Clarence Thomas recently issued a twenty-page opinion on the Supreme Court decision Box v. Planned Parenthood that went viral because he drew on Margaret Sanger, founder of the first birth control clinic in the U.S., and her connection to eugenics in order to argue that abortion is and historically has been a tool to control the reproductive lives of women of color. The opinion has already been critiqued for getting the history of eugenics wrong; for suggesting, if taken to its logical conclusion, that birth control should also be outlawed; for conflating the history of birth control with the history of abortion; and for ignoring that the history of forced sterilizations went hand-in-hand with the movement to outlaw abortion.
It also gets another major point wrong: eugenicists were, for the most part, adamantly anti-abortion. Thomas acknowledges that Margaret Sanger was in fact anti-abortion. However, he doesn’t explain that in taking this position, she fell in line with all the leading eugenicists of the day. In fact, racist arguments were at the foundation of many laws that made the procedure illegal in every state. As the nineteenth-century medical doctor Horatio Storer, who led the fight in outlawing abortion in the U.S., argued in 1866 in reference to the newly annexed “open” territories in the west and the recently emancipated south, “Shall they be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question that our own women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.” Storer led the campaign to outlaw abortion and convince other medical doctors (mostly men) to follow suit by instilling the fear that it was primarily white women with means who were having abortions, and that because of their practices, the U.S. would soon be filled with the children of “aliens.”
The eugenics movement soon took up this argument, and early twentieth-century popular culture complied by circulating the belief that white women were doing the nation a disservice when they had abortions. Films like Lois Weber’s 1916 Where are my Children? were made with this fear as their premise. In this silent film, a wealthy white woman has a series of abortions behind her husband’s back because she doesn’t want to give up her leisure. In the meantime, her husband, a prominent lawyer, is fighting for the eugenic cause by trying to stop indigent, unhealthy, and already overcrowded families from having more children. Novels like Viña Delmar’s 1928 bestseller Bad Girl implicitly underscored this argument by suggesting that a white, middle-class woman’s job was to have children. Only lascivious, disreputable women have abortions, the novel not so subtly argues. And Anthony Comstock, the infamous moral reformer who helped pass many of the laws that made the circulation of any reference to abortion or birth control by mail illegal, promoted the erroneous belief that abortion was not a procedure a respectful woman would ever choose. Outlawing abortion was seen as a solution to coerce white middle-class and wealthy women to reproduce.