Put Y'all Back in Chains, page 16
But it didn’t seem that she’d be a champion for life in the beginning. Prior to the Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion, Alveda King had what she called an “involuntary” abortion. It was performed “without my consent,” she said. “The doctor said, ‘You don’t need to be pregnant.’”7 He then performed what he called a “local D and C,” she explained. “He gave me an illegal abortion with no anesthesia.”8 She would end up having to have surgery to repair her cervix.9
In 1973, Alveda became pregnant again, and at age 22, she walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic, where the doctors explained, “Don’t talk to your family. Don’t talk to your church. We’re your friends, and we’re going to give you this procedure,” and Alveda underwent a second abortion.10 It would be nearly 10 years before Alveda King would become one of the champions of the pro-life movement.
Today she recalls her grandfather’s perspective on the perils of abortion: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Ripping babies apart is a very unjust act. It is very violent.”11
Abortion has been a plague on the black community for decades, but this is no accident. The abortion movement at its founding shared many of the goals of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century.
Margaret Sanger: No Friend of Black America
The leading group promoting abortion today is Planned Parenthood. Founded as the American Birth Control League in 1921, it changed its name to Planned Parenthood in 1942.12 Its founder Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist who targeted blacks. In 1921, she explained, “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”13 “Mentally and physically defective” was her code for black people.
Sanger was the main organizer of the first World Population Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927, whose purpose was to deal with the global threat of overpopulation. In her writings afterwards, she acknowledged her disappointment that birth-rate control was not allowed to take the main stage at the event.14
In 1939, she started “The Negro Project” with the aim of expanding birth control services for Black communities in the south, according to a report by New York University.15 Sanger’s agenda was largely hidden, especially from blacks. She explained her objectives in a letter to a staff member in 1939: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”16 In order to achieve her goals, she needed to hire black doctors and ministers.17
Denounce the Planner, not the Plans
Today Planned Parenthood has a budget of over $1.7 billion and assets exceeding $2.1 billion.18 In 2022, Planned Parenthood received more than half a billion dollars in federal taxpayer support.19 Besides ending the life of the unborn, it turns out abortion is a huge business, and like any other business, Planned Parenthood strives to achieve a regulatory environment that has little to no limits. Is it any wonder that Planned Parenthood has pledged to spend $50 million in political activity for the November 2022 midterm elections?20 Walmart, Apple, and Exxon Mobil—companies that are nearly 10 times larger21—have committed collectively less than 7 percent of the audacious political funding level promised by Planned Parenthood.22 It’s clear that for Planned Parenthood, a lot is at stake.
A Protected Industry No More
In 1973, the abortion industry received a gift that any business might want. The U.S. Constitution severely limited the ability of federal, state and local governments to interfere with its practices. Imagine what Wal-Mart or General Motors could accomplish if they had limits on government interference removed.
There once was a time when the Supreme Court sided with business. Historians note that from about 1897 to 1937, the Supreme Court used a strained interpretation of the “due process” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down all manner of business regulations. It was called the Lochner era, named after a case in which the Supreme Court struck down a New York State law, which placed a maximum ten-hour day and sixty-hour work week on employment in a bakery to protect employees from workplace hazards.23 Under what is now referred to an action relying on “substantive due process,” the Supreme Court regularly countermanded the ability of Congress and the several states to enact measures that the Court said “interfered with the freedom of contract.”24 It also struck down laws passed by Congress to prevent firings over union membership,25 laws making it illegal for movie theater companies to enter into agreements to set ticket prices, and laws also preventing gas station operators from engaging in “price-fixing.”26
After a threat by President Roosevelt to pack the Supreme Court with justices more sympathetic to business regulation, the Lochner era ended. In a case often referred to as the “switch in time that saved nine”, Justice Owen Roberts abandoned “freedom of contract” in a minimum wage case and joined with four other Justices to allow the law to go into effect.27
Today, legal commentators mock this doctrine, saying that it was merely a mechanism for the Court to impose its economic and business judgements on America. Many of the mockers of substantive due process are progressives. Yet substantive due process undergirds much of their abortion jurisprudence.
Substantive Due Process Strikes Back
For more than 40 years, progressives relied upon a “made up” right of abortion that wasn’t tied to the language or history of the actual Constitution. Like “freedom of contract” at the start of the 20th century, the progressive movement used the “women’s right to choose” power as a tool to bludgeon federal, state, and local government, and the abortion industry—Planned Parenthood in particular—welcomed these changes.
After Roe v. Wade, not only did the industry demand to be able to operate in any jurisdiction whether or not a particular state welcomed them, Planned Parenthood pushed back against all manner of restrictions, including those affecting the regulation of its actual facilities. Whereas General Motors has to accept OSHA oversight and submit compliance reports for a byzantine number of regulations regarding its business of car manufacturing, Planned Parenthood has regularly claimed over the last forty years that any state or local regulations it didn’t like—such as medical licensing, requirements that clients be legally old enough to give consent, and minimum staffing requirements—were unconstitutional. When it comes to business regulations, Planned Parenthood sounds more like nineteenth century laissez-faire advocate Spencer Herbert28 than a social justice organization. It has pushed to keep its industry all but immune from government interference.
Initially, Planned Parenthood was remarkably successful, able to use constitutional protections to overcome not only spousal but most parental consent laws, thus ensuring its customer base could expand.29 It also successfully pushed to have the Medicaid program cover its services.30 Imagine if the American Psychological Association could claim the Constitution requires that its services should be paid for by Medicaid. Planned Parenthood was even able to tap into taxpayer-financed international funding.31
In a surprising win for the industry, it even overturned a state law banning abortion advertisements.32 Imagine if Big Tobacco could have such protections. It also succeeded in overturning regulations requiring doctors to use abortion techniques that “maximized the chance of fetal survival.”33 For years, the abortion industry was able to have their federally funded facilities refer patients for abortion.34 In a victory that many businesses would envy, the industry even prevailed in its claim that protestors interfered with its business and should be limited in their ability to protest.35 Today, school teachers, bus drivers, and welfare recipients have to comply with drug testing requirements,36 but Planned Parenthood was able to avoid even this.37 Apparently, it’s never heard of the “drug free workplace.”
In contrast to rules mandating a “cooling off” period for guns (whose ownership is expressly protected by the Second Amendment), the abortion industry successfully claimed that the Constitution forbade a 48-hour waiting period for a minor.38 Mostrecently, it successfully pushed to overturn a decision by state governments to ban Planned Parenthood from receiving grants.39
But all of this came to an end with the Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Once the abortion industry’s constitutional claims were stripped away, it has been forced to defend its business activities—albeit more gruesome than most—the same way every other business does. Post-Dobbs, Planned Parenthood can have any and all business impositions placed on it, including minimum-wage requirements, industry-specific taxes, safety requirements, and environment and hazardous waste regulations.
In the past, and without irony, Planned Parenthood had claimed that these types of rules would run it out of business and prevent a “woman’s right to choose.” Yet, when these rules were applied against Plymouth and Saturn, progressives never argued about anyone’s right to travel or “freedom of contract.” Maybe those car companies would still be around if they had.
Sadly, forty years of misguided abortion jurisprudence have been destructive to black America. The Guttmacher Institute reports that the abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women.40 Blacks account for 38 percent of all abortions,41 even though they are only 11.2 percent of the U.S. female population.42
Is it a coincidence that an organization founded by a eugenicist who specifically targeted blacks would continue its deadly program in the black community today? The truth is that this industry preys on blacks, and Joe Biden as President has worked to empower it in ways no previous President ever had.
It is to America’s great shame that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which sought to guarantee, first and foremost, liberty and equality for newly freed slaves after the bloody U.S. Civil War—was twisted in this way by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court’s majority created out of whole cloth a so-called constitutional right to abortion in the infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that lasted nearly fifty years until the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
The legal straightjacket of Roe v. Wade inhibited states from preventing more than 62 million abortions—murders of defenseless human beings—in the nearly five decades since the ruling.43 More than one third of these lives snuffed out, “the weakest and most innocent among us in the human family,” as Alveda King said, were black babies,44 descendants of the very freedmen the Fourteenth Amendment sought to protect. This is a terrible tragedy.
Joe Biden, the Most Pro-Abortion President in U.S. History
Abortion is a top priority for the Biden White House. Sadly, the team there has demonstrated an absolute commitment to promoting it in a number of ways. Senator Joe Biden, and later Vice President Joe Biden, said for decades that he supported the Hyde Amendment, which restricts funding for abortion across many federal programs. However, he abandoned this position when he started his run for President in 2019, and his Administration has been fighting to kill the Hyde Amendment since he entered the White House.
In a twist that would have been comical if it wasn’t so sad, thenRepresentative Cedric Richmond, a Democrat from Louisiana andone of candidate Biden’s top advisors, went on TV to defend Joe Biden’s allegedly deeply-held views on the Hyde Amendment. This was on June 5, 2019. On June 6, less than 24 hours later, Biden flip-flopped on the issue, just as the campaign was starting in earnest. Richmond would eventually get a job in the Biden White House, where he lasted for just over a year before being shunted off to the Democratic National Committee.
Abortion and the Hyde Amendment is one of a string of issues on which Biden originally posed as a moderate, and then shifted towards the far Left when he came under pressure. It’s not clear whether Biden was lying in his earlier position, or is simply a weak, unprincipled politician. Very possibly, it’s both. Either way, it’s not good news for the country to have such a person in a position of great power.
Upon entering the White House, President Biden stuck to his new extreme pro-abortion position. One of the more wearisome aspects of the Republican-to-Democrat, Democrat-to-Republican presidential transfers in recent decades is the way certain executive actions simply switch on and off like a light switch. Abortion is perhaps the starkest area where this is true. On every abortion-related issue, where the light switch flipped when Joe Biden entered the White House, life got worse for blacks in America.
On January 28, 2021, President Biden issued an executive action—formally a “Memorandum on Protecting Women’s Health at Home and Abroad”45—to restore funding to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood by:
►Directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to review and undo the Trump Administration’s Title X Rule and other Trump-era restrictions on the Title X program;
►Revoking the Trump Administration’s Mexico City Policy denying U.S. taxpayer funds for family planning organizations advocating abortion in foreign countries, and directing the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Health and Human Services, and the USAID Administrator to rescind any related actions; and
►Directing the Secretary of State to resume funding to the United Nations Population Fund even though critics charge the UNFPA “supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”46
Biden’s campaign decision in 2019 to cave to the far Left telegraphed his assault on the Hyde Amendment. When Administration budget requests were developed, the White House formally requested that the Hyde Amendment come to an end.47
Named for the late Republican Representative Henry Hyde from Illinois, the amendment had barred federal funds for the performance of abortions. It became so ingrained as a budget and appropriations rider that it has become perfunctory to include the language in money bills authored by both parties since its 1977 introduction.48 The Biden Administration, however, rejected the Hyde Amendment in its budgets for both fiscal years 202249 and 2023.50 It also fought against the Hyde Amendment being included in both the so-called American Rescue Plan51 in early 2021 and the so-called Build Back Better bill.52
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan has become law. Most of this money has been wasted on bailing out state and city governments that have been spending like drunken sailors for years. This spending bill has also been a major contributor to the current inflation surge; the federal government could only hit the trillion-dollar-debt button so many times in the short space of two years before making a hash of monetary policy. The nation is now suffering through forty-year inflation highs. But alas, abortion funding was greenlighted.
On the “good news” side, however, the Build Back Better plan—named for Biden’s transparent attempt to mirror Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan—has so far failed to make it across the finish line in Congress. As introduced, it would allow more funding for abortion. A much more truncated version finally did pass, dubiously named the “Inflation Reduction Act.”53
Abortion Is Bad
It must be said: abortion is a bad, terrible thing. For all the droning on about “science” from the Left, the science on abortion is entirely straightforward: abortion ends a human life—or, to quote the bumper sticker, abortion stops a beating heart. For all the pro and con discussion about this issue, it can be boiled down to this terrible fact: it ends a baby’s life.
This is not a partisan or ideological observation. Large majorities of the American public believe that abortion is a bad thing54 that should be avoided if at all possible. This is true even for millions of people who don’t believe that abortion should be illegal but who also understand that there’s something wrong here.
Think of it this way: every human—indeed, every living creature on planet Earth—has its own distinct DNA. Frederick Douglass had Frederick Douglass’s DNA, and no one else will ever have that. Harriet Tubman, Winston Churchill, Clarence Thomas, Tom Brady—each has had his or her own DNA, and no one else ever will have it. The one partial exception is with identical twins, but even they typically accumulate differences in their DNA.55 And in no case is the baby ever simply a lump of tissue with the same DNA as the mother. The baby is a whole, unique, distinct individual from the beginning.
When a mother conceives a baby in her womb, a new human being is formed. Is this a religious belief? An ideological belief? For many people, surely, it is those things. But it’s also scientific fact: the DNA of a new human being, distinct from mother and father, has been created. The science is settled, as liberals love to (usually falsely) assert about their pet issues. In this case, however, it’s actually true.56
For many decades, there was a political consensus that, whatever the laws should be, abortion should be treated as an activity to avoid, not celebrate. Bill Clinton won the presidency twice on the platform that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Without speculating on whether Clinton has any kind of moral hesitancy about abortion, the more important fact was his correct read of the political environment. Keeping abortion rare was a winner.
And why should abortion be rare? Because abortion isn’t a good thing.
However, this strategic positioning changed in 2008, when the Democratic platform replaced “rare” with “regardless of ability to pay,” and then in 2016, when the platform was changed to “advocate that abortion be essentially available at all times and for any reason.57” The shift to a Brave New World mindset was almost totally complete. Did the Democratic Party make this change because of a sincere evolution in belief on abortion? Probably not. More likely, it was made because of a strategic ideological calculation to capitulate to the ascendant progressive forces of the Left.58
The simple fact is that if abortion should be rare because it’s a bad thing, then it follows that we as a society should look for ways to reduce it and make it rarer, even if not illegal. That perspective puts pro-abortion ideologues on the defensive. Conceding that abortion is bad was an invaluable advantage to pro-life advocates. Progressives pushed to drop this approach; it’s no wonder the loudest voices on the Left have resorted to ever-more-bizarre slogans in recent years, such as “Shout Your Abortion.”59 It’s their goal, they say, to “destigmatize” abortion; in other words, there is no moral dimension whatsoever to aborting a child.
