Since we are on the subject of defunding things in order to protect black lives, it seems someone should make the rather obvious and unavoidable point. While defunding the police is sure to kill many more black people than it saves, defunding Planned Parenthood, and then abolishing abortion entirely, is sure to save many millions of lives while costing none.
Abortion has destroyed over 60 million people in this country since Roe v. Wade. A disproportionate number of the victims are black. Indeed, the black abortion rate is nearly 4 times higher than the white abortion rate. In some American cities, the situation has gotten so bad that more black babies are aborted than born. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, about 30 percent of the women who obtain abortions outside of hospitals are black. And this despite black women accounting for only 13 percent of the women in the United States.
Doing the math, and taking into account the 330,000 abortions Planned Parenthood alone performs every year, it is fair to estimate that Planned Parenthood kills close to 100,000 black people annually. For comparison sake, police killed 1,000 people total last year — white, black, armed, and unarmed. Comparing just the number of unarmed black people killed by both groups, the ratio is 100,000 to 9. And yet police are the greatest threat to black lives?
Those who shout “black lives matter” must decide what exactly they mean by this slogan, or if they mean anything at all by it. Do black lives matter inherently or conditionally? When you declare that a black man’s life “matters,” do you mean that it matters all the time, in all situations, at all stages, because he possesses within himself, by his very nature as a human being, inherent value? Or do you mean that his life matters subjectively, under particular circumstances, because it has achieved a certain usefulness and desirability to society?
If you mean the latter, then it is perfectly consistent to support abortion. But the problem is that a life that “matters” in this way — subjectively and conditionally — doesn’t really matter at all, and it can never be a true moral outrage when such a life is taken. BLMC (Black Lives Matter Conditionally) would be, perhaps, an honest slogan, but not a very effective, inspiring, or moral one.
But if you mean that black lives matter inherently — that a black life, like any human life, is in principle and by its nature sacred — then you have made a statement that has certain implications. None of the implications should be frightening to a decent person, but they may be politically inconvenient. If black life matters inherently (and it certainly does), then it matters from the first moment that it comes into existence. Any quality or value that is earned or achieved over time is by definition not inherent. So, a black life that really matters, has always mattered. And that means that a black baby in the womb matters. He matters as much as George Floyd, and he has as much value.
There is no such thing as a pro-abortion Black Lives Matter movement. To be pro-abortion is to reject the premise that life inherently matters. It is to see life as a commodity whose value is dependent on various external factors. If this is all you intend to communicate with the slogan “black lives matter,” then you shouldn’t say it, because you don’t mean it. But if you do mean it, then welcome to the pro-life movement. We’ve been waiting for you, and we need your help.
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