broke down the last barriers to legalized abortion on demand. Indeed, just one year after
the commission's final report was issued, the Supreme Court delivered the Roe v. Wade
decision which did just that.
Aware that many blacks and other minorities had noticed that the population control
movement was a genocide program aimed at reducing their numbers, the commission
went out of its way to cover its real intent by stipulating that all races should cut back on
their birth rates. But the racist animus of their conclusions could not be hidden.
Commssion Executive Director Westoff, who owed his job and his funding to Bush gave
a hint of this in a book he had written in 1966, before joining the commission staff, which
was entitled From Now to Zero, and in which he bemoaned the fact that the black fertility
rate was so much higher than the white.
The population control or zero population growth movement which grew rapidly in the
late 1960s thanks to free media exposure and foundation grants for a stream of
pseudoscientific propaganda about the alleged "population bomb" and the "limits to
growth," was a continuation of the old prewar protofascist eugenics movement, which
had been forced to go into temporary eclipse when the world recoiled in horror at the
atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of eugenics. By the mid-1960s, the same
old crackpot eugenicists had resurrected themselves as the population- control and
environmentalist movement. Planned Parenthood was a perfet example of the
transmogrification. Now, instead of demanding the sterilization of the inferior races, the
newly packaged eugenicists talked about the population bomb, and giving the poor "equal
access" to birth contol, and "freedom of choice." But nothing had substantively changed--
including the use of coercion. While Bush and other advocates of government "family
planning" programs insisted these were stricly voluntary, the reality was far different. By
the mid-1970s, the number of involuntary sterilizations carried out by programs which
Bush helped bring into being, had reached huge proportions. Within the black and
minority communities, where most of the sterilizations were being done, protests arose
which culminated in federal litigation as a suit was brought.
In his 1974 ruling on this suit, Federal District Judge Gerhard Gesell found that, "Over
the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been
sterilized annually under federally funded programs. Although Congress has been
insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis," Judge
Gesell wrote, "there is uncontroverted evidence ... that an indefinite number of poor
people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the
threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they
submitted to irreversible sterilization." Gesell concluded from the evidence that the
"dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky."
As we have seen, George Bush inherited his obsession with population control and racial
"down breeding" from his father, Prescott, who staunchly supported Planned Parenthood
dating back at least to the 1940s. In fact, Prescott's affiliation with Margaret Sanger's
organization cost him the Senate race in 1950, a defeat his son has always blamed on the