Nixon's statement should not be a shock.

Back when pro-choice was the conservative position, racism was the dominant motivation for getting rid of these mixed babies.

Not to be a nitpick, but I don't think you'd call the conservative position back then "pro-choice." Forced abortion is just as anti-choice as forced pregnancy.

Thanks for the newsflash. Without this bit of information, I would have gone on thinking Nixon was such a wonderful human being.

Mike

What he said is no different than what Margaret Sanger believed. She was involved in eugenics, which is a movement that believed in racial supremacy of the 'Aryan' race and wanted to eliminate other races through sterilization and abortion. She founded Planned Parenthood for this very purpose, and it continues on today without most of the public knowing its true purpose.

Wow, Anon. Four comments in and someone's already comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis. Thanks for being a prime example of what Dana just talked about.

Sanger did have some racist views, but that doesn't mean that her belief in family planning is automatically wrong. That's like saying PETA is evil because Hitler was a vegetarian (it is evil, but not for that reason). She was opposed to abortion at first. She also said masturbation would make you blind and crazy. Planned Parenthood doesn't share any of these views today.

Trash them all you want, but only 3% of their services go to abortion. The other 97% goes to sex education, preventing unwanted pregnancy, preventing/treating STDs, routine healthcare like pap smears, and prenatal care. They're doing more to prevent abortion in a single day than the pro-life movement could do in a lifetime!

Black American foetuses are aborted at about 3 times the rate of white ones. Given the facts on the ground about the black American lower classes there is a clearly "eugenic" effect on the society. Why such a drop in the crime rates in the 1990s? Yes most certainly. One need only think of the resources saved on law enforcement, incarcerations, the welfare rolls, public housing estates, schooling, the list goes on. To deny all this is to deny the facts.

One has to wonder if tapes will ever reveal how Nixon felt about the positions his wife took on abortion and other "women's issues" (to use a phrase of that day).




From Wikipedia on Pat Nixon:

She spoke out in favor of women running for political office and encouraged her husband to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court, saying "woman power is unbeatable; I've seen it all across this country".[45] She was the first of the American First Ladies to publicly support the Equal Rights Amendment,[46], though her views on abortion were mixed. Following the Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, Pat stated she was pro-choice.[1] However in 1972, she said, "I'm really not for abortion. I think it's a personal thing. I mean abortion on demand—wholesale."[47]

The newly released statements make Pat's statements on abortion all the more interesting. Maybe they both talked about the issue, and had some sort of understanding that it would be Pat, and not Richard, to comment on abortion, and perhaps the Roe decision in particular?




If so, it's doubtful that tapes will ever be found to document that conversation. :)

One other point on Nixon's remarks in this (or these) tapes on abortion: it's not really clear exactly how he's linking how he could condone abortion (either personally or politically), it's not clear if he's referring to consensual interracial relationships (a la the potential product of the movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", for example) or to rape, which he mentions in the same thought.

Similar misunderstandings and prejudices may be involved either way, of course, but there is something different or at least there's shading of a different kind of 'wrong' between someone who wants to prohibit what was once called 'miscegenation', or the (presumably) consensual 'mixing' of races in relationships, particularly sexual ones, someone who wants the government to enact policies that would promote abortion in cases of a mixed-race pregnancy, and someone who thinks that black-on-white rape is a much more heinous crime than rape by someone of the same race as the victim. About the only thing that can maybe be reasonably inferred from the quotes so far in the press on these tapes is that it appears Nixon was talking about his own feelings and not what might be politically acceptable policy for abortion law.

These distinctions are worth noting because some press reports on this are going so far as to say that Nixon was saying in this cited tape that the government should promote or encourage abortion in cases where, presumably, a pregnancy results from a black-white relationship. It doesn't seem clear that he's saying that. This isn't to defend Nixon or suggest he was "misunderstood" at the time regarding civil rights or relationships between black and white people, it seems evident that Nixon strongly supported the Republican party's "Southern Strategy" of playing on the race-related fears of white people to gain votes in the face of increasing support in the Democratic party for civil rights laws and legislation. It would be much more helpful though to progressives who study this era to better understand what presidents in particular like Nixon and LBJ thought on abortion in the years leading up to Roe when support for abortion law reform was so strong, the question wasn't so much whether or not abortion should be made legal, but how.

It's also worth noting that many people, including progressives, had attitudes about race and sex that today's world would see as anachronistic at best, or racist, sexist, or (if possible) worse. On race, sex, and the South the best example might be Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird". That book is a Southern classic still taught in high schools today, cited by attorneys as motivation for them to take up law as a career, and last and least, the protagonist "Atticus Finch's first name has been co-opted to name a popular line of punk rock clothing. The name "Atticus Finch" has been immortalized, but not the name of the accuser, Mayella Ewell.

But try to reread "To Kill A Mockingbird" from the perspective of the alleged accuser, an apparently mentally disabled young woman and possible incest victim, and see if it doesn't play overly on themes of promiscuity, female vulnerability and treachery to extremes that make the likely existence of a woman as deranged and driven as Mayella as unlikely and unrealistic as Atticus' altruism and willingness was in the extreme personal and financial risk he took in representing the accused, Tom Robinson. It's all the more unrealistic given that the entire story, as well as the perspective taken towards Mayella, is told in the book through the mind of a six year old girl, Scout Finch, Atticus' daughter.

This isn't to suggest that "To Kill A Mockingbird" is any less of an insightful classic of Southern literature, just that depending on one's depth of understanding of the people and the times, very different readings and opinions are possible, like with Nixon's remarks above.

Not sure why 'southern students for choice-athen' seeks to restore the Nixon legacy - and the comparison with "To Kill A Mockingbird" seems beyond stretched, but I am absolutely certain that this commenter has been confused by a paraphrase of Nixon.

Here is what he actually said:

Nixon: What is the situation, incidentally, with regard to the Supreme Court decision on abortion [unclear]?

[…]

Colson: I mean, the weird thing about it, Mr. President, I’m not a Catholic, but I’m—

Nixon: I know, I know. I admit, I mean there are times when abortions are necessary. I know that. You know [unclear] you have a black and a white. [Unclear]

Colson: Or rape.

Nixon: Or rape.

I hope this larger transcription segment from the tapes makes it clear that it was Colson who introduced rape, not Nixon and that it was almost done as a means to give Nixon a way out of the little racist cul-de-sac, into which his thoughts had wandered.

I know it was a long time ago, but we must try hard to remember that Nixon was a bad guy. His own words define him as a bad guy and his actions even more so. It is our poor comprehension of history, that allows us to permit the hard edges of that fact to grow fuzzy, but we cannot imbue nostalgia with the power to alter the reality of our own past.

Learn who Nixon was, in his own words:

http://nixontapes.org/chron53.htm