MSNBC Worries That Dobbs Means White Supremacists Can Now Rape White Women to Increase White Births. Wait, what?
I’m serious. This is actually on their website. Now, normally with this kind of asshattery I’d refuse to link because I try not to reward asshattery. But in this case I feel I have to because otherwise, you’d think I was making this up.
How the loss of Roe directly serves white supremacists’ horrifying plot
Some white supremacist groups see rape of white women as an “extremely effective” way to increase white births. After the death of Roe, the ideology is all the more horrifying.
Minorities and white women are targets of an ideology that both seeks to reduce nonwhite populations and to increase white ones. For this and other white supremacist extremist groups, the mass murder of minorities and the mass rape of white women are twin goals oriented toward maintaining a white majority nation.
These groups fear possible declining white birthrates and think demographic change is part of an orchestrated plot to end the white race. It’s a claim that’s been around for decades, in the form of an antisemitic conspiracy theory called “white genocide” and an Islamophobic conspiracy theory called “Eurabia.” And these conspiracies have gotten new life as the global “great replacement” conspiracy has grown and been mainstreamed.
This creates considerable contradictions when it comes to women’s reproductive rights. Abortion is seen by white extremists as part of the so-called white genocide plot, and in that sense, reproductive rights are a part of their “white extinction anxiety.” The loss of Roe v. Wade, in this scenario, directly serves white supremacist extremist goals — as long as it is white babies who cannot be aborted. As NPR has reported, “prominent white supremacists have at times called for abortion to be banned only for white women but for it to be accessible and even free for women of color.”
The same contradictions hold true for rape. While the rape of white women by nonwhite men is used to generate outrage and a “rallying call to unite and fight back,” rape is seen by some on the far right spectrum as acceptable, even desirable — if it produces white babies. Voluntary reproduction matters too. In far-right forums online, users have discussed the “pro-white” approach of having large families of white children, thus promoting their goals and ideology “through procreative means.”
White women aren’t only victims of this worldview; women play an active role across the far-right spectrum, including some actively promoting women’s roles in restoring white birth rates. In 2017, one white supremacist extremist mother issued a “white baby challenge” on social media, urging other white women to have at least as many white babies (six) as she had birthed. The challenge came on the heels of a tweet from then-Iowa Rep. Steve King in which he warned: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
This is where the state of reproductive rights in the U.S. post-Roe becomes especially chilling. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade referred to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describing an insufficient “domestic supply of infants” to meet the demand for infant adoption in the U.S. He also cited Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s December reflection during oral arguments that forced pregnancy is not a “meaningful hardship” because unwanted babies can be surrendered through “safe haven” laws. These kinds of justifications for dismantling reproductive rights reduce women to vessels charged with producing babies for the good of the collective.
In a post-Roe world, a plot to force women to become pregnant, however fringe it might be, takes on a whole new meaning. It’s not a stretch to see how this frame benefits white supremacist extremists, their obsession with demographic change and their desire to increase white birth rates.
Ummmmm. What?
It’s not a stretch, huh? The US Supreme Court rules to protect the unborn and somehow this is part of a racist conspiracy to fill the world with only white babies.
Um. There’s one problem with that. When Roe was the law of the land, minorities were far more likely to abort their children than white women. So actually, legalized abortion for all nine months of pregnancy would actually make the racist’s dreams come true. So, once again the progressive ideals and the racist’s ideals match up perfectly.