The U.K.-based Lancet medical journal has denounced “medical racism” in the United States as part of purported ongoing “structural violence” present in the country.
“While much public health research has shown that racism is a fundamental determinant of health outcomes and disparities, racist policy and practice have also been integral to the historical formation of the medical academy in the USA,” states the once prestigious journal in an October 3 article coauthored by Ayah Nuriddin, Graham Mooney, and Alexandre R. White.
“Like the history of US policing, the history of medicine and health care in the USA is marked by racial injustice and myriad forms of violence: unequal access to health care, the segregation of medical facilities, and the exclusion of African Americans from medical education are some of the most obvious examples,” the essay states.
“These, together with inequalities in housing, employment opportunities, wealth, and social service provision, produce disproportionate health disparities by race,” it continues. “The health community needs to confront these painful histories of structural violence to develop more effective anti-racist and benevolent public health responses to entrenched health inequalities, the COVID-19 pandemic, and future pandemics.”
By “structural violence,” the authors mean how the organisation of society “puts individuals and populations in harm’s way.” The arrangements are structural, they explain, “because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world.”
Lest readers think that this structural violence and medical racism are things of pre-Emancipation America or the Jim Crow years, the authors hasten to insist that they continue up to the present day.
The concept of structural violence, they assert, “is helpful for understanding how the histories of violence, neglect, and oppression that crisscross law enforcement, politics, medical care, and public health are inextricably linked and manifested in the present.”
Curiously, the authors venture into the dangerously mined territory of “reproductive rights” and its ties to the eugenics movement, a reality still present in Planned Parenthood’s targeting of black and minority women for abortion.
“The coercive nature of this history resonates with attitudes towards reproductive rights decades later,” the article declares. “Native American, African American, and Puerto Rican women were overwhelmingly targeted for involuntary, coercive, and compulsory sterilisation under early 20th century eugenics laws.”
As Nigerian pro-life activist Obianuju Ekeocha, author of Target Africa: Ideological Neo-colonialism of the Twenty-first Century, told Breitbart News in 2018, Planned Parenthood continues to carry on the legacy of its racist founder.
Planned Parenthood not only “has its roots firmly embedded in eugenic racism,” Ms. Ekeocha said, but even today, “we know that Planned Parenthood targets black and other minority communities, having up to 79% of their surgical abortion facilities located within walking distance of African American or Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods.”
“The disparity in infant mortality between White and Black people in the USA is even higher now than it was in the Antebellum period,” notes the Lancet article. Racism “has not just been incidental to the history of American medicine, and much medical practice around the world, but entrenched in it.”
What the article fails to mention is that in today’s America black babies are aborted at more than three times the rate of white babies, leading some black leaders to speak of a “racist genocide” through abortion.
If the Lancet authors are seriously concerned about vestiges of racism and eugenics in modern medical practice in the U.S., they need look no further than the “structural violence” of abortion giant Planned Parenthood.
Defunding this iniquitous organization would be a fine start.
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