A health official in the Netherlands has called for a debate on the idea of forced abortion and contraception to deal with what she sees as a crisis of unwanted children.
Alderman Marianne van den Anker of the Leefbaar Rotterdam Party wants specifically to target communities of Antilleans and Arubans where she sees the biggest problems of unwanted children.
Her comments have stirred protest by a health foundation working with those communities in Rotterdam. The group, which called the comments degrading, is asking Mayor Ivo Opstelten and other politicians to distance themselves from Van den Anker's views.
Van den Anker is a mother of two children and the official in charge of Rotterdam's health and security portfolios. In an interview in a newspaper Saturday, she said she had tried everything to prevent child abuse. "I fail, I fail," she told the interviewer as she outlined her controversial idea for a debate on compulsory abortion and contraception.
The target groups for her program are Antillean teenage mothers; drug addicts and people with mental handicaps, she said, according to a report in Expatica. According to the report, Van den Anker said children from these groups run an "unacceptable risk" of growing up without love and with "violence, neglect, mistreatment and sexual abuse." "The exceptions," she said, "and there are some, can be counted on a pair of hands." Van den Anker pointed to the growing number of Antillean youth gangs in Rotterdam whose members come from loveless homes.
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