COME FOR THE RACISM & ABLISM; STAY FOR THE GENDER SELECTION:

Nestled among Justice Samuel Alito's arguments laying waste to nearly 50 years of abortion precedent lurked an unassuming footnote documenting a narrative advanced in amicus briefs submitted to the high court. These "friend of the court" briefs, Justice Alito explained, "present[ed] arguments about the motives" of those favoring "liberal access to abortion," namely "that some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population."

According to Alito, claiming abortion is a tool of racial genocide is not beyond the pale.  "[I]t is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect." After all, he noted "[a] highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black." As further support for the view that abortion has functioned as a tool of eugenics, Alito cited Justice Clarence Thomas's separate opinion in 2019's Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, a challenge to an Indiana law that prohibited abortion where undertaken for reasons of race or sex selection or because of the diagnosis of a fetal anomaly. The Court declined to review the law, deferring the question of the constitutionality of such "reason bans" to another day. While Justice Thomas agreed with the decision to decline review, he nonetheless wrote separately to emphasize that the day was coming when the Court would have "to confront the constitutionality of laws like Indiana's," which, in his view, merely reflected a "compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics."  

As evidence of the "eugenic potential" of abortion and reproductive rights, Justice Thomas noted that "[t]he foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement," which "developed alongside the American eugenics movement." Indeed, reproductive rights advocates like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the modern birth control movement, and Alan Guttmacher, who served as the President of Planned Parenthood in the 1960s, worked hand in glove with the eugenics movement, endorsing contraception and abortion as effective methods for "controlling the population and improving its quality." 

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