Republican Uses ‘Great Replacement’ Theory to Justify Abortion Ban | Abortion

“The population of our state has not grown except for foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here… because we have killed 200,000 people.”

As Nebraska Republicans moved to ban most abortions in their state on Wednesday, one used arguments right from the racist “good substitute” conspiracy theory to push for the bill’s passage.

Nebraska Sen. argued. Steve Erdman that abortion has caused slow population growth in the state for the past half century—and argues that it has hurt Nebraska’s economy.

“The population of our state has not grown except for foreigners moving here or refugees being placed here. Why is that? It’s because we’ve killed 200,000 people. These are the people we’ve killed,” Erdman said during the debate, after lamenting that making abortion illegal would result in more people “being able to work and fill some of the positions that we have vacancies.”

Erdman’s comments came during debate over a bill that would ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy—before many women know they are pregnant. These include exceptions for rape, incest, and life-saving procedures. The bill advanced to a vote Wednesday night.

His views seem to be drawn from the racist great replacement theory. That theory, in its purest and most extreme form, posits that there is a conspiracy by globalist elites—in many versions, Jews—to flood western countries with immigrants in order to de-racialize and replace the population with a white majority and control those countries. Abortion is part of the theory—extremists argue that the procedure is part of accelerating a “white genocide.”

It has been used to justify many white supremacist attacks of terror and violence. At the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, tiki torch-wielding white supremacists chanted. “You will not replace us” and, “Jews will not replace us,” the day before they rioted. The killers who massacred Jewish worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018 were mostly Mexican-American shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019, and Black grocery shoppers in Buffalo, New York in 2022 all cited versions of this theory as reasons for their violence—as did the man who shot two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

There are Republicans embraced more a watered-down version of that theory over the years. In their chant, the Democrats want to admit a large number of immigrants so they can dominate the elections and control the country.

And Erdman is not the first Republican to link this theory to abortion.

Then-Iowa Rep. Steve King argued in 2017 that “culture and demographics are our destiny. We cannot give our civilization back to other people’s babies.”

Matt Schlapp, the head of the influential group that hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference and a close confidant and former top staffer for former President Donald Trump, the implicit connection is made just a few days after the Buffalo shooting.

“If you say there’s a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legal abortion every year, if that can be reduced, some of that problem will be solved,” Schlapp said. “You have millions of people who could take many of these jobs. How come no one is bringing that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start by allowing our own people to live.”

Erdman’s statements about population replacement are not his only eyebrow-raising remarks on abortion; He also argued that the most vulnerable people are not the women who carry unwanted pregnancies, but the fetuses themselves.

“The ones we should care about are the babies. It’s not the mother. It’s not the ones who choose to have an abortion. It’s the babies. It’s the babies. It’s about a heartbeat. It’s about a human life ,” he argued. “This is not medical care, killing someone. I don’t know who we think we are, that we can choose to be God. God created those people. They deserve a chance.”

Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3akqdy/nebraska-steve-erdman-abortion-great-replacement-theory