It’s all over the news today (although it’s been going on for several months) that unspecified “Islamic militants” in Pakistan are threatening health workers administering the polio vaccine to children. These zealots claim the health practitioners are actually spies for the US. And that may be over the top. They also claim the vaccine is intended to sterilize Muslim children. Now whatever on earth would give them that idea!? What could possibly make them so paranoid!? Why such distrust of the US medical & pharmaceutical establishment!?
Could it be the numerous syphilis “studies” done by US health agencies on Black veterans & Guatemalan women? Might it be eugenics & forced sterilization programs on Latina, Native American, Black, & Puerto Rican women--which continue to this day without the women’s knowledge or consent? Might it be the US eugenics programs conducted all over the African continent? Or could it be that poor people in other countries, most prominently India, are now guinea pigs for drug testing by US & European drug companies?
Racist eugenics, under the guise of population control, has been a focus of US policy domestically & overseas for decades. Some of the most despicable figures in US science & medicine have promoted & administered these programs which the US government bankrolls. These programs aggressively contracept, sterilize, & abort millions of women. They are coercive & racist & flout the fundamental right of women to control their own reproductive lives--including the right to have children.
India & African countries have always been prime targets of the eugenicists. The explanation given for extreme poverty in those countries is that there are too many babies--& that lying-assed theory is promoted at the highest levels of government & pseudoscience. The problem in those countries is not babies but local oligarchs & predatory nations who extract wealth at the expense of the working poor.
US eugenics & population control programs have been called a holocaust & that is exactly what they are. The unidentified “Islamic militants” in Pakistan are absolutely right to question vaccination programs & every other US bankrolled program that pumps unspecified chemicals into Pakistani babies.
The women’s movement in the 1970s raised the issue of eugenics & forced sterilization & put itself at odds with eugenics/population control forces. Regrettably, much of the opposition today is from opponents of reproductive freedom who promote false science & alarmist conspiracies to mask their right-wing agenda. Advocates of women’s right to reproductive freedom must wrest the debate back from these creeps & place women’s rights firmly in the center of the debate.
(Photo is of Pakistani child being vaccinated: by Muhammed Muheisen/AP)
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