Today SCOTUS responded to a challenge to the Indiana state law concerning abortion regulation, as WaPo notes:
The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to a compromise on a restrictive Indiana abortion law that keeps the issue off its docket for now.
The court said a part of the law dealing with disposal of the “remains” of an abortion could go into effect. But it did not take up a part of the law stricken by lower courts that prohibited abortions because tests revealed an abnormality.
The court indicated it would wait for other courts to weigh in before taking up that issue.
No real answer, just putting it off. However, Justice Thomas is trying to sneak in an opinion based on a faulty understanding of the word eugenics, a word fraught with negative connotations. From the dissent section of the response:
Each of the immutable characteristics protected by this law can be known relatively early in a pregnancy, and the law prevents them from becoming the sole criterion for deciding whether the child will live or die. Put differently, this law and other laws like it promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.
A quick poke at Wikipedia to find out about eugenics:
Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/; from Greek εὐγενής eugenes ‘well-born’ from εὖ eu, ‘good, well’ and γένος genos, ‘race, stock, kin’)[2][3] is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population by excluding (through a variety of morally criticized means) certain genetic groups judged to be inferior, and promoting other genetic groups judged to be superior.
The key is “... that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population …“. We’re talking about motivations here. But is that particular motivation applicable in this context?
No. In my experience, it’s a rare mother & father who are worried about improving the genetic quality of the human race. Historically, the concern is economic: Can this potential baby be supported by the family? Other motivations have also applied, such as Are we too old and Do we want this potential baby?
In order to support the eugenics charge, it would be necessary for a court to infer the motivations of a mother having an abortion, absent a clear and trustworthy statement from same. Not that we haven’t tried to do so with hate-crime legislation, or at least crept up to the precipice with such laws, but it’s still a chancy and intellectually dubious enterprise. Given the stronger likelihood that the motivation is economic or convenience, Justice Thomas’ use of the word eugenics in this discussion is ill-chosen to the point of the illicit interjection of politics and religion into the discussion.
ALL that said, there’s an important question to ask concerning freedom of choice, as illustrated by the use of sex-selected abortions in India and China. Both of these countries now have large imbalances in their young citizens as measured by sex, which has lead to unrest. What if – and it’s an unlikely if – we saw the same phenomenon in the United States? If our social harmony were roiled by the free choices of potential parents?
In this unlikely happenstance, SCOTUS could rule that the government has a compelling interest in denying abortions for sex-related reasons. Not that I’m making that argument now; I think it’s absurd, given the lack of substantial dowries in American marital rites. But it’s worth contemplating how free choice must sometimes be limited, especially when there is a valid perception that a child is more valuable as one sex than as another.
But, to return to the main point, attempting to borrow the negative connotations of a word that does not apply is a mark of intellectual dishonesty which should make further evaluation of Justice Thomas’ argument a rather fraught affair.
And for a graphic eugenics example, see The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (2013).
