@ Putin
Remember Fulham cited the "Planned Parenthood" offshoot (a lie) Guttmacher Institute as evidence that Planned Parenthood was targeting the black community, making up a lie whereby the black community had an abortion rate 5x higher than whites. Remember that? So you can cite it but once it disagrees with your position it's propaganda, is that so?

AND

"Nor did you acknowledge that you were wrong about Planned Parenthood "targeting" black communities, or that you were wrong about the abortion-rate being 5x that of whites."

I really find these accusations difficult to understand when Putin himself wrote this yesterday:

“That is not at all what this document says. Non-hispanic white women accounted for 36% of all abortions. Non-hispanic black women accounted for 30% of all abortions."

Now surely it does not take a whizz statistician to work out that if the black community forms some 13 % of the USA population ((http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html) that results in a rate of around 5 times for that group. Is Putin being deliberately obtuse here to suit his argument or is he just in denial? You choose.

As to the genocide aspect I originally wrote this:

“Another question for Putin: How do you feel about the growing number of Black people who feel that the appallingly high comparative rate of abortion in their community to be akin to genocide?”

Even Putin tacitly now accepts that the figures (even as supplied by the Guttmacher institute) indeed highlight the appallingly high comparative rate of abortion in the black community. If I were a member of that same community, particularly in the light of their history, I too would be disturbed and most likely angry about this too. I might even describe it as genocide. I did not mention Planned Parenthood in that post and honestly did not have them in mind. That bit was all in Putin’s imagination. I am "happt" to say that the 5* rate point now seems to me to be unassailable, even for someone in denial.

We have had a number of mentions in this thread of the disabled in the context of abortion. I think that unless there are any eugenicists amongst us (quite likely on a debate on abortion, perhaps), we can all agree that disabled people are as much entitled to life as the able-bodied. Moving on from that premise it would be interesting to hear some voices from the disabled community itself on how they feel about the issue; all pretty reasonable so far?
Well there is sizeable constituency amongst the disabled population who regard many in the pro-choice group as reinforcing stigma and stereotypes about their community. I have to say that I have much sympathy with their view. Here is a well researched academic paper giving a selection of relevant views.
Saxton, M. (2000). Why members of the disability community oppose prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion. Prenatal testing and disability rights, 147-164.

The pdf is available here: http://faculty.law.miami.edu/mcoombs/documents/saxton.pdf

"we can all agree that disabled people are as much entitled to life as the able-bodied."

Utterly absurd statement. Other than the incredibly rare in real life "life of the mother is at risk" rationale for abortion, the reason have abortions is "I don't want to be inconvenienced with a child". Well what the heck is more inconvenient than having to care for a disabled person ... so good for the goose, good for the gander.

If we are going to snuff the fetus because it's existence is an inconvenience, then snuffing the disabled is a tiny moral step.

And this "inconvenienced with a child" is an argument for a fetus that has no indication of being unhealthhy...it's mere existence inconveniences the mother (who, by the way, most likely allowed the sperm into her body and did feel that was inconvenient...)

So then if you get in to the situation where medical tests have indicated medical concerns - disability, deformation, etc - then the pro-abortion crowd is pretty much 100% "the kid isn't going to have a good life...so snuff 'em" mentality...

To say that it is OK to kill a child because it 'won't have a good life because of a disability'....well, I would suggest it is downright immoral of the abortionist to NOT advocate for the snuffing of the disabled, who clearly, by their arguments as applied to the fetus, do not have a life worth living.

(who, by the way, most likely allowed the sperm into her body and did **NOT** feel that was inconvenient...)

"To say that it is OK to kill a child because it 'won't have a good life because of a disability'....well, I would suggest it is downright immoral of the abortionist to NOT advocate for the snuffing of the disabled, who clearly, by their arguments as applied to the fetus, do not have a life worth living."

krellin's really on to something here. Once a society makes the decision that women have a right to carry out an abortion under any circumstance, what possible argument can there be to limit abortions which kill fetuses which will have some disability or genetic defect? If anything, it fits into the argument perfectly. A disabled child is even more difficult to raise than a normal one, so if one couches the argument for abortion in the terms of the mother not having to be burdened with a child she does not want then a the logic fits flush into a scenario with a disabled fetus.

It's eugenics by the backdoor.

ty

It is good that eugenics “e word” has come up in this debate. It truly is the elephant in the room, whose name shall not, on any account, be mentioned.

Unfortunately the evidence remains. There is this from Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood:

“[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”
“Plan for Peace” from Birth Control Review (April 1932, pp. 107-108)
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=129037.xml

AND

"[We propose to] hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. And we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Commenting on the 'Negro Project' in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 1939. - Sanger manuscripts, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts.

AND

Eugenics without Birth Control seems to us a house builded upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit. It cannot stand against the furious winds of economic pressure which have buffeted into partial or total helplessness a tremendous proportion of the human race. Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment.

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=143449.xml

On Marie Stoppes her UK equivalent founder of the eponymous institute (920,000 international abortions in 2009, we have this taken from a supportive (!) Guardian piece
(http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2011/sep/02/marie-stopes-right-birth-control)

"But the really eye-popping stuff is in Birth Control News, a self-published extremist fanzine which she set up in July 1922, with this stirring editorial: "Sterilisation of the unfit raises a hornet's nest, but no one worries at all about the daily sterilisation now going on of the fit. Young married men of the professional classes are today often forced by conditions to remain sterile, though they passionately desire the healthy children they could have if they did not have hordes of defectives to support in one way or the other." Her eugenics programme was actually slightly to the right of Hitler's, just because her definition of defective is so broad. There are certainly issues of Birth Control News that seem to suggest, just with their news agenda, that some people should be sterilised for nebulous reasons of defectiveness, like not being rich enough. As you might expect, there are strong strains of racism: she described the southern Italians as a "low-grade race"; she was accused of anti-semitism even by her birth-control allies; and in a stinging attack on the French who, in the early 1920s tightened their laws against contraception, she said that if they really wanted to repopulate their nation, they should "eliminate the taint of their large numbers of perverted or homosexual people".

Good to see that Fulham is still a twit

Of course his posts are completely irrelevant in today's abortion debate, but since when has the great contrarian cared about logic?

The Democratic Party was the party of slave owners, does that mean it is currently pro slavery

Bugger off you ignoramus.

Good old Santa an insult in the first sentence and the last, really conducive to, if not good, then reasonable debate (not).

The context of the Sanger and Stopes quotes was the very much live issue of how contemporary disabled people feel about abortion. At the risk of repetition here is a reference for you:

Saxton, M. (2000). Why members of the disability community oppose prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion. Prenatal testing and disability rights, 147-164.

The pdf is available here: http://faculty.law.miami.edu/mcoombs/documents/saxton.pdf

So you see the discussion of eugenics in the context of abortion is still very much to the point at least as far as these people are concerned. Maybe, however, their opinion does not count in your eyes? If that is contrarian, then so be it. Incidentally my dictionary gives the antonym of contrarian as conformist:

“A person who uncritically or habitually conforms to the customs, rules, or styles of a group.”

Yet, idiot, your entire post was about racial eugenics, and making your normal false equivilencies between in this case early twentieth century race based eugenics and today. Then when called out, as usual, you try to pi or your argument away from its original, absurd premise.

@ Santa "Yet, idiot, your entire post was about racial eugenics"

Wow man are you absolutely sure on that, I mean really? The whole recent trend in the defence of Sanger and Stopes is the claim that when they talked about race they were talking about the wider human race rather than specific races. Santa, you really need to be singing off that hymn sheet if you are to be a good conformist. This paradigm maintains that those two individuals did support eugenics and the improvement of the species through hygiene methods directed at the unfit. They are excused as being "of their time", so that is alright then (!) Are you really saying that you disagree with your elders and betters and interpret these quotes as being racist???
Personally it strikes me that the evidence very firmly suggests that these two ladies were both racists and, as their defenders maintain, also eugenicists. This is very much a matter of contemporary concern, for example in the UK, where the run of the mill abortion limit is 24 weeks, unless the foetus/neonate is handicapped where it becomes 40 weeks (yes I did that arithmetic too).