What the Buffalo Tragedy Has to Do With the Effort to Overturn Roe

[CousinIT]

https://time.com/6178135/buffalo-shooting-abortion-replacement-theory/

In the week since a gunman killed 10 people in a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., countless articles and television spots have unpacked the racist conspiracy he shared in a hate-filled manifesto before his shooting spree.

The conspiracy—the so-called great replacement theory—is the idea that Democratic lawmakers and other elites are working to force white people into a minority in the United States, usually by increasing immigration. Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson has hammered on the idea more than 400 times while railing against immigration on his show, according to a New York Times investigation, and elected Republicans, including Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida have bluntly echoed the language in comments and campaign materials criticizing Democrats’ immigration policy.

But the conspiracy theory also animates another cornerstone of the modern Republican agenda: opposition to abortion.

The anti-abortion movement was born in the 19th century of white fears of a declining white birth rate, says Jennifer Holland, assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. The idea was that by allowing white women to receive abortions, lawmakers were leaving white populations vulnerable to demographic “replacement” by non-white or immigrant groups with higher birth rates. In the 1870s and ’80s, the fear was primarily focused on Jewish and Catholic immigrants, especially those from Italy or Ireland, who had higher birthrates than white Protestants at the time; now, white power organizations that embrace “replacement theory” focus on Black and Latino communities, which have higher birth rates than whites.

While the Buffalo gunman did not explicitly mention the word “abortion” in his manifesto, he references birth rates more than 40 times, according to a TIME analysis, and repeatedly expresses his belief that “white birth rates must change.” . . .

[Wednesdays]

1. Such dogma is doomed to fail

Nearly all white couples aren't going to have more babies just to make up the birth quota.

[intheflow]

2. Not to mention, more babies of all colors will be born without legal access

to abortion. So white people would have to start pumping out babies at twice the rate of everyone else. Even if every straight white woman in America was on board with this, who could afford to have that many kids, housing and feeding them for at least 18 years?

Meanwhile, all the other-colored babies will be placed in foster homes - or what the heck, let's bring back Dickens-esque orphan workhouses. We've tried them before and we have empirical evidence from a human development perspective that they don't work. They want WHITE babies. Or, if they'll adopt a POC child, they'll raise them wearing those "color-blind" rose-colored glasses that has served as cover for racism decades, centuries. That kid will be super screwed up, gaslighting every incident of racism their child experiences as a singular aberration, a personal failing of one person and not indicative of society at large. And what if this kid also turns out to be GLBTQ+? I shudder to inagine.

The core, unspoken agenda for the so-called "party of Lincoln" is to create a jacked-up (jack-booted up?) society that's more like slavery than Jim Crow.