Virginia Deane Abernethy (born 1934) is an American anthropologist and activist. She is professor emerita of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She has published research on population demography and immigration. She ran for Vice President of the United States in 2012 alongside Merlin Miller for the American Third Position, a party that promotes white nationalism. Early life Virginia Deane Abernethy was born in 1934 in Cuba to American parents. She was raised in Argentina and New York City, being educated at New York's Riverdale Country School. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College, an M.B.A. from Vanderbilt University, and Ph.D. from the Social Relations Department at Harvard University in 1970. Career and opinions Abernethy was a post-doctoral researcher and faculty member at Harvard Medical School in the early 1970s. She then worked in the Department of Psychiatry of the Vanderbilt School of Medicine, within Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee for 20 years, from 1975 to 1999. She was appointed as Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, promoted to Associate Professor in 1976 and Professor in 1980. She retired in 1999, and still retains an office on campus as Professor Emerita. She is an anthropology fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. An outspoken opponent of immigration, she has called for a complete moratorium on immigration into the United States. She claims that immigrants devalue the workforce, deplete scarce resources, adversely impact carrying capacity, and that Third World immigration has led to a rise in dangerous diseases within the United States. She has countered claims of racism against her by pointing to her friendship with Jesse Lee Peterson. In a letter to The Washington Times published on September 30, 2004, she rejected their reporting of her as a "self-described 'racial separatist, preferring "ethnic separatist." The Anti-Defamation League in 2012 described her as being a "white supremacist." On June 29, 2011, the American Third Position (now the American Freedom Party), a whites-only party, announced that she had joined their board of directors. She was later nominated as their vice presidential nominee. Abernethy ran in election for vice president of the United States in 2012 as the running mate of Merlin Miller, who ran for president, in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, gaining a total of 12,900 votes nationally. Fertility-opportunity hypothesis Her research has focused on the issues of population and culture. Her best known work discounts the demographic transition