Put Y'all Back in Chains, page 17
Indeed, in just the past year, after years of calling itself “pro-choice,” Planned Parenthood has embraced the term “pro-abortion” to describe itself!60 As The Washington Post reported, “[Alexis] McGill Johnson [the president of Planned Parenthood] said the group would now use a term like ‘pro-abortion,’ a drastic change from the group’s rhetoric even a few years ago. ‘Planned Parenthood would stay away from any language that would stigmatize abortion as a procedure,’ she said.” This wasn’t The Babylon Bee—this was The Washington Post.
OK, then. The good news for pro-lifers is that this approach may be even worse for the pro-abortion side than the nuanced idea that “abortion is bad, but we shouldn’t do anything about it.” When progressives admit what a horror abortion is, normal people conclude that it not only shouldn’t be normalized but that it should be actively discouraged.
Presenting abortion as a positive good, as establishment abortion groups now do, is positively repellent to most people, making those activists look creepy and strange even to people who have no strong views about abortion. The simple fact is that not only is abortion bad, but enthusiasm for abortion is in fact creepy and strange. The good news is that this will, over time, strengthen the opposition to abortion and those parts of society that are looking to help women find alternatives to abortion.
If the science says that abortion is the ending of a human life, and it does, then how should we feel about it, morally and ethically? For thousands of years, every significant enduring society has condemned the taking of innocent human life. The Ten Commandments can be summarized as “God is God, and don’t you forget it; and don’t kill or hurt each other.61”
The Code of Hammurabi, the teachings of Buddha and Mohammed, and the ancient Greeks and Romans have all, to varying degrees, promoted protections for innocent human life and condemnation of murder.62 Many things have changed over the centuries, but even very brutal societies have always drawn a distinction between those guilty of crime and those innocent of crime.
Abortion Is Particularly Bad for Blacks
Blacks are disproportionately victimized by abortion, meaning that they should benefit particularly if abortion can be reduced or eliminated. The numbers are staggering: while blacks make up 13 percent of the population,63 they account for 30 to 40 percent of abortions performed nationwide in America, a strikingly consistent range over the past fifty years.64 If Joe Biden has his way, more black babies will be killed by abortion than ever before. “Put y’all back in chains” indeed.
The Trump Administration undertook various measures to try to reduce taxpayer funds going to abortion and to put in place judges who would understand the historical value given to the inalienable right to life in America’s founding documents.65 Happily, many important steps were taken, including the effort to work with twenty-three nations to oppose abortion,66 creating a federal right of conscientious objection for doctors and medical care givers opposed to abortion67 and repealing an Obama-era federal regulation that mandated state governments fund some abortion clinics in their state.68
Americans may hope that over the coming decades, many of these judges will author legal decisions like the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health69 ruling that overturned Roe V. Wade and continue to promote a culture of life—not to mention issuing many other important pro-liberty and pro-common sense rulings.
A big part of America’s prospects for the twenty-first century include continuing to be a beacon for the rule of law and a place where everyone receives justice under a consistently functioning system. The judges appointed by Trump will hopefully play an important role in getting us there.
However, the Biden Administration has dedicated itself from day one to reversing all these gains.70 In particular, it is restoring Title X funding to Planned Parenthood, meaning that some $60 million in funding71 will be added to Planned Parenthood’s budget. And that’s annual funding, meaning that every single year Planned Parenthood gets another check for $60 million. Unfortunately, Planned Parenthood gets even more taxpayer money than that: roughly $500 million72 every year—more than a third of its total operating budget.73
Another statistic that shows the terrible toll on blacks in America is comparing the total lives lost every year to accidents, disease, and violent crime. Abortion is by far the leading cause of death for blacks, about half of all deaths every year.74
In New York City, this is provably the case: not only are more black babies aborted than born alive annually, but also about twice as many black babies die in abortions than already-born blacks die of any cause.75 This is an incredibly sad set of facts. Black babies, like all babies, deserve a chance at life, whether with both parents, one parent, a grandparent or grandparents, or through adoption. The rest of America should not settle for the New York approach.
Planned Parenthood’s defenders tend to suggest that economic reasons drive abortions among blacks and other minorities. But the fact is that most of the organization’s abortion clinics are located near black and Hispanic communities. Planned Parenthood essentially markets itself disproportionately to blacks and other minorities.76 It’s the old joke that three things matter in real estate: location, location, and location. Planned Parenthood has actively decided to finance operations in black neighborhoods and to encourage and subsidize the abortions of black babies.
Is this a coincidence? An accident of real estate pricing and other subtle economic factors? It is not. Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was keenly aware of the pro-eugenics arguments being made about certain ethnic groups. She was high in the councils of the eugenics movement in the 1920s and 1930s; not only was she familiar with the Ku Klux Klan’s anti-black agenda, but she was also a guest speaker at one of the KKK’s auxiliary groups.77 She shared the KKK’s beliefs that the world, particularly America, would be better off without blacks. Never did she work to take a public stand against this view—she simply regarded the Ku Klux Klan as an ally in the fight for abortion.
In July 2020, Planned Parenthood finally acknowledged founder Margaret Sanger’s ties to the eugenics movement by the token action of removing her name from a New York City facility,78 and even disavowing Margaret Sanger as a racist in a New York Times op-ed.79 But Planned Parenthood’s “clinics” remain where they are situated, substantially targeting black and other nonwhite women, and there’s no sign that this will end anytime soon.
However, the consequences are significant. The outsized amount of abortion within the black population has political consequences. It isn’t simply the case that the next Ben Carson or Barack Obama may never be born—the overall size of the black population is significantly smaller than what it might have been otherwise, and along with that reduction in numbers has come a reduction in influence. Consider this: without racially targeted abortion, the voting power of the black community would now be at 16 percent nationally rather than the current 13 percent.80
What Americans Should Do About Abortion
Abortion advocates argue that women should have “choice,” and certainly freedom is an important part of the American Dream. This is a serious question that deserves a serious answer. There are fair-minded people in the political middle who may ask the same question.
Because abortion is the taking of innocent human life, abortion should be restricted as much as possible. If that means that abortion is prohibited after viability, or after some number of months in the womb, that would be a step forward. Even though the Court has ruled that there is no constitutionally protected right to an abortion, it remains largely unrestricted across the country. State legislatures should act with dispatch to impose limits or an outright ban. Certainly there should be no taxpayer funding of abortion. There are many things that Americans can do to impede the economics of abortion, to make the process of abortion less efficient, less available, and less desirable. They must offer love and compassion to those women who find themselves in a situation where they think abortion is their best option, including financially supporting women’s shelters as well as even taking these women into their own homes.
But that is not the end of this issue, which is unlikely to go away completely, and Americans have to think about how to undo the Biden Administration’s damage to the self-image of Americans, very much including black Americans.
When the lives of our fellow unborn humans are considered unworthy of protection, we undermine our ability to value and appreciate the lives of those who are born. The disproportionate killing of black babies overwhelms any argument that “Black Lives Matter”—why should nonblack Americans care about blacks in the midst of slaughter of black babies by black adults in abortion clinics?
There are many subtle actions the government can take to try to end abortion. Taxpayer funding, for one example, is more than dollars that flow to Planned Parenthood for its grisly activities. It’s also a stamp of approval from the federal government: when the U.S. government gives you a check, it’s a positive endorsement for what you’re doing. Ending taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood probably won’t gut the organization financially—there are many pro-abortion millionaires and billionaires who could replace that money tomorrow. Indeed, many liberal politicians and wealthy liberal donors have said that they want to be ready to jump in and fund abortion if any new restrictions or reductions in funding are approved. What can’t be replaced is the message the federal government sends when it spends millions of dollars to support a certain kind of activity. If the federal government ends taxpayer subsidies for abortion, it will be a subtle shift in the culture that could save thousands or millions of lives.
However, there are other important policy inputs as well. Liberals often argue that if pro-lifers were really pro-life, they’d support all sorts of crazy new spending programs to hand out welfare to various favored groups. To some extent, this may be understood as the way the liberal brain works: “If I love you, I’ll loot the federal treasury for you!” It’s yet another reason why Americans shouldn’t allow liberals to take charge of public policy. However, Americans should try to understand the mentality of people on different sides of an issue, especially on issues as important as abortion.
It would also be fair to ask the reverse question: are pro-abortion advocates proposing a compromise to end abortion in exchange for new social support programs? They are not. In addition, the spending programs liberals support for new mothers do not, in fact, work very well. Welfare programs are mostly just jobs programs for Democrat-voting federal workers, who create dependence by able-bodied adults who really would be better off working in the private sector. Dependence on welfare programs is a bad thing. It weakens the initiative to be independent among those it allegedly helps. These programs typically don’t work well, are poorly administered, and end up spending most of the funds on implementation instead of the designated beneficiaries. Even worse, poor performance by these programs often creates a vicious cycle of politicians coming back for more money the next year and blaming poor performance on insufficient funds—but it’s not lack of funding, it’s lack of a good idea and a functioning model.
Sometimes funding for contraception is offered as the answer to abortion. But this is a red herring. States with the highest rates of contraception use, such as New York, also feature the highest abortion rates. States with low rates of contraception use, such as South Dakota, also have low abortion rates.
The policies that Joe Biden has been supporting for fifty years in public office have corresponded with—and helped to cause—the catastrophic collapse of black families in America. In 1960, only 24 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock.81 By 2020, 70 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock.82
However, that doesn’t mean that nothing can be done. During the Obama Administration, Joe Biden’s former boss at least acknowledged the social problem of fatherless homes by paying lip service to a Fatherhood Initiative.83 President Obama gave occasional, poignant remarks on the issue, but fundamental public policies driving the problem didn’t change.
President Biden has failed to make even token gestures in the direction of assessing the impact of social welfare programs and their harmful effects on blacks. To some extent, this is yet another example of President Biden kowtowing to the new woke hierarchy of the Democratic Party. Most Democratic leaders are so obsessed with new definitions of gender identity and “modern families” that to even talk about the need for fathers is triggering for them.
To say that a child should have a father is a “cisgender heteronormative expression of reactionary patriarchal privilege-mongering.” (If you didn’t understand that previous sentence, congratulations! You just tested negative for the woke virus.)
Even more triggering for fruity Leftists on college campuses is the staggering correlation between the marital status of women who become pregnant and their likelihood of choosing abortion. Planned Parenthood’s own research arm, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, reports that 86 percent of women seeking abortions are not married at the time of the procedure.84 This is not to say that there aren’t married women getting pregnant who also have financial difficulties that make giving birth seem like a hardship.
However, clearly we should do what we can to help encourage those unmarried women—who are overwhelmingly open to having an abortion—to include the father in the picture, preferably by marriage, to help provide a supportive environment to raise that child. Americans can and must support policies that help women to increase their chances of having a stable family situation, as well as support that will persuade them to not have an abortion. Welfare programs and the tax code often discriminate against married people,85 which is an incentive for people not to get married. That must be fixed.
We need to do more education about the health risk of abortion unrelated to the welfare of the baby. Abortion can do severe psychological and physiological harm to women. Numerous studies have suggested a link between having an abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer.86 Girls should be told about these things in school, certainly by high school. The Left, of course, wants detailed sex education and every form of “alternative lifestyle” taught to even very young children. However, to the extent that any of this type of classroom instruction takes place, it should certainly include the truth about the risks of abortion for the mother.
Another issue that deserves serious focus at both the public policy and cultural level is adoption. Pro-lifers should promote adoption services, an entire ecosystem, to ensure that pregnant women know that if they choose to have a baby and give it up for adoption, there is a reliable system in place.
Most important, perhaps, are crisis pregnancy centers. If the federal government is spending money in this area, rather than sending it to abortion factories like Planned Parenthood, it should send it to clinics with the mission of providing women alternatives to abortion.
Roe v. Wade as a Dred Scott Redux
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling chillingly mimicked the kind of reasoning embedded in the Court’s infamous 1856 Dred Scott decision, in which Chief Justice Taney declared that blacks are “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”87 How far off is this sentiment conceptually from “no case could be cited that holds that a fetus is a person”—which was Justice Harry Blackmun’s contention in Roe?88 The perspective of U.S. jurisprudence remained fundamentally off-kilter on this issue all the way until 2022, when the court rendered its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Every member of the human family deserves respect and protection under the law.
Good News from Judges, No Thanks to Biden
The decision on Dobbs by the U.S. Supreme Court turned on challenges to abortion-related laws in several states that ended in the reversal of the landmark rulings in Roe v. Wade (1973), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and others.
The Left has claimed for years that state legislators across America kept pushing restrictions on abortion access because they want to undermine women.89 Repeating this mantra over and over has been effective as it has promoted what analysts refer to as the gender gap: the common differences between men’s and women’s views on social, political, and cultural matters. Although typically used to explain the differences between how men and women vote, ironically, the pro-life movement is overwhelmingly made up of female leaders: Julie Brown, Alveda King, Penny Nance, Charmaine Yoest, Mildred Jefferson, Phyllis Schlafly, Marjorie Danensfelser, Beverly LaHaye, and Andrea Sheldon, among many other women, have been steadfastly promoting life as the best choice and working to influence state and federal legislators to end abortion. They’ve been effective not because they are women but because they put an effort into making strong arguments. They haven’t bullied legislators; instead, they have persuaded them.
Progressives often forget that America as a country operates on the principle of self-government, which requires consent. We as a country aren’t controlled by external forces or political authorities. We the citizens use the ballot as a means by which we express our views and concerns. That’s where persuasion comes in. The most enduring way to achieve change in America is to persuade Americans that change is needed.
The civil rights movement is a great example of persuasion. Racists and bigots weren’t forced to stop mistreating blacks because some exogenous political authority forced them to. It was actually the decisions of people who lived all across America, including many in the very neighborhoods where the bigots lived, that caused the change.
