The Original Design

America was never a blank slate. It was a corporate colonial experiment, funded by investors who expected returns: land, gold, trade, and human labor. The charters made it plain. Rights were granted to “our loving subjects” to colonize a section of North America—not for the good of humanity, but for the glory of empire. The colonists were promised “all liberties, franchises, and immunities” as if they were in England—but only if they were English. They were tasked with spreading the “Christian religion” to the “heathen” (read: Native) peoples. Colonization wasn’t just justified as a civilizing mission—it was an economic enterprise with a racial, religious, and profit-driven logic baked in.

This vision wasn’t metaphor. It was blueprint. It was architectural. The colonies weren’t merely settlements; they were extensions of English bloodlines, Protestant discipline, and land-based wealth. America’s founding ideal was white in body, English in culture, Christian in spirit, and capitalist in function. Citizenship belonged to the free white Christian man. Property was for those who replicated English norms. Reproduction—biological and ideological—was policed to preserve the racial and cultural purity of the national body.

The goal was clear: build a new Eden that looked, prayed, and profited like the Crown—even as it claimed independence from it.

From the start, every institution—church, court, school, militia—was tasked with engraving this template into permanence. America was not simply a land of the free. It was a project in control, in conformity, in crafting a national identity that was white, orderly, and God-fearing. Freedom, in this schema, was never for everyone. It was for those who fit the mold—and the systems were designed to mold or exclude accordingly.

The founding design wasn’t neutral. It was exclusionary by intention and strategic by structure. It privileged white, Christian, property-owning men and built a scaffold of laws, schools, and markets to protect that privilege. To pretend we’ve outgrown these roots is to miss the truth: the architecture is still standing. The language has changed, the fixtures modernized—but the design remains.

The Civil Rights Movement didn’t uproot the system. It rebranded it. The end of segregation didn’t erase the racial hierarchy. It refined it—made it more polite, more coded, harder to name. Roe v. Wade didn’t liberate women. It offered a narrow, conditional refusal—one that was always contested, always monitored, always under threat. The election of a Black president wasn’t a sign of arrival. It was the signal flare that triggered a backlash from those who mistook dominance for divine order and saw any shift as collapse.

Nowhere is this righteous denial more aggressively cloaked than in the twin institutions of the pro-life movement and the adoption industry—systems that claim to protect life and family but in practice preserve the machinery of control. These are not universally nurturing systems. They are curatorial. They decide which families are worthy of support and which must be reshaped, surveilled, or dissolved. They uphold a moral and racial template inherited from the settler-colonial state: white, Christian, heteronormative, and obedient.

The Baby Scoop Era exposes this most clearly. From the late 1940s through the early 1970s, up to 1.5 million babies—mostly white, born to unmarried mothers—were surrendered for adoption. These women, often teenagers, were coerced by churches, families, and social workers in the name of morality and conformity. The goal wasn’t child welfare. It was racial reproduction. The system redirected white infants from “unfit” mothers to “deserving” families that matched the nation’s fantasy of the ideal household.

By 1973, over 4 million white mothers had relinquished their children—nearly half of them in the 1960s alone. But the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 changed everything. Unintended pregnancies among white women declined. Adoption rates plummeted by 42%. The infant supply dried up. And suddenly, the industry’s dependence on white babies became visible. Adoption had never been about love. It had always been about control—about maintaining a racialized national identity through reproductive management.

When white infants became scarce, the illusion cracked. The child welfare system revealed what it had always partially been: a mechanism of social sorting, racial policing, and institutional profit. During the War on Poverty, Black families were targeted. Social workers, armed with racial bias and a new mandate, interpreted poverty—shared beds, unwashed clothes, empty refrigerators—as neglect. Black children were removed at alarming rates. Native families, meanwhile, faced the full force of cultural erasure. By the 1970s, up to one-third of Native American children had been taken from their communities, placed in white homes, orphanages, or boarding schools. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 arose not from benevolence, but from crisis.

Meanwhile, the foster care system metastasized. Children—especially those who were older, disabled, nonwhite, or part of a sibling group—were warehoused in temporary placements that generated revenue through their very instability. Group homes, private agencies, and therapeutic programs profited from churn. Permanence became a myth. Love, a slogan. What endured was the logic of management: containing the fallout of a moral order that had failed, while still extracting value from those left behind.

And through it all, adoption remained the so-called “loving alternative” to abortion. But love, here, was a costume. It masked coercion, cloaked inequality, and ignored the trauma that followed. White unwed mothers were praised for surrendering in the name of virtue, while mothers of color were punished for keeping their children under the weight of poverty. Adoption was not a gentle option. It was a cultural mandate—one that preserved the fantasy of the moral family while punishing deviations from the script.

The same system that shamed women into carrying pregnancies also punished them for not being “good mothers.” Their children were either commodified for private placement or discarded into state care, depending on how well they fit the national myth.

This is the legacy we still live with. A legacy of selective value, of commodified care, of moral manipulation masquerading as love. A nation still obsessed with managing reproduction, controlling family formation, and defining which lives are worth protecting. The rhetoric of “family,” “innocence,” and “tradition” is still deployed—not to serve all families, but to defend an old order that never served them to begin with.

Today’s politicians are not outliers. They are heirs. They carry forward the Founders’ most dangerous traits: the use of moral language to protect economic interests, the invocation of liberty to legislate control, and the strategic manipulation of law to define who belongs—and who is expendable.

They invoke “life” while turning lives into bargaining chips. They champion “freedom” while enforcing obedience to a narrow and exclusionary idea of order. What looks like regression is, in fact, continuity—a faithful execution of an original design that was never about inclusion, only about selection.

Until we confront this continuity—until we name the inherited lies we mistake for values—we remain trapped in ritual, draping old exclusions in new language and calling it justice. And until challenges to the default are no longer treated as betrayal but recognized as necessary reckoning with history repeating, we will continue to punish truth as treason and mistake preservation for progress.