In the loud, raucous Roe v. Wade debate, we've heard a lot about the overreaching sacrifices women can face when having unwanted babies and about their rights to control their own bodies through abortions.
Sympathy is widespread, while other, less-discussed issues need equal attention, such as the especially high rate of abortions afflicting Black Americans with approval, encouragement and help from many white Americans.
Abortion, we should keep in mind, is not a one-way proposition. While we should respect pregnant women, what an abortion gets rid of is not just gobs of tissue. We are talking about unborn children with wondrous possibilities in this world and the same natural rights as the mothers. Extinguishing the helpless and adorable without defensible purposes, such as serious maternal health issues, is not what one should expect from humane sensibilities.
Consider studies show a pregnant Black woman is five times more likely than a pregnant white woman to have an abortion. Consider reports telling us roughly half of all Black pregnancies end in the death of the unborn children with consequences felt in numerous ways.
Back in 2002, for example, the late philosopher Michael Novak showed the Black population would be 36 percent higher without the incredible number of abortions, and think how this continued reduction of possible Black voters has affected their political power.
Catherine Davis in the Washington Examiner dresses the issue up in historical costume, observing that it took the Ku Klux Klan 86 years to lynch 3,446 Black Americans while Roe v. Wade's abortion permissiveness enabled Planned Parenthood and competitors to kill more than 22 million Black people since the Supreme Court ruling just 50 years ago.
Euthanasia played an important role in some early social movements endorsing a supposed need for fewer poor, dumb, unfit, defective humans, with Black people part of the egregious prejudice. The idea of extinction promoting betterment is still with us, if with admissible terminology, and was assisted for decades by forced sterilization of Native Americans, prisoners and others.
One issue since the 1960s sexual revolution has been more careless sex, with abortion becoming a new kind of contraceptive, says still another intriguing analysis. Some people enlightened by self-designation approve, but one of the otherwise enlightened is Dr. James Sherley, a scientist who has criticized Black Lives Matter and other activists for not recognizing evils afflicting the unborn are equivalent to evils afflicting adults.
"Abortion is the hushed killer of Black life that has silenced millions of George Floyds before they even took their first breath of air," he is quoted as saying.
Progressives tend to especially cheer abortion by poor women and explain themselves through a lens like that of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. In a hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, she drew attention by saying abortion allows young, low-income Black and white women and others to get jobs and keep the economy perking. Actually, nothing would boost the economy like more workers and consumers being born and growing up.
But having babies, Yellen explained, can deny poor women all kinds of opportunities, including working and getting an education. These women, she said, are not going to be able to care for children who as adults will be even poorer than their mothers. Her attitude is to dispose of these worries before they are born, no coping allowed.
"I'll just simply say that, as a guy raised by a Black woman in abject poverty, I am thankful to be here as a United States senator," replied Republican Sen. Tim Scott, sitting in Yellen's presence and later amplifying his words.
Did Yellen think lives of the poor are not worth living? Was economics all that mattered to her? Did she think poor mothers could never be extraordinary mothers? Did she see the prospects of poor Black children as always hopeless? Judging by her words, yes, yes, yes and yes.
Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at [email protected].