Nebraska Republican: Abortion Ban Needed to Ensure Dominance of White Population

[appalachiablue]

Nebraska Republican: Abortion Ban Needed to Ensure Dominance of White Population, Truthout, April 18, 2023. Ed.

- The lawmaker’s remarks make explicit the deep ties between white nationalism and abortion bans. -

As lawmakers in the Nebraska legislature debated and advanced a near-total abortion ban last week, one Republican took to the floor & delivered an argument undergirded by a white supremacist conspiracy theory in support of the ban. In a speech last Wednesday, Republican State Sen. Steve Erdman said that an abortion ban is necessary because there are too many of “those foreigners” & “refugees” in the state — coded language for non-white people. “Our state population has not grown except by those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here,” he said, adding his untrue & racist claim about a lack of population growth among white people due to abortion.

Video of his arguments was posted online by Heartland Signal. Erdman also said that the absence of an abortion ban in the state, where the procedure is currently banned after 21 weeks & 6 days, is part of what’s fueling a labor shortage in the state, revealing what Republicans view as the value of their constituents. The aborted fetuses are “people that could be working and filling some of those positions that we have vacancies,” he said. (Republicans’ arguments about a labor shortage are also untrue — Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that unemployment is lower in NE than it has been in the past decade.)

The Republican’s argument invokes white nationalists’ “great replacement theory,” a conspiracy theory that global elites are trying to replace white people with people of color. It is a completely debunked idea that has nonetheless gained hold among the right and the Republican Party, especially as it has been used to supposedly justify antisemitic and racist violence. The “great replacement theory” was invoked by the shooter who killed 10 people & injured 3 in a supermarket in a majority-Black neighborhood in Buffalo, & the man who killed Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. It has also increasingly been referenced by Republicans opposed to humane immigration regulations.

In his argument, Erdman invoked the theory to justify another type of violence: forced birth. Experts have said that the growth of white supremacist rhetoric on the right and the rise of abortion bans & attacks on trans people are deeply linked. Bans on trans & abortion rights are both about taking away the public’s bodily autonomy — specifically, the bodily autonomy of already marginalized populations. Black people already suffer from higher rates of parental mortality than their white counterparts, & experts have said that abortion bans will exacerbate that problem. Meanwhile, as misogyny becomes more prevalent on the right, and abortion bans aid in far right white supremacist groups’ missions to increase the population of white people by forcing white women to give birth, some especially abhorrent groups advocate for doing this via sexual assault... https://truthout.org/articles/nebraska-republican-abortion-ban-needed-to-ensure-dominance-of-white-population/

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. It won't be that long now before the world at large realizes we should've been thinking

that there needs to be less people, not more ... for the last 40 years or so, minimum.

Our collective thinking in that timeframe should've been we can't base the global economy on the issuance of debt against presumed future 'growth' (which essentially amount to 'more babies and more fossil fuel exploitation').

The folly will soon be very apparent.

And all of us personally won't be around at the time, but future historians (should the species survive that long) will look back on era as the absolute STUPIDEST, and MOST SELFISH era that there ever was in human history.

We should've been encouraging a slow-down in human populate growth at every opportunity for at least 40 years, GLOBALLY. And the reduction of fossil fuel use which would naturally coincide with that.

[OldBaldy1701E]

3. But but

You don't tell ME how to raise my kids! You don't tell ME not to have them!



(Parental rights... one of the most dangerous things in our culture. Take it from someone who had to go through a childhood where any old asshole could spit out a kid and then just neglect it or kill it if they did not like it or it was too much trouble, then call it 'crib death'. Yeah... crib death... which is a translation for "I thought a cute kid would be great but the kid is not cute nor is it docile enough for my liking. Plus it is too much work.&quot

[tanyev]

2. And there it is.

They haven't yet figured out a way to make it illegal only for white people, but I'm sure they've thought about it.

[TeamProg]

4. Unwanted kids will make a superb labor force. Is that what he said ?

[Probatim]

5. It couldn't be republican policies that are slowing childbirth in red states?

My kids and their friends all recognize the difficulty and expense of raising children in today's economy.

My son works with a guy who pays $900/month for insurance for his three kids. He says that's practically his mortgage payment and that cost alone all but ensures he's never going to have kids.

Until things change on a broader scale, we're going to see declining birth rates across the board.

[NullTuples]

6. aka, The Great Replacement Theory. But also...the Republic of Gilead is looking less like fiction.

[Martin68]

7. Is the abortion rate higher among whites than other groups?