UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute hosted a panel discussion on the fight for reproductive justice Thursday, with panelists focusing on the role of white supremacy in anti-abortion activism and the need to center marginalized people in abortion-rights activism.
The talk, part of the institute’s Rise Up for Justice series, was titled “Inside the Fight for Reproductive Justice in Critical Times.” The panel was hosted by longtime reproductive justice activist and physician Vicki Alexander, and panelists included Pamela Merritt, the executive director of Medical Students for Choice; Bia Vieira, the chief strategist of programs for the Women’s Foundation of California; and Anise Simon, an abortion storyteller at We Testify.
The panel began with a poem about reproductive rights. After panelists were introduced, Alexander asked participants to define the term “reproductive justice” and asked what reproductive injustice looked like.
Merritt said reproductive justice was a “human rights framework” that seeks to give every person the right to decide whether or not they are pregnant.
Merritt also urged listeners of the panel to reflect on the colonial and white supremacist roots of anti-abortion legislation in the United States.
“They want to control women for a reason, and they want to control reproduction for a reason,” Merritt said during the event. “This is about population, this is about minority rule, this is about (how) white supremacy cannot function without white population growth.”
Full story at DailyCal.
Ms. Merritt is not, and never was, a medical student and appears to know nothing about an archetypical White supremist, Margaret Sanger, the nurse who founded Planned Parenthood, the world’s biggest abortion chain. Ms. Sanger was a blatant racist. She said, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” She favored the forced sterilization of those she deemed “unfit” and gave a speech to the Ku Klux Klan. Ms. Merritt is a former Planned Parenthood employee and has been an abortion advocate for a decade and a half.
The Daily Cal students didn’t do their research well, let alone present both sides of this contentious issue.
Thank you, “journalism . . .” for providing this information. I’d wager many pro-lifers were unaware of it. Planned Parenthood began as a tool to “exterminate the Negro population”, according to the quoted words of its founder. Today, we’d rightly label this “genocide” and its proponents as modern-day Adolf Eichmanns. Now they hide what they do by soft-pedalling their efforts as “feminine health care”. Josef Goebbels was the author of this idea that you could disguise terrible evils by using the right euphemisms; and if you repeat them often enough with a straight face, people would accept them as true. Goebbels = the chief of Nazi genocide propaganda; Planned Parenthood = the chief propagandist that abortion hurts no one and is a right. They deny that the developing baby in the womb is a human being. Courts agree with them. But courts give more consideration to unborn animals of “endangered species”. A California court found that the unintended and incidental killing of unborn pelicans—by using an insecticide in their habitat which killed harmful creatures but also weakened the birds’ shell before they were fully formed–was the same as aborting a FULLY BORN pelican! Why isn’t such mercy granted to a growing, unborn child? Shouldn’t any intelligent person grasp the perverse reasoning here?
Imagine no Leftists
““They want to control women for a reason, and they want to control reproduction for a reason,” Merritt said during the event. “This is about population, this is about minority rule, this is about (how) white supremacy cannot function without white population growth.” ” Try as I might, I cannot think of a more ignorant, misguided and deceptive idea than this one. The first two posts cover this adequately. What bothers me is that this Pamela Merritt is apparently a med student and thus supposedly intelligent. Well she has to be academically sound to be a future doctor but what a waste of a good mind to be blinded by feminist ideology to the point of playing the fool intellectually, morally and spiritually. You have my poor prayers, Pamela.