history of abortion law in America. It has always been a contest not only over womens reproduction, but also over the reproduction of political power because in a (putatively) representative democracy, power is a function of population. The assault on womens rights is part of the wider move to reclaim the commanding place in society for a small minority of patriarchal white men. And, as Alitos decision shows, where legal precedent and other justifications cannot be found, myth will fill the vacuum.

The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells by Sarah Churchwell will be published by Head of Zeus on 4 August.

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Body politics: the secret history of the US anti-abortion movement - The Guardian

Tuesday, July 26, 2022 17:30

ABC has chosen Alyssa Farah Griffin as the new permanent co-host of The View to fill Meghan McCains vacant seat, sources familiar with the matter tell Fox News Digital. Griffin, who served in the Trump administration as a White House director of strategic communications, was one of several candidates who had served as a repeat guest host in a lengthy audition to become the sole conservative voice on the liberal daytime talk show. A spokesperson for ABC News told Fox News Digital, We do not have a co-host announcement to make at this time. Stay tuned. Fox News Digital also reached out to Griffin for comment. Reports previously indicated that she and Lincoln Project adviser Tara Setmayer were two of the finalists in the homestretch of the decision-making. THE VIEW MOCKED OVER REPORT SHOW IS STRUGGLING TO FIND NEW REPUBLICAN HOST: ANTI-CONSERVATIVE LUNATICS However, a source tells Fox News Digital that a lot of people at ABC wanted the job given to Ana Navarro, a frequent guest host of The View and suggested her candidacy was officially quashed following her controversial comments on CNN last month when she pointed to her own relatives with Down syndrome, autism and other disabilities to defend abortions following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Some critics accused her of essentially promoting eugenics. Another source told Fox News Digital that Navarro is apoplectic that she didnt get the job. Navarro is nominally a Republican but detests her party, openly supporting Democrats and imploring viewers to vote for them. Fox News Digital reached out for comment to one of Navarros representatives. ALYSSA FARAH SAYS GOP IS ON THE WRONG SIDE OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE ISSUE: SHOULD BE THE EASIEST VOTE Others who have sat in the vacant seat since McCains departure include former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, former NBC Sports reporter Michele Tafoya and Daily Blast Live host Lindsey Granger. ABC was long searching for whats been described in reports as a conservative unicorn to fill the vacant seat, someone who has credibility among Republicans but who never promoted election fraud allegations following the 2020 presidential race. Griffin resigned from the Trump White House in December 2020 and has been an outspoken critic of her former boss as well as Republicans broadly, particularly as a View co-host and as a contributor on CNN. THE VIEW GUEST HOST ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN SLAMS STEVE BANNON AS LIAR, SAYS HES CRAZY Critics have accused her of betraying conservative principles and shifting her politics for convenience. She has defended her stances and said she has alienated her own family members with her turn against former President Trump. Variety reported that ABC News will officially announce Griffins new gig in the coming weeks ahead of the 26th season that will air in the fall. It is uncertain, however, whether Griffin can bring the same energy to the famed table of The View as her predecessor did. Meghan McCain joined The View in October 2017 and was widely credited for juicing the shows ratings during the Trump era, particularly for her fiery exchanges with her liberal colleagues like Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg. While she was no fan of Trump following his constant attacks on her late father, Arizona Sen. John McCain, she remained critical of Joe Biden a longtime family friend and liberal Democrats. McCain parted ways with The View a year ago, citing her family based in Washington, D.C., as a large motivator in her decision. In her memoir, McCain said she was the subject of toxic, direct and purposeful hostility by her liberal colleagues in front and behind the cameras. She is now a columnist for the Daily Mail.

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'The View' will tap Alyssa Farah Griffin as permanent co-host following Meghan McCain exit, sources say - FOX Bangor/ABC 7 News and Stories