Sixty-three million, four hundred nine thousand, seven hundred and one children have been killed since the United States legalized abortion in 1973.1 To fully comprehend this number is impossible. Over the past five decades, America has brutally eliminated tens of millions of its most vulnerable residents. Abortion is violent: common abortion procedures entail pulling apart a fetus limb from limb and vacuuming out the child’s brain, collapsing her skull, and removing her head. These widespread, well-attested practices are barbaric, sickening, and morally inexcusable. Abortion is truly the human rights issue of our age, for it makes human dignity contingent on one’s stage of development, physical and mental ability, level of independence, whether or not one is “wanted,” and other arbitrary measures. Human rights, as the term implies, depend upon humanity alone, and humanity begins not at birth nor at the ever-shifting “viability line,” but at the moment of fertilization. Abortion, by denying the most fundamental right—life—to a group of innocent human beings, is a terrible injustice.
As is the case with many injustices, abortion disproportionately impacts marginalized communities. Black children are four times more likely to be aborted than white ones.2 Abhorrently, black babies in New York City are more likely to be aborted than born.3 Additionally, half of the mothers who have an abortion live below the poverty line, and another quarter of them are close to it.4 Pro-choice advocates use these statistics to argue that an abortion ban is discriminatory because its impact is greater in disadvantaged communities. This is backwards. By eliminating a practice that disproportionately harms minorities, we take greater strides toward racial equality. It is discriminatory to allow the disproportionate impacts of abortion to persist.
Even those who condone abortion should recognize the danger of this disproportionate impact. The very idea of preventing the birth of black children implies that black children are less valuable. People only seek to terminate a life if they think lives of that type are worth terminating. Just as the eugenicists of the 20th century promoted the abortion of children with supposedly inferior genetics, we seek to abort children with undesirable social or racial attributes. The common saying that children of lower socioeconomic status will endure such difficult circumstances that their lives are not worth living ought to give us serious pause.
Is eliminating the poor really the solution to poverty?
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, thought so. She publicly advocated “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction of defective stocks—those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”5
The left, which prides itself on empowering minorities and marginalized groups, has abandoned its commitment to racial and socioeconomic justice in the face of politics’ greatest incentive: money. Abortion is a multi-billion dollar industry. Planned Parenthood, where abortions comprise 97% of “pregnancy resolution services,” reports an annual income of nearly $2 billion.6 As abortion’s disproportionate impact on minorities indicates, Planned Parenthood remains an engine of modern-day eugenics run by merchants that profit off of terminating low-income and black lives.
Today, money is used to disguise this violence as advocacy. The price tag on the left’s advocacy is $676,765—the amount of money Planned Parenthood donated to Democratic candidates for federal office in the 2022 election cycle.7For $676,765, half of the country ignores the slaughter of voices that will never speak—voices too young to cry.
AUCTORES VARII
Guttmacher Institute, “Abortion Statistics,” National Right to Life, 2019.
Studnicki, et al, “Perceiving and Addressing the Pervasive Racial Disparity in Abortion,” Sage Journals, Aug. 18, 2020.
Jason L. Riley, “Let’s Talk About the Black Abortion Rate,” Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2018.
Margot Sanger-Katz, Claire Cain Miller, and Quoctrung Bui, “Who Gets Abortions in America,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 2021.
Margaret Sanger, “Apostle of Birth Control Sees Cause Gaining Here,” New York Times, April 8, 1923.
“Fact Sheet: Planned Parenthood’s 2021-22 Annual Report,” Charlotte Lozier Institute, May 12, 2023.
“Planned Parenthood PAC Contributions to Federal Candidates,” Open Secrets, March 20, 2023.