‘Racist undertones’: Pro-eugenics arguments submitted in Supreme Court abortion pill case

A declaration submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in the abortion pill lawsuit recently argued before the Court has come under scrutiny, with some noting that its abortion-favorable contents make arguments in line with a eugenics-based worldview.

In a written declaration submitted in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM) lawsuit, professor Jason Lindo, an economics professor at Texas A&M University, described himself as an “expert in the field of economics, policy evaluation, and reproductive health care.” Lindo suggested in his declaration that if pregnant women are denied access to the abortion pill, they will potentially give birth to children who are likely to “do worse in school” or see an “increased likelihood of criminal involvement,” among other ills.

This idea is not new. It’s simply a recycling of pro-eugenics talking points. Eugenics is the belief that the human race can be improved by selective breeding… or, as has been seen more frequently throughout history, by selective elimination.

Decades ago, when the abortion pill was first brought to the United States, a man connected to the star attorney who argued in favor of Roe v. Wade made the exact same arguments, recommending at the time that President Bill Clinton should strive to “eliminate” certain segments of society via vasectomies, tubal ligations, abortions, and the RU-486 abortion pill, now known as mifepristone.

Expert promotes eugenic ideas in Court declaration

“My research interests include health economics and issues concerning youth, including the economic effects of abortion and contraceptive policies. My recent and ongoing work is especially focused on documenting the effects of changes in access to reproductive healthcare,” Lindo wrote.

“For those who have delayed abortions, the financial consequences can be devastating because: (i) a large share of individuals seeking abortion have low incomes,” Lindo claimed. “Individuals report seeking abortions for many different reasons and combinations of reasons. The most frequently cited reasons, which have substantial overlap, include: financial insecurity, poor timing and/or not being ready, educational and career plans, problems associated with their partners, concerns about their existing children, and concerns about health that would arise from continuing the pregnancy.”

“Given the large number of abortion patients who have medication abortions [abortion pill] and their clearly articulated needs and/or informed reasons for doing so, removing medication abortion as an option would represent a shift that is substantially detrimental to a very large share of individuals seeking abortions,” he added.

This is where Lindo exposes his eugenic ideology by suggesting that abortion (the intentional killing of preborn children) will solve the ills of poor children — because if their mothers cannot obtain abortions, their children will do worse in school, exhibit bad behaviors, and potentially end up as criminals.

“Rigorous quantitative research also indicates that there will be extensive effects on the children of people who seek but are unable to obtain an abortion. As a result of the impacts on their parents, these children are expected to do worse in school (lower test scores and increased grade repetition), to have more behavioral and social issues, and ultimately to attain lower levels of completed education. They are also expected to have lower earnings as adults, poorer health, and an increased likelihood of criminal involvement,” the economics professor wrote.

Lindo has made these claims before, suggesting to NPR that “there are detrimental effects” on the outcomes of kids whose mothers are denied or delayed from obtaining an abortion.

“When they grow up, they’re less likely to attain higher education themselves, they’re more likely to be involved in crime, have lower adult earnings,” Lindo claimed.

It should be noted that the much-touted Turnaway Study, which purports to claim that women are harmed by an inability to obtain abortion, has been debunked and is riddled with methodological flaws, not the least of which is the fact that by the final year of the study, only 17% of the original 877 participants remained in the study (approximately 150 women).

Eugenics and abortion pill history

The abortion pill was originally referred to as RU-486 (“RU” for Roussel-Uclaf, the French manufacturer of the pill, and “486” for the drug’s serial number). The company which developed RU-486 also had connections to the company which created the gas used to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust.

A 1999 report by the New York Times revealed that Roussel-Uclaf’s parent company, Hoechst A.G. of Germany, “was one of three corporations that emerged from the breakup of I.G. Farben, the German chemical company that manufactured the cyanide gas, Zyklon B, for Nazi death camps….”

Author Robert J. Lifton noted in his book, “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide,” that “The use of poison gas… Zyklon-B was the technological achievement permitting ‘humane killing.’”

And RU-486 was following in that eugenics vein.

The TROUBLING History of the ABORTION PILL

In 1992, Ron Weddington, a co-counsel of Roe v. Wade and the ex-husband of Roe attorney Sarah Weddington, wrote to the newly-elected Bill Clinton administration expressing concern about the growing size of certain population groups. His open letter, uncovered by Judicial Watch, read in part:

“… you can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country.  No, I’m not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that.

“The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies who can’t afford to have babies. There, I’ve said it. It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it….”

“For every Jesse Jackson who has fought his way out of the poverty of a large family there are millions mired in poverty, drugs and crime….”

Weddington understood that the Black community viewed abortion as Black genocide. The same year Weddington penned his letter, accusations of racism were directed at a school program in Baltimore which targeted minority students with the Norplant contraceptive, developed by the Population Council.

Then, in 1994, with the encouragement of the Clinton administration, Roussel-Uclaf assigned the U.S. rights of marketing and distribution of the abortion pill to the very same Population Council (a non-profit founded by John D. Rockefeller III in 1952), along with others already entrenched in the eugenics movement. The drug’s distribution was later handed over to Danco Laboratories, a sub-licensee of the Population Council, as Live Action News has previously documented.

In addition to the Population Council, abortion pill clinical trials have also been conducted by another organization funded by groups with deep historic ties to the American eugenics movement.

A 1991 book published by three pro-choice researchers suggested that the abortion pill was developed to restrict population growth in minority countries — eugenics in action.

“The specific intention of such research was to restrict population growth in countries that were judged to be ‘underdeveloped.’ If successful, the method(s) could be extended to groups in the United States, Black, Hispanic and Native American Women (Department of Health, Education and Welfare, NIH, USA, 1969),” authors of “RU 486 Misconceptions Myths and Morals” wrote.

“Reproductive technological history seems to be repeating itself,” they added. And indeed, the population control agenda of the abortion pill continues today in full force, having ended the lives of 6 million babies in the U.S. since its approval in 2000.

Pro-life Hispanic and Black groups respond 

Lindo’s eugenics-based ideas were further brought to light in an amicus brief filed before the U.S. Supreme Court by the National Hispanic Leadership Conference (NHLC) — America’s largest Hispanic Christian evangelical organization — and the Frederick Douglass Foundation (FDF), a not-for-profit organization which supports strengthening the Black family.

Both predominantly minority organizations supported Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), the pro-life Respondents in the case.

In response to Lindo’s declaration, the pro-life NHLC and FDF expressed outrage, headlining that section of their brief, “The Federal Government’s Own ‘Expert’ in this Case Chillingly Echoes the Eugenicist Aims of Widespread Abortion.”

The groups collectively wrote (emphasis added):

Lindo strongly suggests that, based on these expectations, abortion is preferable to allowing the child to live. Put simply, the FDA—a federal agency—submitted a supporting declaration that claims that children should be aborted because they are more likely to be unfit for school, for adulthood, and for society.

On the allegation that children born to mothers who do not have access to abortion-inducing drugs could turn out to be criminals, the pro-life groups claimed that “Dr. Lindo’s perspective is not new: It is rooted in the eugenics movement and consistent with contemporary scholarship.”

The groups were referring to controversial research previously published by John J. Donohue and Steven D. Levitt and updated in their book Freakonomics in which the pair claim that the legalization of elective abortion in the 1970s led to the decline in violent crime in the 1990s. Other economists have disputed those claims.

“Again, it is hard not to observe the racist undertones of such theories, given that the abortion rate is higher among black and Hispanic women,” NHLC and FDF stated in their brief.

In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that while the abortion rate percentage among white women decreased from 2020 to 2021, it increased nearly six percent (5.86%) among Black women (39.2% in 2020 v. 41.5% in 2021). Likewise, Hispanic women also saw an abortion percentage increase of over three percent (3.3%) in 2021, (21.7% in 2020 v. 21.8% in 2021).

Abortion is disproportionately targeting minority communities.

In 2021, while white Americans made up 58.2% of people living in the United States in 2021, they accounted for 30.2% of abortions in 2021. Yet, Black Americans made up 11.6% of people living in the United States in 2021, and accounted for 41.5% of abortions in 2021. Hispanic Americans made up 19% of people living in the United States in 2021, and accounted for 21.8% of abortions that same year.

“In any event, potential difficulties in a child’s future should not justify aborting that child. Yet Dr. Lindo’s declaration reflects that prevailing sentiment among so called experts that mifepristone may be used as ‘a disturbingly effective tool for implementing the discriminatory preferences that undergird eugenics,'” the pro-life groups emphasized in their brief.

Abortion has long been tethered to eugenics, with certain segments of society — including communities of color — targeted to this day for eugenic abortions. Advocates of abortion often paint the killing of the children of the disadvantaged as a solution to poverty, or as a stepping stone out of a life of poverty. But the facts simply do not bear this out.

This eugenic philosophy of abortion has little to do with helping the disadvantaged and instead serves to eliminate them.

The DOJ put a pro-life grandmother in jail for protesting the killing of preborn children. Please take 30-seconds to TELL CONGRESS: STOP THE DOJ FROM TARGETING PRO-LIFE AMERICANS.