Protecting preborn babies from abortion could be the first step toward authoritarianism, according to a gender studies professor at the University of Michigan.
“Banning abortion is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes,” Seda Saluk wrote in an essay for The Conversation, a liberal publication subsidized by universities, including the University of Michigan. Universities currently pay around $45,000 per year each to support the publication, The College Fix previously found.
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“Restrictions on reproductive freedoms often necessitate other kinds of restrictions to enforce and maintain them,” Saluk (pictured) said. She also said prohibitions on the killing of preborn babies “can serve as a back door for the erosion of civil liberties — and of democracy itself.”
The United States is “mirroring a pattern that has happened in authoritarian regimes around the world,” before going on to say that “the first move most 20th-century dictators made…was to criminalize abortion and contraception.”
She concludes by saying “reproductive rights are really a collective good…they are an essential element of democracy.”
The Fix reached out to Saluk three times without response, twice by email on Oct. 22 and 28, once by phone call to the UMich gender studies department. The Fix asked her about counter examples of authoritarian countries who coerced women into having abortions, such as North Korea and China. The Fix also asked for her to respond to a counter argument that prohibiting abortion is not authoritarian but about protecting human rights, as pro-life groups argue.
Several experts criticized Saluk’s arguments in original comments given to The Fix.
“Banning abortion would be akin to banning slavery, which was a political move rooted in righting a serious attack on basic human rights,” Katie Xavios told The Fix via email. She is the national director of Virginia-based American Life League. “Granting preborn citizens the right to life outside the womb would be righting a wrong that has taken the lives of billions of innocent children.”
She also criticized Saluk’s assertion that abortion is needed for freedom.
“The author is making the claim that in order to be truly free, certain citizens should have the right to marginalize other citizens,” Xavios said.
“Authoritarian regimes all have the hallmark of marginalizing a certain demographic and deciding whether they live or die,” she said. “The reality is that the demographic being marginalized today is the preborn.”
An expert on international relations and family policy shared similar criticism.
“Abortion is historically a tool used by communist regimes to destroy the family and by racist regimes for eugenic population control,” Stefano Gennarini said. He’s the vice president for legal studies at the Center for Family and Human Rights. The group advocates for pro-family values on the international stage, including at the United Nations.
“The first country to declare a right to abortion-on-demand was Communist Russia,” Gennarini said.
“Communist dictators like Mao and eugenicists like [Planned Parenthood founder] Margaret Sanger promoted abortion throughout the 20th century,” he said. “To this day, the most generous government funders of the abortion industry are motivated by population control motives, and not by concerns for women’s health.”
He also said abortion came to this country under an “authoritarian imposition” by the Supreme Court in the 1973 decision Roe v. Wade.
LifeNews Note: Brenna Ruddell is a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville.This column originally appeared at The College Fix.
