Earlier this month, one ghastly chapter in a particularly ghastly story came to a kind of a conclusion as the Czech government agreed to make restitution to thousands of women, mostly members of the Roma minority, who were subjected to coerced sterilization by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
The socialist strongmen of the 20th century differed in important ways from their progressive admirers in the United States and the rest of the free world, but they had some fundamental things in common: “Central planning” was never an idea that was limited to economic life, and the planned in “Planned Parenthood” is very much the planned from “planned economy,” meaning that the “planning” involved was to be at the social scale rather than merely at the family scale.
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