NEUTER THEM!

Newstalk ZB's Chris Lynch says some women need to be forcibly sterilised to prevent them having further children. He thinks poor people should only be allowed to have one child.

YESTERDAY A FOURTEEN YEAR OLD BOY was found guilty of the manslaughter of an Auckland dairy owner while his 13-year-old companion was found not guilty.

The profoundly deprived background of the 14 year old has provoked some nasty views from within the corporate media. Yesterday afternoon National Party stooge David Farrar told Newstalk ZB's Larry Williams that some women needed be forcibly sterilised to prevent them having further children. On TV3 this morning Paul Henry championed the same view.

Also on Newstalk ZB local Christchurch host Chris Lynch, playing back Farrar's comments (twice), was also pitching for forced sterilisation this morning. He agreed with one caller who compared the mother of the 14 year old to unwanted cats and dogs. She needed to be neutered to prevent her getting pregnant again. Lynch agreed that some people needed to 'have their bits cut off'.

Another caller attacked young mothers who he had seen - wait for it - taking their children to McDonald's. 'And they say they need more money.' replied Lynch. Presumably Lynch thinks a mother who allows her children to eat fast food is a candidate for sterilisation.

Lynch elaborated on his 'enlightened' social policy, declaring that poor people needed to prevented from having more than one child.

This, unfortunately, is not the first time we've heard right wing media pundits calling for sterilisation  and its often spurred by a high profile criminal case.

In 2010 another talkback host, Michael Laws, trumpeted that 'mongrels' (the comparison with dogs again) had to be prevented from breeding more 'mongrels'.

Former ACT MP David Garratt suggested that "abusive parents" could be paid some $5000 each if they agreed to be sterilised.

Chris Lynch appears to have no qualms at all introducing compulsory sterilisation - just like the Nazis did as part of their eugenics campaign. But perhaps Lynch thinks Winston Churchill got it right when he introduced a bill that included forced sterilisation of "mental degenerates".

And it would be a mistake to think that forced sterilisation was only attractive to the Nazi Party. It has a long and ugly history in the so-called 'free world' - which Lynch and co all seem keen to extend further.

 In the United States for example, between 1997 to 2010, the state of California paid doctors  some $150,000 to sterilise women in the state's prisons. The sterilisations in California prisons only stopped after a prisoner-rights group began to ask questions.

In 2012, right-wing politicians in North Carolina blocked a plan to give thousands of victims of state sterilisation programs compensation for what they endured.

The state ran one of the most active eugenics programs in the country. Created by law in 1929, according to the Charlotte Observer, "A state board ordered sterilizations for poor, feeble-minded, mentally diseased or people considered likely to have disabled children. The program continued until 1974."

And here we have three white males, not short of a dollar or two, calling for the forced sterilisation of poor women - because that's what it amounts to.

It is not a coincidence that all three males, Farrar, Lynch and Henry, have often attacked beneficiaries and the welfare state generally.

The idea that poor women--and those on welfare, in particular--are somehow unfit to be mothers has become a part of the right-wing assault on all social programs. All three media commentators - who I suspect know very little about the fourteen year boy’s background other than what they've read in the media - have evoked the image of the woman with too many children  and supposedly living the high life at the expense of the taxpayer--to promote forced sterilisation.

It is also supremely ironic that these very same commentators are the first to promote 'individual rights' and to complain loudly about the 'Nanny State'. Yet they are happy to trample over the rights of socially marginalised working class women and bring the coercive mechanisms of the State to bear on them.