Strange Bedfellows: Margaret Sanger and Kim Hammer
Arkansas State Rep. Kim Hammer had a strong record of defending life. He was a co-sponsor of bill in the Arkansas Legislature to ban abortions after twenty weeks and supported another bill to ban abortions when a heartbeat can be detected. However sterling his pro-life bona fides though, it cannot excuse his most recent proposal to provide subsidized IUDs for single mothers on welfare. Meanwhile, radical pro-abortion liberals are now complaining that his proposal doesn’t go far enough, while at the same time admitting that sterilization programs for the poor, especially in the South, have a dark and terrible history.
Strange Bedfellows: Margaret Sanger and Kim Hammer
The evil legacy of eugenics should give one pause. The founder of the pro-abortion movement, Margaret Sanger, is regarded as nothing short of a saint by her followers today, but in her day, she enthusiastically embraced the vile and ghastly ideas of white supremacy and racial purity which were then fashionable. Those same ideas inspired a whole host of abuses, most notably the forced sterilizations of racial minorities, prisoners, and the disabled.
Representative Hammer rationalizes his proposal by saying that single mothers should be able to take “a little bit of a breather to think about their life decisions that are affecting us as taxpayers.” Perhaps Mr. Hammer is the one who needs to take a breather to think about his decisions that are affecting the lives of single mothers. The government should not be in the birth control business in the first place, but it is intolerable to suggest that bringing life into the world is merely a question of dollars and cents. It should be a wake-up call for Mr. Hammer to find himself agreeing with Margaret Sanger and Ruth Bader Ginsburg about eugenics and population control.
Moreover, it is the great tragedy of our time that this idea that providing “free” (i.e., taxpayer funded) contraception is somehow helping women. As the Blessed Pope Paul VI prophetically wrote in the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968:
Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.
It is unquestionably a great social evil that single mothers must have recourse to the government to provide for their basic needs. However, the solution is not to degrade and defile women by treating them as a line in an accounting ledger or a soulless cog in the machinery of the state. Rather, the question must be asked, why are these mothers single in the first place? Where are the fathers?!
Our culture is deeply sick. The sexual revolution has come at a terrible cost which has been most severely and harshly borne by the poor and the infirm. The failure to care for widows and children is one of the greatest of all injustices which cries out to heaven for vengeance. This misguided and inexcusable legislation from Representative Hammer is a part of the real “war on women” which liberals are so fond of attributing to Republicans. Sadly, for once, this accusation is true.