A conversation with a young college student revealed that the Progressive abortion obsession has changed little since the early 20th Century.
I’ve been brooding for a few days now about a conversation I had last week with a student attending Oberlin. During the course of our talk, the student earnestly told me that, thanks to his Anthropology 101 class, he fully understands why it is imperative that we keep abortion entirely legal throughout a pregnancy. (Thankfully, he did not try to argue, as this college student did, that abortion ought to be extended into a child’s second year out of the womb.)
As best as I could tell what the young man was arguing, his teacher showed the class statistics for prison populations in America. Most of these prisoners came from damaged communities. Apparently the teacher taught, or the student concluded on his own initiative (or the zeitgeist at Oberlin holds), that the best way to shrink the American prison population is to abort potential children in poor, damaged communities (which I understood to mean inner city black communities).
This argument, of course, is the ultimate utilitarian take on the Freakonomics assertion that the reason we’ve seen an overall drop in crime since 1973 is that multiple generations of would-be criminals were terminated ab initio thanks to Roe v. Wade. If past abortion reduced present crime, the Oberlin student seemed to be saying in his muddled way, we can pretty much eliminate future crime with more present-day abortions!
I was shocked spitless and, indeed, suffered a terrible attack of l’esprit de l’escalier (or, in Yiddish, treverter) — that is, the perfect responses to this eugenics worldview didn’t strike me until the student was gone. You’ll notice I said “responses” (plural) because there are so many.
I did manage to choke out the first argument in the list below, but the remainder came to my mind later, as I was brooding about this discussion. The first three arguments are the quick and easy ones. The fourth argument provided the title for this post.
Here goes:
1. It’s entirely possible that young people in those damaged communities have grown up to be violent criminals because the prevalence of abortion in their community tells them that life has no value. To support this argument, I told the student something he did not know: Planned Parenthood clinics are most common in poor communities. PP supporters would say that’s because they go where the need is greatest; PP opponents argue that PP is targeting vulnerable populations.
2. The criminal problems in poor neighborhoods may arise because, at the same time that legalized abortion came along, single motherhood started climbing. Children raised by a single mother do not fare well. Boys without fathers are more likely to engage in crime. Girls without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous and depressed. And both boys and girls unlucky enough to have a mother who is not particular about the quality of the men who roll through her life, are at extreme risk of abuse and death. While these statistics hold true for fatherless children of all races, the reality is that the scourge is worst in the black community — the same black community that abortionists target and in which Democrats continue to push government welfare over fathers.
3. A continuation of the last clause in the previous paragraph — “in which Democrats continue to push government welfare over fathers” — is that all of these damaged communities have had generations of Democrat politicians and their policies. Perhaps before we take more lives in abortion clinics, those communities should give different political ideologies a try. Trump’s policies, for example, have seen the best black employment in decades, which may well benefit all those damaged communities.
As an aside about Trump, it’s ironic that the president who is presiding over a rising tide lifting black-owned boats and who is protesting abortion policies that are most likely to destroy black babies, is relentlessly castigated as a racist. The Democrat narrative may be false, but it sure is strong. [Read more…]