Many people in the U.S., particularly those in the GOP, claim to be “pro-life.” Since 1973, these people have fought long and hard to turn back Roe v. Wade and outlaw abortion, with the claims that abortion is murder and conception is life.
In a twist of irony, some of the most vocal anti-abortion protestors know absolutely nothing about the U.S. government’s history of sterilizing men and women of color, or of things like the Tuskegee Experiment that destroyed the sexual health of many black men. They don’t protest the radioactive waste on Navajo reservations that give children cancer. They don’t protest the conditions of poverty that lead children to die from abcessed teeth. They don’t protest the poisons in ground and well water in many poor communities of color, that cause children to be born with birth defects. They don’t protest that the U.S. government is blowing up small children in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that the government is not helping children starving to death in Darfur or Brazil or the U.S. itself. They don’t protest the death penalty.
They are simply pro-life when it comes to fetuses, specifically white fetuses. The deaths of poor children and children of color, the deaths of poor people and people of color and “the enemy” and U.S. soldiers … none of those are covered under “pro-life.”
These same people often also claim to be pro-family, when they mean “pro-straight nuclear/white middle-class family.” I specify “white” there because the nuclear family of one father, one mother and 2.5 kids is primarily a Western thing. They don’t mean single-mother families, which is why poor mothers lose their children on bogus charges. They don’t mean extended families, which is why the adult children of immigrants have to wait over a decade to get into the U.S. legally, even if their parents are veterans of this country. They aren’t protesting that local governments often move poor families into housing in neighborhoods ridden with crime and drug use.
Well, here’s another one for the pro-life, pro-family files. Men and women in China who face sterilization can be political refugees, but they can’t bring their spouse with them.
For a decade, the Justice Department’s immigration courts had considered the husbands of women forced to undergo abortions or sterilizations to be political refugees in their own right. The protection also extended to women whose husbands were sterilized.
A deeply divided 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the Justice Department’s interpretation of the immigration law yesterday, holding that only the person unwillingly subjected to the medical procedure counted as a political refugee. [Full story]
The reason is because, supposedly, Chinese men leave their wives in the U.S. in some sort of underhanded asylum scheme, while they go back to China to live all happy. Hooray, stereotyping.
So it’s not really that they’re concerned about the life of the children (otherwise, they’d allow the babies to have two caretakers, right?) or their quality of life. It’s not that they care about family, really, either, or this wouldn’t even be an issue.
It’s that gay people, people of color, and poor people need to know their place. The GOP will tell you when you can reproduce, when you can have your children, and when your family can stay together, and you’d better keep quiet, keep your knees together and follow orders like a good little citizen.
