Even if you are, like me, a Black Lives Matter skeptic, we can nevertheless agree that the lives of black people matter just as much as those of any other people. I’ve spoken about the threat posed to black life by violent crime and bad economic prospects, but do we know what we mean when we say “black life”? To know that, we would first have to know what we mean when we say “human life.” This would entail a discussion more fit for philosophers and theologians than for economists, but the overturning of Roe v. Wade has made the definition of life a matter of urgent concern in statehouses and at ballot boxes around the country. Like it or not, that is where the fates of so many lives are currently being determined.
The writer Delano Squires, my guest this week, is black, Christian, and conservative, and according to him any conversation about black lives mattering is incomplete if it does not take into account the high rates of abortion among black women. Those abortions are, in his view, extirpations of human lives that should have been accorded the full value and dignity we grant to any other human life. It may be unusual to hear such sentiments coming from the mouth of a black public figure, but more black Americans feel the way Delano does than one might suppose. Whatever your views on abortion, ignoring his side of the argument isn’t going to make it go away.
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GLENN LOURY: You said “we.” You said, “The hour is late and we are in trouble. We are sliding down into a dark place.” So that “we” is a collective statement. That's a statement about a political community: we Americans. Because we're gonna be making policy, there's gonna be issues of somebody's gotta decide what the law is, what people can and cannot do, whether it's about abortion or it's about marriage or whatever it's about.
Now, not everybody will ascribe to the foundational beliefs that you just articulated. Not everybody thinks there's a God, and those who think there's a God, some of them think God is different from the God than you think. Not everybody reads that great book, the Bible, Old Testament and New. Not everybody does. And some who do read it differently than the way that you read it. We have to have a framework where, notwithstanding the fact that we don't all sign off on the same religious beliefs, we nevertheless can accommodate our mutuality and our living together under law.
I'm sure you don't want to simply impose your beliefs on other people. So we have a constitution, we have a framework, we have a bill of rights, et cetera, et cetera. It's fine for you, in your private life, to decide not to abort a pregnancy, to decide to homeschool your children, to decide to deny the legitimacy of gay marriage or whatever. But when you act through law to impose that on other people, it becomes a different story altogether. So how do you justify the imposition of your beliefs, which would be required if, for example, the court were to strike down Obergefell.
If the court has done, as it has done, it's stricken Roe v. Wade—again, I'm not expressing my personal opinion here—but these are impositions, these are consequential acts of the state that infringe upon individuals, and to justify those acts by reference to a sectarian religious perspective raises a lot of questions. It almost has a tyrannical ring to it. It's something that's not liberal, in the small-L sense of freedom of persons, of conscience, and all of that. Again, no establishment of religion. That's one of the First Amendment dictates, et cetera, et cetera. So I think I've said enough for you to get the idea of what I'm, what I'm trying to get you to talk about.
DELANO SQUIRES: It's a common response. But the way I would respond is that every law and policy is inherently moral. Someone's belief system is always going to be imposed and inscribed on our laws, and certainly someone's belief system is going to be imposed on the public square. I'm just clear about what it is that I believe and why it is that I believe it. But the same people who may argue, let's say, for same sex marriage today, and they say, yes, we believe in marriage equality, like the so-called Respect for Marriage Act that just was passed recently. There was a provision in there that talked about marriages between two people. But why? Why can't it be be between three? Who gets to set the terms of where the movement stops?
And what I'm saying is everyone has their own belief systems, and part of what I said before is that oftentimes, and you can tell when people are just making it up as they go along, they may not think so, but when Planned Parenthood sends out a message to John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, after they had the unfortunate circumstance of her having a miscarriage, and they say, I'm paraphrasing, but “We're sending our prayers out to John and Chrissy for the loss of their son.” Their son.
Now, I'm trying to understand. So even the biggest abortion provider understands that that's a life. If we find a single cell on Mars, we call that life. But when it comes to the abortion debate, it's a life if the mother wants the child, it's not a life if the mother does not. That is a logically irreconcilable position. So it's either we have to agree that life has inherent value, regardless of the circumstances of conception, regardless of the location of a particular life, regardless of the gestational age of a particular child, or it has conditional value. And if we say it has conditional value, then everybody better be ready to talk about where their conditions start and end.
I'll put it to you this way. You and I both know that black folk—we'll come back to our people, I'm comfortable saying that—we would have a very different position on abortion. If the Republicans in every state and a handful of large cities said, “We're gonna start a campaign to pay black women $15,000 to abort their babies,” very different. We would say, oh man, they're trying to commit genocide. They're trying to kill us off.
You wouldn't even have to go that far if they were promoting the proliferation of Planned Parenthood clinics, if it were Republicans promoting them. Somebody would remember what Margaret Sanger thought about the proliferation of Negros early in the life of the Planned Parenthood movement. Somebody would recall that, and they would pay the Republicans with a genocidal brush for encouraging the extrication of black life. I hear you. I hear you loud and clear.
And people don't know the numbers. Do you happen to know the numbers? I mean, the numbers are absolutely staggering in terms of the extent of the extirpation of black life. Potential life. I don't want to get into an argument with people about whether a fertilized egg is a life or not. You just said it is. Some people will say it's not. I'm not trying to argue that point. I'm just saying that when you do the sums, the actual footprint of African American humanity within this country is substantially smaller than it otherwise would be in virtue of the vast extent of abortion amongst African American people. And that's worth remarking.
Even if, at the end of the day, we were to decide that a woman has a right to choose or has a right to choose before a certain number of weeks. However we were to resolve that question, the overarching fact that the health of African American society, the robustness of it, of the capacity to reproduce our being into another generation. And of course, it invites the reflection on what are the relational interactions between men and women on a daily basis, in terms of their intimacy, in terms of their connectivity, in terms of their feelings of responsibility to the next generation that are then reflected in these abortion statistics? Regardless of whether or not I thought Roe v. Wade was rightly or wrongly decided, that's a profound reality of the African American condition that ought to occasion deep reflection from our moral leadership about where we're going and what has become of our society. So anyway, that's my speech.
You asked for some of the stats. Nationally, black women account for close to 40% of all abortions.
About 12% of the female population accounted for about 40% of all abortions.
And in New York City, the city with the largest black population, just cause it's the largest city, in 2016, it was almost exactly equal the number of live births and the number of induced abortions among black women in New York City. So if you were a baby at that point, you had a coin flip's chance of making it into the world. And the thing that really aggravates me, and I'm not afraid to use that word, is when I see an organization like Black Lives Matter come on the scene. And I just went to their website. They told you who they were. It's an LGBT organization that use the high-profile deaths of a few black men to gain cultural and financial currency in this--
I'm sorry, I gotta stop you. I gotta interrupt you. I gotta do this, Delano. Because Patrisse Cullors and the others are LGBT, that is to say queer women. You just called Black Lives Matter, which is a loose affiliation of different groups across the country, an LGBT organization. That's not fair. That's not fair.
Well if I didn't say this, I meant to say “Trojan horse organization,” but I'll leave that part out for right now. But it's true. I mean, if you go to their thirteen original principles, they didn't use the words police or violence a single time. I've done the word search multiple times. They said that they're queer-affirming, trans-affirming, woman-affirming, and explicitly against the nuclear family. So they are not concerned with black lives.
But the only reason I bring them up is because these are the same people that say that white conservatives have a white supremacy agenda and want to keep black people down and in chains. But if you were a black baby in utero in 2016 in the South Bronx, you would be much better off having your mother speak to a white Christian conservative woman outside of Planned Parenthood than a BLM activist. Your chances of living and being born into this world would be much higher if your mother received counsel from the first woman and not the second.
So the abortion statistics should make any person just take a step back. The black population in this country has been at between 11 and 13% for over 50 years. And that's at the beginning of life. We didn't even get to the fact that among young black men 15 to 24 years old, among those who pass away—obviously tragically—half of those die via homicide. We are getting squeezed on both ends. My last year working for the DC government, I worked in the Office of Gun Violence Provision. I was on the calls every morning at 8:30 hearing about every contact shooting in the city. And consistently it was always young black male, young black male, young black male. So yes, all of these things speak to the condition of black family. The disappearance of marriage, particularly with respect to low-income neighborhoods, the disproportionate abortion rate.
Glenn, don't you find it odd that Planned Parenthood and the issue of abortion is probably the only one where an organization with a checkered racial past, and particularly a checkered racial past as it relates to its founder, and a disproportionate impact on black bodies and black lives, this is one of the only issues in which the left doesn't stand up and say, “Hey, there's a problem here”? I'm trying not to be cynical, but at a certain point there was a shift in the abortion rhetoric. I wasn't around the 1970s, but just from what I read and what I see, abortion was, I think, generally framed as an issue for middle-class white women. If you want to get a job at the Atlantic or in some newsroom and a baby might have gotten in, you were the face of that.
Now all of a sudden, every black politician and every politician on the left is saying, “If Roe is struck down, this will have a disproportionate impact on poor black women,” which means they think it is a more fitting fate for a child to be killed in utero than to be born to a poor black woman. And my question to them is, how many black people do you think would be in this country if we took that position from 1865 until now?
Do Black Abortions Matter Too?
Do women who have an abortion have fewer kids? Is there a significant difference in the population due to abortions? Just because a woman has an abortion doesn't mean she won't have kids later. If fact, it's also possible women who have abortions might have more children later in life. Raising an unexpected child might give a false sense of parenting and deter people from having as many children.
Either way, it's not obvious that population is significantly affected due to abortions.
The abortion debate has evolved into another of the all-or-nothing, uncompromising dialogues that are so prevalent across most of Western Civ these days. Most Americans support keeping access to abortions open for women of all colors. Many of us, including me, want fetal age to be considered as a limiting factor on abortion access. I can see how a woman could be in the third trimester of a pregnancy before she seeks out an abortion, but unless there is a risk to her physical health in going through the remainder of the pregnancy and birth, I don't think that she should be able to get an abortion at that point.
In the past midterms I voted for an independent candidate who lost the state governorship, solely because the Republican candidate has a record of making all-or-nothing anti-choice statements. I talked to a number of other women voters who did the same, after struggling with the decision for months leading up to the election. The Republican candidate stopped talking about her extreme position on abortion while she was campaigning, but didn't fool anybody I know. Indeed, we saw that as soon as Roe v. Wade was overturned by SCOTUS, Republican politicians around the country began campaigning on "no abortions, no exceptions" platforms, and Republican legislatures started passing total abortion bans.
Until the Republican Party moderates their anti-choice positions, they will lose a large segment of women voters and their allies. They will also lose voters who truly believe in the separation of church and state. Both the so-called left and the so-called right are now wedded to anti-democratic religions, and neither party can afford to lose the support of its religious fundamentalists. The majority of Americans disagree with both of the two all-or-nothing positions on abortion rights, and for many women this is an important enough issue to reject the extreme views of both political parties.
My final comment is that I find it absurd that most of the men who identify as Republicans now claim to be morally opposed to abortion. Since when?! So many Americans will say anything to make themselves look like saints! Even Trump!! Give me a break!